Archived Course Listings
Spring 2024 Undergraduate English Courses
English 2200: Understanding Literature (BHU)—Genevieve Ford
This course will explore how to read short stories, drama, poetry, and novels in a format that features world and American literature in brief, manageable, readable portions. We’ll read poetry in fresh ways that will make it more legible. We’ll explore drama by imagining the stages, sets, and scenes, particularly of the classic play A Raisin in the Sun. We’ll look at how this play, dealing with prejudice and pressures African Americans faced in Chicago in the 1950s might look if we staged it on the Navajo Reservation today. No acting required, just creativity and an interest in the ways the literature can enrich your life. Two of the textbooks will be available free online, so this will also be an economical choice.
English 2200: Understanding Literature (BHU)—Carrie Icard
Understanding Literature is an introductory survey course that welcomes any student looking to fulfill the Breadth Humanities requirement, or someone who is interested in literature and “always wanted to try” a first course. Students will focus on analytical readings in literature, with attention to types, terms, and historical development. Emphasis will be on approaching selected texts with understanding and appreciation. Readings will include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama by a wide variety of authors including Steinbeck, Dickinson, Cisneros, and Shakespeare.
English 2230: Introduction to Film (BHU)—Dustin Crawford
This course introduces students to global film from the 19th century to contemporary award winners and examines how authorship, genre, presentation, and narrative structure contribute to meaning. Students will learn to evaluate films as reflections of culture and mediums for communication while becoming familiar with film techniques, terminology, and basic film concepts through film analysis and criticism.
English 2240: Introduction to Poetry (BHU)—Jason Olsen
This course will provide students with an introduction to reading and understanding poetry using examples from various writers over the past several centuries (and today). Using a variety of approaches, students will understand how poetry responds to the period in which it was (or is) written, how writers influence over time, and how poetry (regardless of when or why it was written) can resonate for us today. Through analysis and discussion, students will leave this course with an understanding of what makes poetry valuable and how it can bring substantial joy and understanding to the world.
English 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing (BHU)—Russ Beck
This course will focus on the examination and creation of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scripts. Students will not have to commit to any single genre for the entire term—instead, the course will investigate the fundamentals of creative writing and encourage experimentation with minimal risks. At the conclusion of the course, students will have a working definition of the mentioned genres, a better understanding of their individual writing processes, and a diverse writing portfolio filled with both project initiations and completed projects.
English 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing (BHU)—Jason Olsen
This is a creative writing course that will introduce students to the basic concepts of creative writing in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction (with conversations about plays and screenplays, among other genres). Students will write creatively in a supportive environment that encourages collaboration and writing in different genres. In addition to writing creatively, students will also read and analyze texts to help learn how best to develop their own creative works (and how to respond to the creative work of others).
ENGL 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing (BHU)—Josi Russell
Develop your own creative voice by exploring the craft of writing fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. Do you have a story idea you want to write or a powerful life experience you’d like to capture? In this class, you’ll get to play with different techniques for creating your own original stories, poems, memoirs, scripts, and songs. You’ll also discover various pathways you might take to become a published author.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies // Myths of the American West (BHU)—Travis Franks
This course investigates the creation of some of the most iconic notions of the American West: the rugged frontier, the gun-slinging cowboy, and the promise of absolute freedom. We'll encounter some of the works that helped build these myths up—Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, a novel by Louis L'Amour, and John Ford's film The Searchers—before engaging with those that challenge them—scholarship by Richard Slotkin, a satirical novel by Percival Everett, and C. Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills is Gold, radical reimagining of the West from the perspective of Chinese and Chinese American peoples in nineteenth-century California. We'll also work to define what American Studies is as a discipline and how it's done in and out of the classroom.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies (BHU)—Dr. Robert King
Whether it’s “the best of times” or “the worst of times” in our American experience, it is certainly a time of challenge and change—political, economic, technological, social—unsettling our sense of the meaning of America, our narratives of national purpose and meaning...or providing an opportunity to revise those narratives. A survey of American literary, historical, and cultural works will allow us to examine the roots of American culture, with a key focus on freedom and on what it means to be a citizen in a democracy—what does the government owe you, what do you owe the government and community? Should you wear a mask? And after a distinctive political year, what is the condition of our democratic institutions? Why are our politics now so partisan and polarizing? Can we answer these questions by the end of the semester?
ENGL 2640: Race and Ethnicity in the United States (BHU)—Cree Taylor
Race is one of the most powerful factors influencing the way we live; however, its origins as a social construct are often misunderstood, and folks often do not have the background knowledge or vocabulary to engage in meaningful conversations about the impact of race in our lives. This course centralizes the experiences and perspectives of People of Color to help provide folks with a broad overview of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity in the United States. Through the study of racial formations, Intersectionality, and contemporary issues, students will gain an increased understanding of the ways in which race and racism have been, and continue to be, powerful social, cultural, and political forces in society today. Course readings grapple with the histories and realities of race in American life and ask us to take on the difficult inner work of embarking on our own path towards leading more anti-racist lives. In short, this course is about humans and power, and the responsibility we all have to use our power to help all humans access the American ideals of equity and justice.
ENGL 3030: Perspectives in Literature (DHA)—Dr. Robert King
Our focus will be on the American culture of personal transformation and creed of social mobility and self-development. These values are very much rooted in American literature, from the Puritans’ preoccupation with personal salvation, Ben Franklin’s “rags to riches” narrative, through Emerson and Thoreau’s expression of American Romanticism (rugged individualism in a sublime key), up to its contemporary forms and expressions—self-care podcasts, “makeovers,” yoga stretching itself across the country, transformations in gender and racial identities. Other issues include the extent transformation is communal or relational, as opposed to autonomous and personal, and how it relates to “the pursuit of happiness,” especially in Pandemic times and our own experience. Several of the readings will focus on the Southwest desert as a landscape of personal transformation.
English 3040: Perspectives in Writings and Rhetoric: Rhetorics of Protest and Resistance (DHA)—Kristen Wheaton
This course explores a wide variety of genres of protest that all work in concert under the broader umbrella of resistance of gendered violence, including but certainly not limited to stories, marches, petitions, manifestos, songs, photos, testimonies, bodily performances, multimodal works, and much, much more. Though explicitly concerned with experiences of gender, especially the risk of violence, as an impetus for protest and resistance, this course is grounded in an intersectional approach and will aim to complicate simplistic understandings of women’s resistances and the evolving manifestations of women’s rights movements. Because of this subject matter, it is possible that you will encounter triggering, uncomfortable, or otherwise difficult to engage material. Recognizing the emotional and psychological labor such work takes, critical self-reflection will be a core feature of this course. Ultimately, we will work to attain nuanced understandings of the rhetorical dynamics of resistance and protest that aim to engage public attention to effectively (or not) demand change.
ENGL 3630: The Farm in Literature and Culture (DHA)—Rosa Thornley
This interdisciplinary course will draw on multiple modes to explore the Farm in Literature and Culture. With a Communications Intensive and Depth Humanities designation, students will find rigor in writing about the agricultural themes they will find through reading and viewing a variety of rhetorics. Examples will start with foundationa ideas in documentary Guns, Germs, and Steel, the roots of indigenous peoples in Braiding Sweetgrass, complexity of colonization found in letters of Jefferson, homesteading through the eyes of a child in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing, and then moving on through the depths of The Depression Era in Grapes of Wrath, and ending with contemporary issues found in Silent Spring, “The Pleasures of Eating,” The Bucolic Plague and The Martian. A journey through these texts will develop cultural literacy through the lens of agriculture.
ENGL 3640: Nature Writing (DHA)—Michaelann Nelson
In this General Education course that fulfills the Depth Humanities Requirement, we will explore how practices of reading and writing impact the relationship between humans and the environment. We will learn about how art and literature from the mid-1800s shaped ideas about America as an Edenic garden and evolved through the twentieth century to current philosophies of land use and how they affected public policy and perceptions of the environment. We will take a deep dive into the idea of wilderness by reading Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and the establishment of the Gila Wilderness; Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the fight over damming the Colorado River in the 1960s; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the establishment of the modern environmental movement. We will end by focusing on how current activists use texts and images to shape ideas about current environmental crisis', especially here in Utah. Students will have the opportunity to not only learn about how texts shaped environmental ideology, land use, and politics, but also engage in their own projects to advocate for an issue or place they care about.
American Literature and Folklore
ENGL:
2140: LGBTQ+ Literature — In-person
2150: Intro to Science Fiction — In-person, Connect
2230: Intro to Film — In-person
2630: Intro to American Studies — In-person, Connect
2640: Race and Ethnicity in the US — In-personn
3610: Multicultural American Literature — Connect
3630: The Farm in Literature and Culture — In-person
3365: Nineteenth-Century American Literature — In-person
3375: Literary History of the Americas since 1900 — In-person
4260: US Languages: Diversity and History — In-person
4370: Native American Literature — In-person
5330: Race and Ethnicity in Literature — In-person
SPAN:
3300: Intro to Hispanic Literature and Literary Analysis — In-person
3560: Intro to US Latino/a Culture — In-person
3620: Survey of Hispanic-American Literature I — In-person
3630: Survey of Hispanic-American Literature II — In-person
PORT:
3700: Film Studies in Portuguese — In-person
4200: Brazilian Media in Global Contexts — In-person
American History and Government
HIST:
2700: United States to 1877 — Online
2710: United States 1877 to Present — In-person
2170: Navajo History and Culture — Connect
3850: History of Utah — In-person, Online
4600: History of the American West — Online
4650: Women and Gender in the US West — Online
4720: The Civil Rights Movement — In-person
4810: American Military History — In-person
POLS:
3120: Law and Politics — In-person
3130: United States Legislative Politics — In-person
3140: The Presidency — Online
3270: Latin American Government and Politics — In-person
4130: Constitutional Theory — In-person (prereq. POLS 1100)
4160: The First Amendment — In-person
5140: Law, Politics, and War — In-person
Social Sciences
ANTH:
3160: Anthropology of Religion — Online
3310: Intro to Museum Studies — Connect
CJ:
1010: Introduction to Criminal Justice — Connect
1330: Criminal Law — Connect
2340: Survey of Criminal Procedure — Connect
PSY:
3110: Health Psychology — Connect
3120: Abuse, Neglect, Psychological Dimensions Intimate Violence — Online
3510: Social Psychology — In-person, Online
3700: Mental Health Advocacy and Awareness — In-Person, Online
4230: Psychology of Gender — In-Person, Online
4240: Multicultural Psychology — In-Person, Online
SOC:
2630: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity — Online
3010: Social Inequality — In-Person, Online
3200: Population and Society — Online
3410: Juvenile Delinquency — Online
3420: Criminology — In-person
3400: Tribal Criminal Justice Systems — Connect
3430: Social Deviance — Online
3520: Sociology of Mental Illness — Online
3610: Rural People and Places — Online
3750: Sociology of Aging — Online
SW:
1010: Introduction to Social Welfare — In-Person, Online
2100: Human Behavior in the Social Environment — Connect
2400: Social Work with Diverse Population — Online
3350: Child Welfare — Online
3360: Adolescents: Theories, Problems, and Issues — Online
3650: Mental Health — Online
SW 3750: Community Health and Society — Online
Environmental Studies
ENVS:
2340: Natural Resources and Society — Online
3010: Fundamentals of Natural Resource and Environmental Policy — Online
3320: Archeology of Climate Change — Online
3600: Living with Wildlife — Online
4000: Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management — In-person
4020: Foundations of Environmental Studies — Online
4700: Communicating Sustainability — Online
5000: Environmental Nonprofit and Volunteer Management — Online
HIST:
3950: Environmental History — In-Person
ENGL:
3640: Reading and Writing the Environment: Nature Writing
SOC:
4620: Sociology of the Environment and Natural Resources — In-person
AMERICAN ART, MEDIA, AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES
CMST:
1330: Introduction to Global Communication — In-Person
3230: Organizations and Social Change — In person
3330: Intercultural Communication — In-Person
4200: Language, Thought, and Action — In-Person
4800: Qualitative Research in Communication Studies — In person
FILM:
3220: Bad Cinema — In-Person
JCOM:
1500: Introduction to Mass Communication — Online
2010: Media Literacy — In-person
2300: Introduction to Public Relations — In-person
2400: Introduction to Social Media — In-person
3100: Reporting Public Affairs — Online
4030: Mass Media Law — Online
4350: Popular Culture in Society — In-person
5410: Social Media and Public Health — In-person
MUSC:
3020: History of Jazz — In-Person
3030: Rock and Roll-Catalyst for Social Change — Online
ELECTIVES
The following courses may also be taken for American Studies credit. They do not fall under one of the official Disciplinary Categories, but they may be taken as one of the additional six elective courses in the AS major.
ENGL:
3420: Fiction Writing — In-Person
3430: Poetry Writing — In-Person
3440: Creative Nonfiction — In-Person
TCR:
2100: Intro to Technical Writing and Rhetoric — Online
2110: Digital Writing Technologies — Online
2100: Workplace Research — In-person
3220: Technical Editing — In-person
3230: Community Grant Writing — In-person
4230: Project Management — In-person
4250: User Experience Design — In-person
5490: Special Topics: AI and Writing — In-person
PHIL:
2400: Ethics — In-person
3500: Medical Ethics — In-person
3580: Ethics and Economic Life — In-person
4310: Philosophy of Science— In-person
RELS:
1010: Introduction to Religious Studies — In-Person, online
3010: Introduction to Buddhism — Online
3080: Mormonism and the American Religious Experience — In-person
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing (Waugh)
This introduction to short story writing will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will learn to: 1) use a basic fiction writing vocabulary, 2) identify the core narratological concepts in a work of fiction, 3) recognize the sound and rhythm of good prose, 4) understand and employ various narrative modes and structures, and 5) participate fully and constructively in a workshop oriented class. The success of this workshop depends on your commitment to your writing community, your careful reading of your peers’ work, + your ability to offer sincere, constructive criticism.
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing (Olsen)
This is a fiction writing course that is accessible to beginning fiction writers and beneficial to writers who have had practical experience with fiction writing but minimal academic study in the field. The course is workshop-driven (meaning there will be extensive hands-on analysis of student work) but will also feature serious craft discussion and thorough readings of published material to help students better understand how to approach their own work. Students are encouraged to write in genres and styles that interest them. The course is structured as a hybrid with every-other-week in-class meetings that alternate with weeks where we discuss specific issues related to craft and contemporary fiction.
ENGL 3430: Introduction to Poetry Writing (Grimmer)
What is creative writing, what are poetics, and when do their modes create potential social change? Is popular music also lyric poetry, and are different modes of language-oriented responses considered poetics? What is the relationship between language, the body, and content, and how are these relationships racialized, gendered, classed, etc.? This course is a workshop-styled attempt to create, read, and respond to multi-modal poetry as politically engaged literature. Readings include print-based poems, craft books and essays such as Don’t Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt, community poetry readings, and viewings of audio-visual texts. Course requirements will include attending select readings online, engaged participation in class discussions, weekly writing assignments, one presentation, and a final creative poetry project.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction (Engler)
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction is a course that invites you to explore through writing what it is to be the person that you are in a world full of other people. We experiment with the tools of the nonfiction artist (like scene, character, voice, dialogue, narrative, and reflection) in a workshop-style, supportive, writing community in order to craft powerful memoir and personal essay. Whatever you might discover in your quest to explore humanity, this course gives you the chance to find a compelling way to say it.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction (Kunz)
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction will introduce students to contemporary writers within an increasingly hard to define genre. Students will study the narrative approaches and techniques employed by professional writers, while being asked to apply that knowledge to the crafting of their own Creative Nonfiction pieces. Students will work in small group workshops as well as taking part in a whole class workshop.
ENGL 4420: Advanced Fiction Writing (Caron)
In this advanced fiction workshop, students will discover how authors use structure, compression, tension, and other elements of fiction to write stories that move an audience. With this new knowledge, students will craft their own stories. We will pay particular attention to the role of revision in the writing process, approaching it not as an afterthought—something we do when we think our story is done—but rather as a technique that will help us better understand our material. As the writer Peter Ho Davies says, “revision isn’t just a catch-all description for various refinements of craft and style, but a skill in itself, a technique of its own, a state of mind even.” In this class, students practice revision as a technique; develop it as a skill; embrace it as a state of mind. To do this, they will workshop the same story twice, providing us with the opportunity to discuss revision choices. The final portfolio will consist of revised drafts and a reflective essay on the revision process.
ENGL 4430: Advanced Poetry Writing (Gunsberg)
In this workshop-based course, you will explore a wide range of poetry written by both emerging and established authors as well as by members of the class. You’ll enhance the skills you’ve developed in other writing courses by sharing your work in small and large groups, offering written and oral feedback, and by discussing craft essays. Beyond writing and revising individual poems on a weekly basis, you will assemble a final portfolio consisting of your most successful writing. Because this is an advanced course, you are expected to submit 3-5 of these poems to a literary journal before the conclusion of the semester.
ENGL 4440: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing (Sinor)
In the advanced nonfiction class, we build on the basics of nonfiction writing that you acquired in the introductory course. It is assumed that you are familiar with the subgenres beneath the umbrella of literary nonfiction, that you know the vocabulary, and that you understand how nonfiction utilizes techniques found in fiction and poetry. This semester we are focusing on form, specifically the diamond-tight magic of the brief essay or flash nonfiction. Not unlike the Great Salt Lake, the short form is the liquid lie of prose. On the surface it appears so easy, so brief, so very drinkable, but, once you wade in deeper, you understand that a reduction in space only heightens the precision required. Think of a bolt of lightning as it rends the dark sky. You have that amount of time to create that amount of beauty and power.
Teaching
ENGL 3510: Teaching Young Adult Literature (Gunsberg)
English 3510 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. This course will combine the content knowledge you have gained in your English coursework with pedagogical theory, enabling you to cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices. Through the process of reading and discussing a wide range of diverse young adult literature, we will explore central trends and issues in the field of Young Adult Literature and a variety of ways of interpreting, analyzing, and teaching YA Lit. This course, then, will ultimately help you understand who you hope to become as a literature teacher and participate in our profession’s important conversations.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required), English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 4500: Teaching Writing (Rivera-Mueller)
English 4500 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. This course will combine the content knowledge you have gained in your English coursework with pedagogical theory, enabling you to cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices. The learning activities and projects in this course will help members of the class collectively examine three related concepts: designing, engaging, and assessing writing experiences. Broadly, we will study the following questions: What are meaningful aims for writers? How do secondary writing teachers prompt students to engage in these purposes? What kinds of support do students need to achieve these learning goals? Our course texts will support our investigation into these questions. This course will meet in person.
ENGL 4510: Teaching Literature (Piotrowski)
English 4510 prepares students to teach literature, broadly defined to include canonical, contemporary, digital, print, fiction, and nonfiction texts. The course explores a variety of pedagogical strategies for teaching diverse literary traditions to students of various backgrounds and developmental levels. Students will engage both the philosophical and practical dimensions of secondary English teaching by reflecting on readings, designing a unit, and presenting to one another. Woven into this course will be opportunities for regular writing, examination of digital resources, and strategies for engaging students in reading literature.
ENGL 4520 & SCED 4300: Teaching Literacy in Diverse Classrooms & Clinical Experience II English (Rivera-Mueller)
English 4520 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Students are required to also register for SCED 4300, the clinical experience that accompanies this course. Paired together, these courses provide an opportunity to critically examine classroom moments and learn about teaching and learning from a range of educational stakeholders, including secondary students, peers, mentor teachers, and scholars. We will study scholarship related to teaching and literacy learning, observe learners and learning communities, teach learners, and reflect upon your process of becoming a teacher. These avidities will help you develop a robust understanding of literacy from the perspective of a teacher in diverse classroom settings. This course will meet in person.
Linguistics
ENGL 4200: Linguistics Structures (Manuel-Dupont) Asynchronous Online
Introduction to linguistic science: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, especially as relating to English. Exposure to other aspects of linguistic analysis, including language origins and linguistic diversity.
Requirements filled: Prof/Tech Writing (Linguistics). Linguistics class for English Education majors and minors.
ENGL 4220: Language and Writing: A History (McLaughlin)
Exploring the evolution of human language and the history of the most essential tool of civilization ever invented. We’ll examine the rich history of writing as well as the contemporary diversity of systems that people use to pass speech through space and time.
ENGL 4260: US Languages: History and Diversity (McLaughlin)
While the bulk of our time will be exploring the rich array of English dialects found in the US, we’ll also look at the non-English speech communities that make up the linguistic map. We’ll also examine how language and dialect are too often used as bases of discrimination and oppression.
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (Lynne McNeill)
This course introduces students to the academic field of folklore studies. It explores several major types of folklore—including folktale, legend, myth, belief, custom, and material culture—and covers the basic theoretical frameworks in which folklorists study these cultural expressions. The course’s main objectives are to help students think analytically about culture and everyday life, to help students become more aware of both their own and others' folk behaviors and cultures, and to help students appreciate the cultural forms that are often dismissed as trivial. Pursuing these goals will help us appreciate the tremendous role that folklore and folk culture play in shaping human experience. This course also fulfills a requirement for the folklore minor!
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (Afsane Rezaei)
Folklore is the culture that people make for themselves. It is cherished by families, shared among co-workers, and danced on the streets by unruly young people! The forms of folklore circulate from person to person and group to group, adapting to every change of situation and lend themselves to a wide array of social purposes. In this course, we will look at the concept of folklore as emergent and dynamic, and as an integral part of our day-to-day lives. We will review the major genres studied by folklorists, including oral/verbal, customary, and material forms of vernacular culture. Our focus will be on contemporary forms of folklore, including campus traditions, personal narratives, jokes, contemporary and supernatural legends, food traditions and celebrations, occupational folklore, and digital forms of folklore such as internet memes.
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (Jeannie Thomas)
In this course, students will be introduced to basic folklore concepts and genres. We will focus especially on legends (including ghost stories and conspiracy theories), material culture, personal experience narratives (as documented by the StoryCorps project), family narratives, and roots music genres (warning: banjos and accordions will be heard!) and their influence on contemporary music.
ENGL 3700: Regional Folklore -- Foodways (Afsane Rezaei)
How did fry sauce and funeral potatoes turn into iconic Utah foods? Why are there so many stories about rats or dog meat in restaurant meals? How do regional, religious, and political identities impact our everyday food choices? In this course, we will answer these and other questions by studying foodways from a folkloristic lens, i.e. examining the symbolic, artistic, and communicative importance of food in our everyday lives. We will look primarily at the role of food in constructing and performing regional and ethnic identities in the US context. In addition, we will address how the preparation, consumption, and presentation of food is related to individuals' performance of gender, class, or racial identities. Students will engage in food-related research of their own and will have the option to pursue an ethnographic or historical project informed by the course themes.
ENGL 3720 Children’s Folklore and Folklife (Lisa Gabbert)
Come discover the world of children’s folklore! Children’s folklore is different than children’s literature. Children’s literature is literature written by adults for children. In contrast, children’s folklore is material produced by children for children. These material include the games, stories, songs, rituals and beliefs that makeup the fabric of everyday life in childhood. By taking this course students will learn to interpret children’s play to better understand the culture of childhood.
ENGL 5700 Folk Narrative (Claudia Schwabe)
Why do fairy tales appear in almost every culture across the globe and why are they so popular? Undoubtedly because they encapsulate in (usually) succinct form many of the most pressing concerns of human existence: family conflict, the struggle for survival, sexual desire, the quest for happiness, among many others. This course explores why writers and readers have been attracted to the fairy-tale form through a study of its key elements and its uses in adult and children’s literature, book illustration, and film. Special attention will be given to the German Children’s and Household Tales, along with French, Italian, Danish, English, and selected non-Western fairy tales. Works of contemporary mainstream scholars such as Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, Donald Haase, and Marina Warner, and various critical lenses will be applied to the tales to reveal multiple methods of analyzing the texts. As part of the first half, the course begins with the definition of the fairy tale (its relation to the oral folktale, its components, and the function of oral and literary storytelling across cultures). It then surveys the most significant critical approaches to the study of the fairy tale: formalism, psychoanalysis, social history, and feminism. Students will read theoretical writings by prominent advocates of these approaches to understand how each methodology interprets specific tales. The next part of the course explores popular authors and collectors of fairy tales with a main focus on Straparola, Basile, Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Musäus, and Bechstein. Special attention is also given to German Kunstmärchen (literary fairy tales) of the Romantic period. In the second half of the course, students will read and analyze some of the most popular fairy tales from each of the major collections in Western Europe, augmented by postmodern retellings and adaptations in literature and the media.
ENGL 4200: Linguistics Structures (Manuel-Dupont) Asynchronous Online
Introduction to linguistic science: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, especially as relating to English. Exposure to other aspects of linguistic analysis, including language origins and linguistic diversity.
English 4220, Language and Writing: A History (McLaughlin) Asynchronous Online
Exploring the evolution of human language and the history of the most essential tool of civilization ever invented. We’ll examine the rich history of writing as well as the contemporary diversity of systems that people use to pass speech through space and time.
English 4260, US Languages: History and Diversity (McLaughlin)
While the bulk of our time will be exploring the rich array of English dialects found in the US, we’ll also look at the non-English speech communities that make up the linguistic map. We’ll also examine how language and dialect are too often used as bases of discrimination and oppression.
ENG 2140: LGBTQ+ Literature | Robb Kunz
This course provides an introduction to Literature that centers on/surrounds/considers the experience (historical, cultural and discursive) of individuals within LGBTQ: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (a term that is by nature flexible and which is used by many who feel that they in some way fall outside of "norms" of gender identity, gender expression, and/or sexual orientation) communities. Students will read, discuss, write, and present on ideas gleaned from the study of theoretical and literary texts ranging from novels, short stories, graphic novel, novella, and poetry. Students will be introduced to approaches in queer theory, gender theory, and the history of sexuality as a field of inquiry as it aligns with epistemological and human studies. Working in small and large (full class) groups, students will extrapolate ideas, exchange personal experiences and anecdotes, make evaluative connections between classroom studies and “real world” implementation.
ENG 2150: Introduction to Science Fiction | Russ Winn
In this course, students will consider different definitions of humanity through the lens of science, technology, and bodily autonomy, among other things. The texts will investigate large questions. Parable of the Talents, for example, asks us to imagine what it means to be human while Earth is ravaged by climate catastrophe; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep asks what it means to be human when it’s impossible to distinguish an AI replica from a human being. Students will use comparative analysis, personal and external interpretations, and humanistic traditions to identify questions that cut not only across a text’s history, but that grasp at the core truths of what it means to be human.
ENG 2150: Introduction to Science Fiction | Zackary Gregory
In this course we will explore the foundational works, core concepts, and essential elements that shape the genre of science fiction. We will begin by delving into the genre’s murky origins, examining proto science fiction works from the 19th century. From there the course will beam forward through the 20th century, exploring the key works from authors like H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guinn, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia E. Butler. Finally, we will make contact with contemporary science fiction literature by studying texts from writers like Ted Chiang and Kazuo Ishiguro. Throughout this course we will explore Ursula K. Le Guinn’s assertion that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” Keeping Le Guinn’s quote in mind we will delve into the questions like: What insights do writers convey about their present through their fictional visions of the future? How do authors dissect cultural anxieties through imagined alien encounters, self-aware androids, and technological biohacking?
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Tackett
In this course, we will investigate the key elements of literary analysis by practicing sustained reading, close listening, critical writing, and creative performance across various genres such as fiction, poetry, film, and television. Our goal will be to learn how to make persuasive literary arguments in both conversation and writing. This section will focus on our interactions with technology, such as artificial intelligence, and how they shape our ideas about sexuality, gender, race, and environment. We’ll experiment with ChatGPT and other technologies as we explore literature that might include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk, episodes of Black Mirror, and code-davinci-002’s I Am Code.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Mann
Becoming an English major means mastering your powers of interpretation, and literary analysis is at the heart of every English major’s interpretive practice. This course will introduce you to methods of literary analysis, or “close reading.” Specifically, we will focus on analyzing three main genres of literature—poetry, drama, and prose fiction—and course readings will include poems, short stories, a novel, and a play. As we explore these different genres, we’ll also consider what it means for a text to be considered “literary.” You will learn to notice the nuanced construction of a text, become familiar with literary concepts and terms, and understand the relationship between form and meaning. Writing assignments will develop your powers of analysis and synthesis. You will form compelling arguments, support your ideas with evidence, integrate the ideas of others into your writing, and contribute to a scholarly conversation. Major texts may include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Cooper-Rompato
This is an introductory course in Literary Analysis, which teaches students to read texts closely, to draw connections between form and content, to make interpretative claims, and to write persuasive arguments. This semester we will read three remarkable texts about young people—Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono (in translation), and Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger—and watch film adaptations of Coraline and Kiki's Delivery Service. These YA/children's fantasy novels and film adaptations create new universes that we will explore with in-class discussions and short papers.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies: Myths of the American West | Franks
This course investigates the creation of some of the most iconic notions of the American West: the rugged frontier, the gun-slinging cowboy, and the promise of absolute freedom. We'll encounter some of the works that helped build these myths up—Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, a novel by Louis L'Amour, and John Ford's film The Searchers—before engaging with those that challenge them—scholarship by Richard Slotkin, a satirical novel by Percival Everett, and C. Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills is Gold, a radical reimagining of the West from the perspective of Chinese and Chinese American peoples in nineteenth-century California. We'll also work to define what American Studies is as a discipline and how it's done in and out of the classroom.
English 3060: Mind and Body: The Rhetoric of Health and Healing—Mary Ellen Greenwood
In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore cultural expressions that reflect the condition of the human mind and body, which will include historical perspectives and the work of contemporary writers across multiple disciplines. Our goal is to critically analyze, summarize, and synthesize a variety of ways health is viewed, presented, and discussed through key units of study, which include exploring what rhetoric and health mean and how they connect to identity; investigating the rhetoric of mental health and physical health; considering spiritual and holistic approaches to health writing as well as the voices of conventional medical professionals; and unpacking health and healing rhetoric in a digital age.
ENGL 3325: Eighteenth-Century British Literary History: The Gothic Imagination | Mann
Tyrannical fathers, haunted castles, deranged monks, ancient prophecies, and things that go bump in the night. These are familiar features of the Gothic novel, a genre that flooded the literary landscape at the end of the eighteenth century and captivated the imaginations of British readers. From Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), this course will examine the origins and the evolution of the Gothic in the long eighteenth century. While the main focus of the course will be the rise and early influence of the Gothic novel, we will also read poetry and plays that experimented with Gothic conventions. We will consider how the Gothic was shaped by developments in aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and science, and how the genre reflected anxieties about gender, religion, and race. Course readings will include works by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen.
ENGL 3365: Nineteenth-Century American Literature | Tackett
We live in a world sculpted by nineteenth-century America. From the origins of the United States in the eighteenth century to World War I, Americans navigated industrial, political, and social upheaval that literature caused, recorded, and reacted to. Indigenous people, enslaved and freed people, queer people, immigrants, feminists, and others wrote, memorized, performed, and published poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and everything in between. Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Stephen Crane, John Rollin Ridge to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson to Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe to Walt Whitman made their mark on the way we read, speak, and think. To understand our era, we must understand theirs. Through discussion, research, and composition we’ll ask how literature made America and will continue to in the future.
ENGL 3375: American Literature Since 1900: Black American Canon | Rivera-Dundas
This course will move chronologically through the 20th century to analyze some of the most important writers in the Black American canon. We will read three beautiful and challenging novels: James Baldwin's fictional autobiography Go Tell it on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Octavia Butler's prescient speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower. Through each, we'll discuss the representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability to understand how Black American literature has evolved over the course of the 20th century, keeping an eye on the relationship between literary forms, intersectional identity, and American race relationships. Themes of religion and love tie the three novels together. We will supplement our reading with essays and poetry.
ENGL 3385: Postcolonial World Literature: After the Raj—Colonial and Postcolonial Anglo-Indian Literature | Blackstock
English 3385 covers a variety of texts that emerge from and explore the experience of colonization. The period of British control over South Asia was known as the Raj and produced some of the greatest works of 19th and 20th century literature written in English. The Oxford Companion to English Literature offers the following brief assessment of Anglo-Indian literature: “[A]lso referred to as Indian literature in English, produced both in India and across the vast Indian diaspora, Anglo‐Indian literature represents one of the most innovative and dynamic fields of world writing in English today.” In class we will be examining the novels, short stories, and poems of British writers including Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and E.M. Forster, along with works by writers of South Asian descent such as Salman Rushdie and Sara Suleri.
ENGL 3395: World Literature in Translation: Medieval Worlds | Cooper-Rompato
This class will explore a range of literature from the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Middle Ages. Readings will include poetry of the Japanese Heian Court as well as excerpts from what is argued to be the first novel,The Tale of Genji (ca. 1000), which follows the life and loves of the amazingly handsome and charismatic Genji; selections from a new translation of the Ethiopian national epic Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), which describes how the Ark of the Covenant made its way to Ethiopia; short tales from the Thousand and One Nights and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, as well as a number of other texts that students will vote on as a class to read. Special attention will be paid to texts that English Teaching students can bring into their secondary school classrooms. We will use Norton’s Anthology of World Literature (volume B), 4th edition.
ENGL 3610: Multicultural American Literature | Ricketts
In this course, we'll embark on a literary exploration of the kaleidoscopic American experience, weaving through time and across cultural landscapes to deepen your understanding of the rich tapestry that makes up American culture and identity. As we move from historical texts to contemporary works, we'll delve into the complexities of identity, memory, and belonging within various ethnic communities in the United States. By engaging with narratives that challenge and expand the traditional American literary canon from authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Julia Alvarez, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others, this course invites you to immerse yourself in voices that broaden the American narrative. In a time when questions of identity and belonging are more vital than ever, this course offers you a journey through the literary landscape of America, seen from perspectives too often pushed to the peripheries.
ENGL 4300: Shakespeare: Shakespeare the Authoritarian? | Graham
At the end of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate seems to have learned her lesson of obedience to male authority: “Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband.” The enslaved spirit Ariel in The Tempest similarly promises to Prospero to “be correspondent to command.” And many characters in Julius Caesar and Corialanus treat the plebeians with withering contempt. Some questions we will ask in this class, then: To what extent do these characters speak for the larger lessons of the texts? To put it crudely: was Shakespeare an authoritarian? To speak of his views on “democracy” would be an anachronism, but is the outlook of his plays at odds with democratic values? Or, on the contrary, do the plays subtly question, undermine, or resist these messages of unquestioning obedience to (certain kinds of) authority? What is the subject’s (or wife’s) rightful position with regards to authority, as these plays depict it? We will read Julius Caesar; Henry IV Parts 1 and 2; The Taming of the Shrew; and The Tempest, in addition to a handful of sonnets and a few examples of academic writing.
ENGL 4330: World Writers: Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature | Blackstock
The nineteenth century is known as the Golden Age of Russian literature, seeing the rise to prominence of such monumental and influential writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekov. Two of these writers in particular--Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy—profoundly influenced the thought of the age in which they lived and of the ages to follow, not only in Russia but throughout the world, and their ideas helped shape the twentieth century both philosophically and politically. As professor of philosophy Walter Barrett has written, “It has been said that every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; it might be said with equal justice that he is born either a Tolstoyan or a Dostoevskian.” This course will examine the lives, times, and works of these two literary giants, along with the contemporary writers who influenced them and who were influenced by them. Representative poems, stories, novels, and plays of these authors will be studied in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
ENGL 4340: Studies in Fiction: Novel Forms | Caron
In this class, we’ll focus our attention on novels that challenge conventional narrative forms. We’ll look at a range of novels, including novels-in-stories, novels-in-fragments, collage novels, and novels that resist easy categorization. Through our close reading and careful study, we’ll consider each novel on its own terms, examining how authors create their fictional worlds. We’ll then expand the conversation to consider how these books make space for new kinds of stories and new ways of telling them. Authors will include William Maxwell, Julie Otsuka, Jenny Offill, Max Porter, Lindsey Drager, and others.
ENGL 4350: Studies in Poetry: Lyrical Bodies, Romantic Lyrics | Mann
At the turn of the end of the eighteenth century, the objectives of poetry and medicine seemed to converge. As doctors and scientists sought to accurately describe the structures and functions of the human body, so, too, did poetry turn inward, taking an interest in the “inner life” of the self. In this class, we will endeavor to see the body in Romantic poetry. Romantic poets concerned themselves with the material, the visceral, the sensory, the bawdy, and the anatomical; they exalted and celebrated these physical aspects of the human condition; and they resisted them. They also shared close relationships with scientific thinkers, and the development of their poetry coincided with developments in medical science. Throughout the semester, we’ll explore the intersections of poetry and medicine in the Romantic period, and we’ll consider the body as a salient feature of the Romantic lyric. As we read selections of poetry by canonical and non-canonical British and Anglophone Romantic writers, we’ll discuss a variety of themes, including gender and sexuality, illness and pain, youth and aging, sex and desire, race and identity, mental health and the mind, trauma and disability, etc. Secondary readings in health humanities, disability studies, and history of medicine scholarship will supplement our readings of poetic texts.
ENGL 4370: Native American Literature | Franks
This broad survey of literatures by Indigenous writers of North America will cover foundational works by writers like William Apess and Zitkala-Ša, as well as major works from and inspired by the so-called Native American Renaissance of the mid-twentieth century. We'll read novels from N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Darcie Little Badger, as well as collections from Layli Long Soldier (poetry) and Thomas King (essays). Fans of YA will love Little Badger's speculative novel Elatsoe, and anyone looking forward to the theatrical release of Killers of the Flower Moon won't want to miss Hogan's historical novel Mean Spirit.
ENGL 5330: Literature of Race and Ethnicity: Black Feminist Intersectionality | Rivera-Dundas
In this seminar-style course, we will read texts that center and celebrate difference. We will talk about race, what it means that everyone--regardless of background--has a racial identity, and how race has shaped American politics, law, and literature. In addition, we'll discuss how other kinds of identity such as gender, class, religion, and ability interact with race and what it means to represent those stories through literature. Two novels will bookend our semester--Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward and Dawn by Octavia Butler--and we will supplement our reading with essays, poetry, and short prose pieces by writers including Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. By the end of the semester, students will be able to write an intersectional analysis of a piece of pop culture of their choosing.
TCR 2100: Introduction to Technical Communication | Chen (in-person) | Eyre (online)
This course introduces you to the field of technical communication as an iterative, problem-solving activity useful in any organization with communication needs. Working independently and collaboratively, you will propose, compose, design, and revise a variety of workplace-based documents. This course will also teach you how to synthesize and evaluate arguments about technology and society relevant to technical communicators. This course uses a free open-access textbook along with other freely available media.
TCR 2110: Digital Writing Technologies | Perkins (online)
Technologies are always changing, so it’s important that you know how to learn new technologies. That’s what you’ll do in this class. Employers will expect you to be adept at using a variety of technologies and know how to select the best tool(s) to accomplish a particular task. In this course, you will gain experience learning and using three software programs used for 1) photo editing, 2) document layout, and 3) web design. But more importantly, you’ll develop your sense of adventure, tenacity, and confidence in evaluating, learning, and using technologies relevant to the workplace.
ENGL 3085: Writing for the Computer Science Workplace | Mathis | Stevens
This class will introduce you to professional and technical writing situations common in computer science workplaces, as we cultivate adaptive communication strategies and ethical professional behaviors. You will design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information.
TCR 3100: Workplace Research | Anabire
Technical communicators frequently engage in research to answer questions or address problems in the workplace. This course is designed to prepare you to work successfully as a technical writer by learning how to craft a research question; how to select appropriate methods to address a particular research question; how to ethically collect and analyze data; and how to report research findings and their associated implications (i.e., research-based recommendations). By partnering with a client for the full semester, you will practice applying all that you are learning within a real organizational context, learning about how you can conduct research to address organizational problems and questions.
TCR 3220: Technical Editing | Stevens
Whether or not your job title includes the word “editor,” you will find that good editing skills are an excellent way to move ahead in your workplace. In this course, you will experience first-hand what it means to be an editor by learning and applying the skills of copyediting, proofreading, and comprehensively editing, while also considering the context in which editing currently exists, and moving toward considering what editing could be by engaging in critical frameworks and theories that can inform our conceptualizations of editing.
TCR 3230: Community Grant Writing | Ault-Dyslin
Through a community-engaged learning approach, students collaborate with nonprofit partner organizations as you develop analysis, writing, editing, and communication skills. Coursework leads up to a final grant draft that will be presented to the partner organization for future funding opportunities.
TCR 4230: Project Management | Edenfield
In this class, you will study project management strategies involving and affecting diverse groups of stakeholders. You will learn first-hand how gender, race, culture, age, ideology, and socioeconomic class influence the design, execution, and outcomes of projects.
TCR 4240: User Experience Design | Chen
User experience design works to make products and services more enjoyable for users. In this class, you will learn how to plan, conduct, and report on data collected from user experience design research, including the value of designing experiences for a diverse user base.
TCR 5490: Special Topics: AI and Writing | Moeller
This course will focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)—from GenAI bot writers and predictive text generators to ChatGPT—as a writing technology. Using posthuman theory, we will interrogate GenAI’s impact on human labor and probe its limitations and potentialities as a tool in the field of technical communication.
English 2200: Understanding Literature (BHU)—Genevieve Ford
This course will explore how to read short stories, drama, poetry, and novels in a format that features world and American literature in brief, manageable, readable portions. We’ll read poetry in fresh ways that will make it more legible. We’ll explore drama by imagining the stages, sets, and scenes, particularly of the classic play A Raisin in the Sun. We’ll look at how this play, dealing with prejudice and pressures African Americans faced in Chicago in the 1950s might look if we staged it on the Navajo Reservation today. No acting required, just creativity and an interest in the ways the literature can enrich your life. Two of the textbooks will be available free online, so this will also be an economical choice.
English 2200: Understanding Literature (BHU)—Carrie Icard
Understanding Literature is an introductory survey course that welcomes any student looking to fulfill the Breadth Humanities requirement, or someone who is interested in literature and “always wanted to try” a first course. Students will focus on analytical readings in literature, with attention to types, terms, and historical development. Emphasis will be on approaching selected texts with understanding and appreciation. Readings will include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama by a wide variety of authors including Steinbeck, Dickinson, Cisneros, and Shakespeare.
English 2230: Introduction to Film (BHU)—Dustin Crawford
This course introduces students to global film from the 19th century to contemporary award winners and examines how authorship, genre, presentation, and narrative structure contribute to meaning. Students will learn to evaluate films as reflections of culture and mediums for communication while becoming familiar with film techniques, terminology, and basic film concepts through film analysis and criticism.
English 2240: Introduction to Poetry (BHU)—Jason Olsen
This course will provide students with an introduction to reading and understanding poetry using examples from various writers over the past several centuries (and today). Using a variety of approaches, students will understand how poetry responds to the period in which it was (or is) written, how writers influence over time, and how poetry (regardless of when or why it was written) can resonate for us today. Through analysis and discussion, students will leave this course with an understanding of what makes poetry valuable and how it can bring substantial joy and understanding to the world.
English 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing (BHU)—Russ Beck
This course will focus on the examination and creation of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scripts. Students will not have to commit to any single genre for the entire term—instead, the course will investigate the fundamentals of creative writing and encourage experimentation with minimal risks. At the conclusion of the course, students will have a working definition of the mentioned genres, a better understanding of their individual writing processes, and a diverse writing portfolio filled with both project initiations and completed projects.
English 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing (BHU)—Jason Olsen
This is a creative writing course that will introduce students to the basic concepts of creative writing in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction (with conversations about plays and screenplays, among other genres). Students will write creatively in a supportive environment that encourages collaboration and writing in different genres. In addition to writing creatively, students will also read and analyze texts to help learn how best to develop their own creative works (and how to respond to the creative work of others).
ENGL 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing (BHU)—Josi Russell
Develop your own creative voice by exploring the craft of writing fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. Do you have a story idea you want to write or a powerful life experience you’d like to capture? In this class, you’ll get to play with different techniques for creating your own original stories, poems, memoirs, scripts, and songs. You’ll also discover various pathways you might take to become a published author.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies // Myths of the American West (BHU)—Travis Franks
This course investigates the creation of some of the most iconic notions of the American West: the rugged frontier, the gun-slinging cowboy, and the promise of absolute freedom. We'll encounter some of the works that helped build these myths up—Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, a novel by Louis L'Amour, and John Ford's film The Searchers—before engaging with those that challenge them—scholarship by Richard Slotkin, a satirical novel by Percival Everett, and C. Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills is Gold, radical reimagining of the West from the perspective of Chinese and Chinese American peoples in nineteenth-century California. We'll also work to define what American Studies is as a discipline and how it's done in and out of the classroom.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies (BHU)—Dr. Robert King
Whether it’s “the best of times” or “the worst of times” in our American experience, it is certainly a time of challenge and change—political, economic, technological, social—unsettling our sense of the meaning of America, our narratives of national purpose and meaning...or providing an opportunity to revise those narratives. A survey of American literary, historical, and cultural works will allow us to examine the roots of American culture, with a key focus on freedom and on what it means to be a citizen in a democracy—what does the government owe you, what do you owe the government and community? Should you wear a mask? And after a distinctive political year, what is the condition of our democratic institutions? Why are our politics now so partisan and polarizing? Can we answer these questions by the end of the semester?
ENGL 2640: Race and Ethnicity in the United States (BHU)—Cree Taylor
Race is one of the most powerful factors influencing the way we live; however, its origins as a social construct are often misunderstood, and folks often do not have the background knowledge or vocabulary to engage in meaningful conversations about the impact of race in our lives. This course centralizes the experiences and perspectives of People of Color to help provide folks with a broad overview of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity in the United States. Through the study of racial formations, Intersectionality, and contemporary issues, students will gain an increased understanding of the ways in which race and racism have been, and continue to be, powerful social, cultural, and political forces in society today. Course readings grapple with the histories and realities of race in American life and ask us to take on the difficult inner work of embarking on our own path towards leading more anti-racist lives. In short, this course is about humans and power, and the responsibility we all have to use our power to help all humans access the American ideals of equity and justice.
ENGL 3030: Perspectives in Literature (DHA)—Dr. Robert King
Our focus will be on the American culture of personal transformation and creed of social mobility and self-development. These values are very much rooted in American literature, from the Puritans’ preoccupation with personal salvation, Ben Franklin’s “rags to riches” narrative, through Emerson and Thoreau’s expression of American Romanticism (rugged individualism in a sublime key), up to its contemporary forms and expressions—self-care podcasts, “makeovers,” yoga stretching itself across the country, transformations in gender and racial identities. Other issues include the extent transformation is communal or relational, as opposed to autonomous and personal, and how it relates to “the pursuit of happiness,” especially in Pandemic times and our own experience. Several of the readings will focus on the Southwest desert as a landscape of personal transformation.
English 3040: Perspectives in Writings and Rhetoric: Rhetorics of Protest and Resistance (DHA)—Kristen Wheaton
This course explores a wide variety of genres of protest that all work in concert under the broader umbrella of resistance of gendered violence, including but certainly not limited to stories, marches, petitions, manifestos, songs, photos, testimonies, bodily performances, multimodal works, and much, much more. Though explicitly concerned with experiences of gender, especially the risk of violence, as an impetus for protest and resistance, this course is grounded in an intersectional approach and will aim to complicate simplistic understandings of women’s resistances and the evolving manifestations of women’s rights movements. Because of this subject matter, it is possible that you will encounter triggering, uncomfortable, or otherwise difficult to engage material. Recognizing the emotional and psychological labor such work takes, critical self-reflection will be a core feature of this course. Ultimately, we will work to attain nuanced understandings of the rhetorical dynamics of resistance and protest that aim to engage public attention to effectively (or not) demand change.
ENGL 3630: The Farm in Literature and Culture (DHA)—Rosa Thornley
This interdisciplinary course will draw on multiple modes to explore the Farm in Literature and Culture. With a Communications Intensive and Depth Humanities designation, students will find rigor in writing about the agricultural themes they will find through reading and viewing a variety of rhetorics. Examples will start with foundationa ideas in documentary Guns, Germs, and Steel, the roots of indigenous peoples in Braiding Sweetgrass, complexity of colonization found in letters of Jefferson, homesteading through the eyes of a child in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing, and then moving on through the depths of The Depression Era in Grapes of Wrath, and ending with contemporary issues found in Silent Spring, “The Pleasures of Eating,” The Bucolic Plague and The Martian. A journey through these texts will develop cultural literacy through the lens of agriculture.
ENGL 3640: Nature Writing (DHA)—Michaelann Nelson
In this General Education course that fulfills the Depth Humanities Requirement, we will explore how practices of reading and writing impact the relationship between humans and the environment. We will learn about how art and literature from the mid-1800s shaped ideas about America as an Edenic garden and evolved through the twentieth century to current philosophies of land use and how they affected public policy and perceptions of the environment. We will take a deep dive into the idea of wilderness by reading Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and the establishment of the Gila Wilderness; Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the fight over damming the Colorado River in the 1960s; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the establishment of the modern environmental movement. We will end by focusing on how current activists use texts and images to shape ideas about current environmental crisis', especially here in Utah. Students will have the opportunity to not only learn about how texts shaped environmental ideology, land use, and politics, but also engage in their own projects to advocate for an issue or place they care about.
American Literature and Folklore
ENGL:
2140: LGBTQ+ Literature — In-person
2150: Intro to Science Fiction — In-person, Connect
2230: Intro to Film — In-person
2630: Intro to American Studies — In-person, Connect
2640: Race and Ethnicity in the US — In-personn
3610: Multicultural American Literature — Connect
3630: The Farm in Literature and Culture — In-person
3365: Nineteenth-Century American Literature — In-person
3375: Literary History of the Americas since 1900 — In-person
4260: US Languages: Diversity and History — In-person
4370: Native American Literature — In-person
5330: Race and Ethnicity in Literature — In-person
SPAN:
3300: Intro to Hispanic Literature and Literary Analysis — In-person
3560: Intro to US Latino/a Culture — In-person
3620: Survey of Hispanic-American Literature I — In-person
3630: Survey of Hispanic-American Literature II — In-person
PORT:
3700: Film Studies in Portuguese — In-person
4200: Brazilian Media in Global Contexts — In-person
American History and Government
HIST:
2700: United States to 1877 — Online
2710: United States 1877 to Present — In-person
2170: Navajo History and Culture — Connect
3850: History of Utah — In-person, Online
4600: History of the American West — Online
4650: Women and Gender in the US West — Online
4720: The Civil Rights Movement — In-person
4810: American Military History — In-person
POLS:
3120: Law and Politics — In-person
3130: United States Legislative Politics — In-person
3140: The Presidency — Online
3270: Latin American Government and Politics — In-person
4130: Constitutional Theory — In-person (prereq. POLS 1100)
4160: The First Amendment — In-person
5140: Law, Politics, and War — In-person
Social Sciences
ANTH:
3160: Anthropology of Religion — Online
3310: Intro to Museum Studies — Connect
CJ:
1010: Introduction to Criminal Justice — Connect
1330: Criminal Law — Connect
2340: Survey of Criminal Procedure — Connect
PSY:
3110: Health Psychology — Connect
3120: Abuse, Neglect, Psychological Dimensions Intimate Violence — Online
3510: Social Psychology — In-person, Online
3700: Mental Health Advocacy and Awareness — In-Person, Online
4230: Psychology of Gender — In-Person, Online
4240: Multicultural Psychology — In-Person, Online
SOC:
2630: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity — Online
3010: Social Inequality — In-Person, Online
3200: Population and Society — Online
3410: Juvenile Delinquency — Online
3420: Criminology — In-person
3400: Tribal Criminal Justice Systems — Connect
3430: Social Deviance — Online
3520: Sociology of Mental Illness — Online
3610: Rural People and Places — Online
3750: Sociology of Aging — Online
SW:
1010: Introduction to Social Welfare — In-Person, Online
2100: Human Behavior in the Social Environment — Connect
2400: Social Work with Diverse Population — Online
3350: Child Welfare — Online
3360: Adolescents: Theories, Problems, and Issues — Online
3650: Mental Health — Online
SW 3750: Community Health and Society — Online
Environmental Studies
ENVS:
2340: Natural Resources and Society — Online
3010: Fundamentals of Natural Resource and Environmental Policy — Online
3320: Archeology of Climate Change — Online
3600: Living with Wildlife — Online
4000: Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management — In-person
4020: Foundations of Environmental Studies — Online
4700: Communicating Sustainability — Online
5000: Environmental Nonprofit and Volunteer Management — Online
HIST:
3950: Environmental History — In-Person
ENGL:
3640: Reading and Writing the Environment: Nature Writing
SOC:
4620: Sociology of the Environment and Natural Resources — In-person
AMERICAN ART, MEDIA, AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES
CMST:
1330: Introduction to Global Communication — In-Person
3230: Organizations and Social Change — In person
3330: Intercultural Communication — In-Person
4200: Language, Thought, and Action — In-Person
4800: Qualitative Research in Communication Studies — In person
FILM:
3220: Bad Cinema — In-Person
JCOM:
1500: Introduction to Mass Communication — Online
2010: Media Literacy — In-person
2300: Introduction to Public Relations — In-person
2400: Introduction to Social Media — In-person
3100: Reporting Public Affairs — Online
4030: Mass Media Law — Online
4350: Popular Culture in Society — In-person
5410: Social Media and Public Health — In-person
MUSC:
3020: History of Jazz — In-Person
3030: Rock and Roll-Catalyst for Social Change — Online
ELECTIVES
The following courses may also be taken for American Studies credit. They do not fall under one of the official Disciplinary Categories, but they may be taken as one of the additional six elective courses in the AS major.
ENGL:
3420: Fiction Writing — In-Person
3430: Poetry Writing — In-Person
3440: Creative Nonfiction — In-Person
TCR:
2100: Intro to Technical Writing and Rhetoric — Online
2110: Digital Writing Technologies — Online
2100: Workplace Research — In-person
3220: Technical Editing — In-person
3230: Community Grant Writing — In-person
4230: Project Management — In-person
4250: User Experience Design — In-person
5490: Special Topics: AI and Writing — In-person
PHIL:
2400: Ethics — In-person
3500: Medical Ethics — In-person
3580: Ethics and Economic Life — In-person
4310: Philosophy of Science— In-person
RELS:
1010: Introduction to Religious Studies — In-Person, online
3010: Introduction to Buddhism — Online
3080: Mormonism and the American Religious Experience — In-person
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing (Waugh)
This introduction to short story writing will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will learn to: 1) use a basic fiction writing vocabulary, 2) identify the core narratological concepts in a work of fiction, 3) recognize the sound and rhythm of good prose, 4) understand and employ various narrative modes and structures, and 5) participate fully and constructively in a workshop oriented class. The success of this workshop depends on your commitment to your writing community, your careful reading of your peers’ work, + your ability to offer sincere, constructive criticism.
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing (Olsen)
This is a fiction writing course that is accessible to beginning fiction writers and beneficial to writers who have had practical experience with fiction writing but minimal academic study in the field. The course is workshop-driven (meaning there will be extensive hands-on analysis of student work) but will also feature serious craft discussion and thorough readings of published material to help students better understand how to approach their own work. Students are encouraged to write in genres and styles that interest them. The course is structured as a hybrid with every-other-week in-class meetings that alternate with weeks where we discuss specific issues related to craft and contemporary fiction.
ENGL 3430: Introduction to Poetry Writing (Grimmer)
What is creative writing, what are poetics, and when do their modes create potential social change? Is popular music also lyric poetry, and are different modes of language-oriented responses considered poetics? What is the relationship between language, the body, and content, and how are these relationships racialized, gendered, classed, etc.? This course is a workshop-styled attempt to create, read, and respond to multi-modal poetry as politically engaged literature. Readings include print-based poems, craft books and essays such as Don’t Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt, community poetry readings, and viewings of audio-visual texts. Course requirements will include attending select readings online, engaged participation in class discussions, weekly writing assignments, one presentation, and a final creative poetry project.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction (Engler)
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction is a course that invites you to explore through writing what it is to be the person that you are in a world full of other people. We experiment with the tools of the nonfiction artist (like scene, character, voice, dialogue, narrative, and reflection) in a workshop-style, supportive, writing community in order to craft powerful memoir and personal essay. Whatever you might discover in your quest to explore humanity, this course gives you the chance to find a compelling way to say it.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction (Kunz)
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction will introduce students to contemporary writers within an increasingly hard to define genre. Students will study the narrative approaches and techniques employed by professional writers, while being asked to apply that knowledge to the crafting of their own Creative Nonfiction pieces. Students will work in small group workshops as well as taking part in a whole class workshop.
ENGL 4420: Advanced Fiction Writing (Caron)
In this advanced fiction workshop, students will discover how authors use structure, compression, tension, and other elements of fiction to write stories that move an audience. With this new knowledge, students will craft their own stories. We will pay particular attention to the role of revision in the writing process, approaching it not as an afterthought—something we do when we think our story is done—but rather as a technique that will help us better understand our material. As the writer Peter Ho Davies says, “revision isn’t just a catch-all description for various refinements of craft and style, but a skill in itself, a technique of its own, a state of mind even.” In this class, students practice revision as a technique; develop it as a skill; embrace it as a state of mind. To do this, they will workshop the same story twice, providing us with the opportunity to discuss revision choices. The final portfolio will consist of revised drafts and a reflective essay on the revision process.
ENGL 4430: Advanced Poetry Writing (Gunsberg)
In this workshop-based course, you will explore a wide range of poetry written by both emerging and established authors as well as by members of the class. You’ll enhance the skills you’ve developed in other writing courses by sharing your work in small and large groups, offering written and oral feedback, and by discussing craft essays. Beyond writing and revising individual poems on a weekly basis, you will assemble a final portfolio consisting of your most successful writing. Because this is an advanced course, you are expected to submit 3-5 of these poems to a literary journal before the conclusion of the semester.
ENGL 4440: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing (Sinor)
In the advanced nonfiction class, we build on the basics of nonfiction writing that you acquired in the introductory course. It is assumed that you are familiar with the subgenres beneath the umbrella of literary nonfiction, that you know the vocabulary, and that you understand how nonfiction utilizes techniques found in fiction and poetry. This semester we are focusing on form, specifically the diamond-tight magic of the brief essay or flash nonfiction. Not unlike the Great Salt Lake, the short form is the liquid lie of prose. On the surface it appears so easy, so brief, so very drinkable, but, once you wade in deeper, you understand that a reduction in space only heightens the precision required. Think of a bolt of lightning as it rends the dark sky. You have that amount of time to create that amount of beauty and power.
Teaching
ENGL 3510: Teaching Young Adult Literature (Gunsberg)
English 3510 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. This course will combine the content knowledge you have gained in your English coursework with pedagogical theory, enabling you to cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices. Through the process of reading and discussing a wide range of diverse young adult literature, we will explore central trends and issues in the field of Young Adult Literature and a variety of ways of interpreting, analyzing, and teaching YA Lit. This course, then, will ultimately help you understand who you hope to become as a literature teacher and participate in our profession’s important conversations.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required), English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 4500: Teaching Writing (Rivera-Mueller)
English 4500 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. This course will combine the content knowledge you have gained in your English coursework with pedagogical theory, enabling you to cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices. The learning activities and projects in this course will help members of the class collectively examine three related concepts: designing, engaging, and assessing writing experiences. Broadly, we will study the following questions: What are meaningful aims for writers? How do secondary writing teachers prompt students to engage in these purposes? What kinds of support do students need to achieve these learning goals? Our course texts will support our investigation into these questions. This course will meet in person.
ENGL 4510: Teaching Literature (Piotrowski)
English 4510 prepares students to teach literature, broadly defined to include canonical, contemporary, digital, print, fiction, and nonfiction texts. The course explores a variety of pedagogical strategies for teaching diverse literary traditions to students of various backgrounds and developmental levels. Students will engage both the philosophical and practical dimensions of secondary English teaching by reflecting on readings, designing a unit, and presenting to one another. Woven into this course will be opportunities for regular writing, examination of digital resources, and strategies for engaging students in reading literature.
ENGL 4520 & SCED 4300: Teaching Literacy in Diverse Classrooms & Clinical Experience II English (Rivera-Mueller)
English 4520 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Students are required to also register for SCED 4300, the clinical experience that accompanies this course. Paired together, these courses provide an opportunity to critically examine classroom moments and learn about teaching and learning from a range of educational stakeholders, including secondary students, peers, mentor teachers, and scholars. We will study scholarship related to teaching and literacy learning, observe learners and learning communities, teach learners, and reflect upon your process of becoming a teacher. These avidities will help you develop a robust understanding of literacy from the perspective of a teacher in diverse classroom settings. This course will meet in person.
Linguistics
ENGL 4200: Linguistics Structures (Manuel-Dupont) Asynchronous Online
Introduction to linguistic science: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, especially as relating to English. Exposure to other aspects of linguistic analysis, including language origins and linguistic diversity.
Requirements filled: Prof/Tech Writing (Linguistics). Linguistics class for English Education majors and minors.
ENGL 4220: Language and Writing: A History (McLaughlin)
Exploring the evolution of human language and the history of the most essential tool of civilization ever invented. We’ll examine the rich history of writing as well as the contemporary diversity of systems that people use to pass speech through space and time.
ENGL 4260: US Languages: History and Diversity (McLaughlin)
While the bulk of our time will be exploring the rich array of English dialects found in the US, we’ll also look at the non-English speech communities that make up the linguistic map. We’ll also examine how language and dialect are too often used as bases of discrimination and oppression.
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (Lynne McNeill)
This course introduces students to the academic field of folklore studies. It explores several major types of folklore—including folktale, legend, myth, belief, custom, and material culture—and covers the basic theoretical frameworks in which folklorists study these cultural expressions. The course’s main objectives are to help students think analytically about culture and everyday life, to help students become more aware of both their own and others' folk behaviors and cultures, and to help students appreciate the cultural forms that are often dismissed as trivial. Pursuing these goals will help us appreciate the tremendous role that folklore and folk culture play in shaping human experience. This course also fulfills a requirement for the folklore minor!
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (Afsane Rezaei)
Folklore is the culture that people make for themselves. It is cherished by families, shared among co-workers, and danced on the streets by unruly young people! The forms of folklore circulate from person to person and group to group, adapting to every change of situation and lend themselves to a wide array of social purposes. In this course, we will look at the concept of folklore as emergent and dynamic, and as an integral part of our day-to-day lives. We will review the major genres studied by folklorists, including oral/verbal, customary, and material forms of vernacular culture. Our focus will be on contemporary forms of folklore, including campus traditions, personal narratives, jokes, contemporary and supernatural legends, food traditions and celebrations, occupational folklore, and digital forms of folklore such as internet memes.
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (Jeannie Thomas)
In this course, students will be introduced to basic folklore concepts and genres. We will focus especially on legends (including ghost stories and conspiracy theories), material culture, personal experience narratives (as documented by the StoryCorps project), family narratives, and roots music genres (warning: banjos and accordions will be heard!) and their influence on contemporary music.
ENGL 3700: Regional Folklore -- Foodways (Afsane Rezaei)
How did fry sauce and funeral potatoes turn into iconic Utah foods? Why are there so many stories about rats or dog meat in restaurant meals? How do regional, religious, and political identities impact our everyday food choices? In this course, we will answer these and other questions by studying foodways from a folkloristic lens, i.e. examining the symbolic, artistic, and communicative importance of food in our everyday lives. We will look primarily at the role of food in constructing and performing regional and ethnic identities in the US context. In addition, we will address how the preparation, consumption, and presentation of food is related to individuals' performance of gender, class, or racial identities. Students will engage in food-related research of their own and will have the option to pursue an ethnographic or historical project informed by the course themes.
ENGL 3720 Children’s Folklore and Folklife (Lisa Gabbert)
Come discover the world of children’s folklore! Children’s folklore is different than children’s literature. Children’s literature is literature written by adults for children. In contrast, children’s folklore is material produced by children for children. These material include the games, stories, songs, rituals and beliefs that makeup the fabric of everyday life in childhood. By taking this course students will learn to interpret children’s play to better understand the culture of childhood.
ENGL 5700 Folk Narrative (Claudia Schwabe)
Why do fairy tales appear in almost every culture across the globe and why are they so popular? Undoubtedly because they encapsulate in (usually) succinct form many of the most pressing concerns of human existence: family conflict, the struggle for survival, sexual desire, the quest for happiness, among many others. This course explores why writers and readers have been attracted to the fairy-tale form through a study of its key elements and its uses in adult and children’s literature, book illustration, and film. Special attention will be given to the German Children’s and Household Tales, along with French, Italian, Danish, English, and selected non-Western fairy tales. Works of contemporary mainstream scholars such as Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, Donald Haase, and Marina Warner, and various critical lenses will be applied to the tales to reveal multiple methods of analyzing the texts. As part of the first half, the course begins with the definition of the fairy tale (its relation to the oral folktale, its components, and the function of oral and literary storytelling across cultures). It then surveys the most significant critical approaches to the study of the fairy tale: formalism, psychoanalysis, social history, and feminism. Students will read theoretical writings by prominent advocates of these approaches to understand how each methodology interprets specific tales. The next part of the course explores popular authors and collectors of fairy tales with a main focus on Straparola, Basile, Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Musäus, and Bechstein. Special attention is also given to German Kunstmärchen (literary fairy tales) of the Romantic period. In the second half of the course, students will read and analyze some of the most popular fairy tales from each of the major collections in Western Europe, augmented by postmodern retellings and adaptations in literature and the media.
ENGL 4200: Linguistics Structures (Manuel-Dupont) Asynchronous Online
Introduction to linguistic science: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, especially as relating to English. Exposure to other aspects of linguistic analysis, including language origins and linguistic diversity.
English 4220, Language and Writing: A History (McLaughlin) Asynchronous Online
Exploring the evolution of human language and the history of the most essential tool of civilization ever invented. We’ll examine the rich history of writing as well as the contemporary diversity of systems that people use to pass speech through space and time.
English 4260, US Languages: History and Diversity (McLaughlin)
While the bulk of our time will be exploring the rich array of English dialects found in the US, we’ll also look at the non-English speech communities that make up the linguistic map. We’ll also examine how language and dialect are too often used as bases of discrimination and oppression.
ENG 2140: LGBTQ+ Literature | Robb Kunz
This course provides an introduction to Literature that centers on/surrounds/considers the experience (historical, cultural and discursive) of individuals within LGBTQ: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (a term that is by nature flexible and which is used by many who feel that they in some way fall outside of "norms" of gender identity, gender expression, and/or sexual orientation) communities. Students will read, discuss, write, and present on ideas gleaned from the study of theoretical and literary texts ranging from novels, short stories, graphic novel, novella, and poetry. Students will be introduced to approaches in queer theory, gender theory, and the history of sexuality as a field of inquiry as it aligns with epistemological and human studies. Working in small and large (full class) groups, students will extrapolate ideas, exchange personal experiences and anecdotes, make evaluative connections between classroom studies and “real world” implementation.
ENG 2150: Introduction to Science Fiction | Russ Winn
In this course, students will consider different definitions of humanity through the lens of science, technology, and bodily autonomy, among other things. The texts will investigate large questions. Parable of the Talents, for example, asks us to imagine what it means to be human while Earth is ravaged by climate catastrophe; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep asks what it means to be human when it’s impossible to distinguish an AI replica from a human being. Students will use comparative analysis, personal and external interpretations, and humanistic traditions to identify questions that cut not only across a text’s history, but that grasp at the core truths of what it means to be human.
ENG 2150: Introduction to Science Fiction | Zackary Gregory
In this course we will explore the foundational works, core concepts, and essential elements that shape the genre of science fiction. We will begin by delving into the genre’s murky origins, examining proto science fiction works from the 19th century. From there the course will beam forward through the 20th century, exploring the key works from authors like H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guinn, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia E. Butler. Finally, we will make contact with contemporary science fiction literature by studying texts from writers like Ted Chiang and Kazuo Ishiguro. Throughout this course we will explore Ursula K. Le Guinn’s assertion that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” Keeping Le Guinn’s quote in mind we will delve into the questions like: What insights do writers convey about their present through their fictional visions of the future? How do authors dissect cultural anxieties through imagined alien encounters, self-aware androids, and technological biohacking?
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Tackett
In this course, we will investigate the key elements of literary analysis by practicing sustained reading, close listening, critical writing, and creative performance across various genres such as fiction, poetry, film, and television. Our goal will be to learn how to make persuasive literary arguments in both conversation and writing. This section will focus on our interactions with technology, such as artificial intelligence, and how they shape our ideas about sexuality, gender, race, and environment. We’ll experiment with ChatGPT and other technologies as we explore literature that might include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk, episodes of Black Mirror, and code-davinci-002’s I Am Code.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Mann
Becoming an English major means mastering your powers of interpretation, and literary analysis is at the heart of every English major’s interpretive practice. This course will introduce you to methods of literary analysis, or “close reading.” Specifically, we will focus on analyzing three main genres of literature—poetry, drama, and prose fiction—and course readings will include poems, short stories, a novel, and a play. As we explore these different genres, we’ll also consider what it means for a text to be considered “literary.” You will learn to notice the nuanced construction of a text, become familiar with literary concepts and terms, and understand the relationship between form and meaning. Writing assignments will develop your powers of analysis and synthesis. You will form compelling arguments, support your ideas with evidence, integrate the ideas of others into your writing, and contribute to a scholarly conversation. Major texts may include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Cooper-Rompato
This is an introductory course in Literary Analysis, which teaches students to read texts closely, to draw connections between form and content, to make interpretative claims, and to write persuasive arguments. This semester we will read three remarkable texts about young people—Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono (in translation), and Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger—and watch film adaptations of Coraline and Kiki's Delivery Service. These YA/children's fantasy novels and film adaptations create new universes that we will explore with in-class discussions and short papers.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies: Myths of the American West | Franks
This course investigates the creation of some of the most iconic notions of the American West: the rugged frontier, the gun-slinging cowboy, and the promise of absolute freedom. We'll encounter some of the works that helped build these myths up—Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, a novel by Louis L'Amour, and John Ford's film The Searchers—before engaging with those that challenge them—scholarship by Richard Slotkin, a satirical novel by Percival Everett, and C. Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills is Gold, a radical reimagining of the West from the perspective of Chinese and Chinese American peoples in nineteenth-century California. We'll also work to define what American Studies is as a discipline and how it's done in and out of the classroom.
English 3060: Mind and Body: The Rhetoric of Health and Healing—Mary Ellen Greenwood
In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore cultural expressions that reflect the condition of the human mind and body, which will include historical perspectives and the work of contemporary writers across multiple disciplines. Our goal is to critically analyze, summarize, and synthesize a variety of ways health is viewed, presented, and discussed through key units of study, which include exploring what rhetoric and health mean and how they connect to identity; investigating the rhetoric of mental health and physical health; considering spiritual and holistic approaches to health writing as well as the voices of conventional medical professionals; and unpacking health and healing rhetoric in a digital age.
ENGL 3325: Eighteenth-Century British Literary History: The Gothic Imagination | Mann
Tyrannical fathers, haunted castles, deranged monks, ancient prophecies, and things that go bump in the night. These are familiar features of the Gothic novel, a genre that flooded the literary landscape at the end of the eighteenth century and captivated the imaginations of British readers. From Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), this course will examine the origins and the evolution of the Gothic in the long eighteenth century. While the main focus of the course will be the rise and early influence of the Gothic novel, we will also read poetry and plays that experimented with Gothic conventions. We will consider how the Gothic was shaped by developments in aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and science, and how the genre reflected anxieties about gender, religion, and race. Course readings will include works by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen.
ENGL 3365: Nineteenth-Century American Literature | Tackett
We live in a world sculpted by nineteenth-century America. From the origins of the United States in the eighteenth century to World War I, Americans navigated industrial, political, and social upheaval that literature caused, recorded, and reacted to. Indigenous people, enslaved and freed people, queer people, immigrants, feminists, and others wrote, memorized, performed, and published poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and everything in between. Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Stephen Crane, John Rollin Ridge to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson to Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe to Walt Whitman made their mark on the way we read, speak, and think. To understand our era, we must understand theirs. Through discussion, research, and composition we’ll ask how literature made America and will continue to in the future.
ENGL 3375: American Literature Since 1900: Black American Canon | Rivera-Dundas
This course will move chronologically through the 20th century to analyze some of the most important writers in the Black American canon. We will read three beautiful and challenging novels: James Baldwin's fictional autobiography Go Tell it on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Octavia Butler's prescient speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower. Through each, we'll discuss the representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability to understand how Black American literature has evolved over the course of the 20th century, keeping an eye on the relationship between literary forms, intersectional identity, and American race relationships. Themes of religion and love tie the three novels together. We will supplement our reading with essays and poetry.
ENGL 3385: Postcolonial World Literature: After the Raj—Colonial and Postcolonial Anglo-Indian Literature | Blackstock
English 3385 covers a variety of texts that emerge from and explore the experience of colonization. The period of British control over South Asia was known as the Raj and produced some of the greatest works of 19th and 20th century literature written in English. The Oxford Companion to English Literature offers the following brief assessment of Anglo-Indian literature: “[A]lso referred to as Indian literature in English, produced both in India and across the vast Indian diaspora, Anglo‐Indian literature represents one of the most innovative and dynamic fields of world writing in English today.” In class we will be examining the novels, short stories, and poems of British writers including Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and E.M. Forster, along with works by writers of South Asian descent such as Salman Rushdie and Sara Suleri.
ENGL 3395: World Literature in Translation: Medieval Worlds | Cooper-Rompato
This class will explore a range of literature from the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Middle Ages. Readings will include poetry of the Japanese Heian Court as well as excerpts from what is argued to be the first novel,The Tale of Genji (ca. 1000), which follows the life and loves of the amazingly handsome and charismatic Genji; selections from a new translation of the Ethiopian national epic Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), which describes how the Ark of the Covenant made its way to Ethiopia; short tales from the Thousand and One Nights and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, as well as a number of other texts that students will vote on as a class to read. Special attention will be paid to texts that English Teaching students can bring into their secondary school classrooms. We will use Norton’s Anthology of World Literature (volume B), 4th edition.
ENGL 3610: Multicultural American Literature | Ricketts
In this course, we'll embark on a literary exploration of the kaleidoscopic American experience, weaving through time and across cultural landscapes to deepen your understanding of the rich tapestry that makes up American culture and identity. As we move from historical texts to contemporary works, we'll delve into the complexities of identity, memory, and belonging within various ethnic communities in the United States. By engaging with narratives that challenge and expand the traditional American literary canon from authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Julia Alvarez, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others, this course invites you to immerse yourself in voices that broaden the American narrative. In a time when questions of identity and belonging are more vital than ever, this course offers you a journey through the literary landscape of America, seen from perspectives too often pushed to the peripheries.
ENGL 4300: Shakespeare: Shakespeare the Authoritarian? | Graham
At the end of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate seems to have learned her lesson of obedience to male authority: “Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband.” The enslaved spirit Ariel in The Tempest similarly promises to Prospero to “be correspondent to command.” And many characters in Julius Caesar and Corialanus treat the plebeians with withering contempt. Some questions we will ask in this class, then: To what extent do these characters speak for the larger lessons of the texts? To put it crudely: was Shakespeare an authoritarian? To speak of his views on “democracy” would be an anachronism, but is the outlook of his plays at odds with democratic values? Or, on the contrary, do the plays subtly question, undermine, or resist these messages of unquestioning obedience to (certain kinds of) authority? What is the subject’s (or wife’s) rightful position with regards to authority, as these plays depict it? We will read Julius Caesar; Henry IV Parts 1 and 2; The Taming of the Shrew; and The Tempest, in addition to a handful of sonnets and a few examples of academic writing.
ENGL 4330: World Writers: Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature | Blackstock
The nineteenth century is known as the Golden Age of Russian literature, seeing the rise to prominence of such monumental and influential writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekov. Two of these writers in particular--Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy—profoundly influenced the thought of the age in which they lived and of the ages to follow, not only in Russia but throughout the world, and their ideas helped shape the twentieth century both philosophically and politically. As professor of philosophy Walter Barrett has written, “It has been said that every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; it might be said with equal justice that he is born either a Tolstoyan or a Dostoevskian.” This course will examine the lives, times, and works of these two literary giants, along with the contemporary writers who influenced them and who were influenced by them. Representative poems, stories, novels, and plays of these authors will be studied in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
ENGL 4340: Studies in Fiction: Novel Forms | Caron
In this class, we’ll focus our attention on novels that challenge conventional narrative forms. We’ll look at a range of novels, including novels-in-stories, novels-in-fragments, collage novels, and novels that resist easy categorization. Through our close reading and careful study, we’ll consider each novel on its own terms, examining how authors create their fictional worlds. We’ll then expand the conversation to consider how these books make space for new kinds of stories and new ways of telling them. Authors will include William Maxwell, Julie Otsuka, Jenny Offill, Max Porter, Lindsey Drager, and others.
ENGL 4350: Studies in Poetry: Lyrical Bodies, Romantic Lyrics | Mann
At the turn of the end of the eighteenth century, the objectives of poetry and medicine seemed to converge. As doctors and scientists sought to accurately describe the structures and functions of the human body, so, too, did poetry turn inward, taking an interest in the “inner life” of the self. In this class, we will endeavor to see the body in Romantic poetry. Romantic poets concerned themselves with the material, the visceral, the sensory, the bawdy, and the anatomical; they exalted and celebrated these physical aspects of the human condition; and they resisted them. They also shared close relationships with scientific thinkers, and the development of their poetry coincided with developments in medical science. Throughout the semester, we’ll explore the intersections of poetry and medicine in the Romantic period, and we’ll consider the body as a salient feature of the Romantic lyric. As we read selections of poetry by canonical and non-canonical British and Anglophone Romantic writers, we’ll discuss a variety of themes, including gender and sexuality, illness and pain, youth and aging, sex and desire, race and identity, mental health and the mind, trauma and disability, etc. Secondary readings in health humanities, disability studies, and history of medicine scholarship will supplement our readings of poetic texts.
ENGL 4370: Native American Literature | Franks
This broad survey of literatures by Indigenous writers of North America will cover foundational works by writers like William Apess and Zitkala-Ša, as well as major works from and inspired by the so-called Native American Renaissance of the mid-twentieth century. We'll read novels from N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Darcie Little Badger, as well as collections from Layli Long Soldier (poetry) and Thomas King (essays). Fans of YA will love Little Badger's speculative novel Elatsoe, and anyone looking forward to the theatrical release of Killers of the Flower Moon won't want to miss Hogan's historical novel Mean Spirit.
ENGL 5330: Literature of Race and Ethnicity: Black Feminist Intersectionality | Rivera-Dundas
In this seminar-style course, we will read texts that center and celebrate difference. We will talk about race, what it means that everyone--regardless of background--has a racial identity, and how race has shaped American politics, law, and literature. In addition, we'll discuss how other kinds of identity such as gender, class, religion, and ability interact with race and what it means to represent those stories through literature. Two novels will bookend our semester--Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward and Dawn by Octavia Butler--and we will supplement our reading with essays, poetry, and short prose pieces by writers including Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. By the end of the semester, students will be able to write an intersectional analysis of a piece of pop culture of their choosing.
TCR 2100: Introduction to Technical Communication | Chen (in-person) | Eyre (online)
This course introduces you to the field of technical communication as an iterative, problem-solving activity useful in any organization with communication needs. Working independently and collaboratively, you will propose, compose, design, and revise a variety of workplace-based documents. This course will also teach you how to synthesize and evaluate arguments about technology and society relevant to technical communicators. This course uses a free open-access textbook along with other freely available media.
TCR 2110: Digital Writing Technologies | Perkins (online)
Technologies are always changing, so it’s important that you know how to learn new technologies. That’s what you’ll do in this class. Employers will expect you to be adept at using a variety of technologies and know how to select the best tool(s) to accomplish a particular task. In this course, you will gain experience learning and using three software programs used for 1) photo editing, 2) document layout, and 3) web design. But more importantly, you’ll develop your sense of adventure, tenacity, and confidence in evaluating, learning, and using technologies relevant to the workplace.
ENGL 3085: Writing for the Computer Science Workplace | Mathis | Stevens
This class will introduce you to professional and technical writing situations common in computer science workplaces, as we cultivate adaptive communication strategies and ethical professional behaviors. You will design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information.
TCR 3100: Workplace Research | Anabire
Technical communicators frequently engage in research to answer questions or address problems in the workplace. This course is designed to prepare you to work successfully as a technical writer by learning how to craft a research question; how to select appropriate methods to address a particular research question; how to ethically collect and analyze data; and how to report research findings and their associated implications (i.e., research-based recommendations). By partnering with a client for the full semester, you will practice applying all that you are learning within a real organizational context, learning about how you can conduct research to address organizational problems and questions.
TCR 3220: Technical Editing | Stevens
Whether or not your job title includes the word “editor,” you will find that good editing skills are an excellent way to move ahead in your workplace. In this course, you will experience first-hand what it means to be an editor by learning and applying the skills of copyediting, proofreading, and comprehensively editing, while also considering the context in which editing currently exists, and moving toward considering what editing could be by engaging in critical frameworks and theories that can inform our conceptualizations of editing.
TCR 3230: Community Grant Writing | Ault-Dyslin
Through a community-engaged learning approach, students collaborate with nonprofit partner organizations as you develop analysis, writing, editing, and communication skills. Coursework leads up to a final grant draft that will be presented to the partner organization for future funding opportunities.
TCR 4230: Project Management | Edenfield
In this class, you will study project management strategies involving and affecting diverse groups of stakeholders. You will learn first-hand how gender, race, culture, age, ideology, and socioeconomic class influence the design, execution, and outcomes of projects.
TCR 4240: User Experience Design | Chen
User experience design works to make products and services more enjoyable for users. In this class, you will learn how to plan, conduct, and report on data collected from user experience design research, including the value of designing experiences for a diverse user base.
TCR 5490: Special Topics: AI and Writing | Moeller
This course will focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)—from GenAI bot writers and predictive text generators to ChatGPT—as a writing technology. Using posthuman theory, we will interrogate GenAI’s impact on human labor and probe its limitations and potentialities as a tool in the field of technical communication.
Fall 2023 Undergraduate English Courses
ENGL 2060: Reading Across Borders (BHU) | Quistberg
While reading texts representative of the diversity in American and world cultures not usually covered in most traditional literature courses, ENGL 2060 invites students to "read across borders" by considering the dynamic interplay in intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, nationality, language, and ability. We'll read both current and historical texts from authors such as (but not limited to) Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, Louise Erdrich, Mohsin Hamid, and Ling Ma.
ENGL 2230: Intro to Film (BHU) | Crawford
This course introduces students to global film from the 19th century to contemporary award winners and examines how authorship, genre, presentation, and narrative structure contribute to meaning. Students will learn to evaluate films as reflections of culture and mediums for communication while becoming familiar with film techniques, terminology, and basic film concepts through film analysis and criticism.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies (BHU) | Ricketts
In this course, our main focus will be on the construction of American identity through examining one of the most powerful forces to shape it—popular culture. Using American Studies methodologies, we will explore the contested terrain of what it means to be an American through literature, other readings, films, music, and discussions. We will reflect on the prevailing cultural trends, beliefs, and values in the United States, asking questions such as how has popular culture impacted American history and how does popular culture construct and/or impact identity? Through the examination of primary and secondary sources, we will analyze how issues of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and religion all played a role in shaping America and the people within it.
ENGL 2640: Race and Ethnicity in the US (BHU) | Straight
Artists and scholars who examine race and ethnicity in the US must contend with a core paradox of modern societies: “Race” is an invented concept that has no basis in human biology; nonetheless, as the social construct behind racism, race is one of the most powerful factors influencing how we live. In this course we will study the fundamentally important interplay between systemic racism, social constructions of race, racial identity, and more nuanced concepts of ethnicity. The essayists, novelists, poets, and memoirists who provide our course texts grapple with the histories and realities of race in American life and—most importantly—they do so out of a belief that “there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words. That sharing our stories confirms our humanity. That it creates community” (Jesmyn Ward). At heart, then, this course is about the power and responsibility we all have to work toward our unrealized American ideals of equity and justice.
ENGL 3030: Perspectives in Literature (DHA) | Ricketts
This course will examine regional literature with a special emphasis on Utah. Authors often use a specific place to reflect, contest, or even attempt to shape regional identity. We will read several texts with the goal of understanding how place can be as important to consider as character, plot, theme, and other traditional literary devices. By analyzing how authors weave place into their stories, we will consider how a place can drive not only narrative, but also give us insight into American history and culture while perhaps even teaching us something about ourselves along the way.
ENGL 3630: Farm in Lit & Culture (DHA) | Moore
The Literature and Culture of the Farm examines literature related to the farm, farming, and agriculture in the broad definition of the word, including written texts, images, music (folk song, farm ballads, and country), film, and material culture such as quilts. The course covers texts ranging from an ancient Sumerian almanac, to Chaucer, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, African American Slave Narrative, Steinbeck, and Cather to more modern writers like Cesar Chavez, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Novella Carpenter, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Kristin Kimball. Students from a wide variety of majors including music, economics, business, education, communications, English, and engineering, as well as agricultural-related majors have found the course engaging, interesting, and valuable.
ENGL 3640: Nature Writing (DHA) | Whitaker
ENGL 3640: Nature Writing is an interdisciplinary course that introduces students to the study of ecocriticism and examines how practices of reading and writing shape our relationships with the nonhuman world. The course will investigate how American cultures developed within the contexts of colonialism, westward expansion, individual freedom, and the notion of “exceptionalism.” Students will trace and compare these themes as they emerge across different arguments, discourses, and genres. In addition to historical perspectives, students will also read widely from contemporary authors and will consider how the production and consumption of text impacts current conversations on environmental issues. The knowledge students gain from these readings will inform their own intellectual pursuits as they research and write their way into greater environmental consciousness.
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Waugh
This introduction to short story writing will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will learn to: 1) use a basic fiction writing vocabulary, 2) identify the core narratological concepts in a work of fiction, 3) recognize the sound and rhythm of good prose, 4) understand and employ various narrative modes and structures, and 5) participate fully and constructively in a workshop oriented class. The success of this workshop depends on your commitment to your writing community, your careful reading of your peers’ work, + your ability to offer sincere, constructive criticism.
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Caron
This workshop is designed for undergraduates who are new to fiction writing and interested in studying the short story form. Students will be introduced to a variety of authors and published stories with a number of questions in mind: What are the components of a story? How do writers create memorable characters? How does time work in a story? How can dialogue reveal character in a short space? In what ways does setting evoke emotion? Together we’ll answer these and other craft-based questions, and students will apply this new knowledge to their own stories. Writing prompts and exercises will push students to take literary risks, and workshops will help them revise their work.
ENGL 3430 Introduction to Poetry Writing | Ballam
In this workshop-based course, we’ll analyze and practice a variety of poetic techniques from musicality to metaphor to drawing material from common stories, such as myths and fairy tales. We’ll complete a wide array of poetry exercises from Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of your Hand, ranging from cross-out/cut-up poems to poems about childhood memories, and we’ll read poems from a diverse variety of voices. Students will write several poems and brief critical essays designed to illuminate specific aspects of poetic craft addressed in the readings and in class. No experience in poetry writing is necessary—all you need is enthusiasm!
ENGL 3430: Introduction to Poetry Writing | Grimmer
What is creative writing, what are poetics, and when do their modes create potential social change? Is popular music also lyric poetry, and are different modes of language-oriented responses considered poetics? What is the relationship between language, the body, and content in different genres and modes of cultural production, and how do we decide to call one activism "poetry" and another not? How is the definition of poetry at times racialized, gendered, classed, etc.? This course is a workshop-styled attempt to create, read, and respond to multi-modal poetics as politically engaged literature that crosses traditional genre and mode boundaries. Readings include print-based poems, craft books and essays such as Gathering Voices by Marty McConnell, community poetry readings, and viewings of audio-visual texts. Course requirements will include attending select readings online, engaged participation in class discussions, weekly writing assignments, one presentation, and a final creative poetics project.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction | Sinor
In this course, we will be establishing the building blocks for creative nonfiction: scene, summary, musing, character, and dialogue. We will focus on autobiographical writing, specifically memoir or personal essay. Creative nonfiction always revolves around the “I,” even when the pronoun makes no appearance on the page, but in memoir and personal essay the “I” is what carries the piece—a thinking mind at work. As Scott Sanders writes, “I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to open a door through which others might pass.” Class time is primarily dedicated to full-class workshops but begins with close readings of example essays and lots of writing exercises.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction | Beck
English 3440 will be a mix of lectures, workshops and out-of-class assignments that will focus on crafting new nonfiction projects. Few parameters will be placed on the subjects of the writing projects, but the class will emphasize narrative and personal writing. Course materials will mostly consist of contemporary essays in both audio and traditional formats. The class will be a safe place to hone existing skills and experiment with form and medium.
ENGL 4420: Advanced Fiction Writing | Caron
In the words of twentieth-century author Zora Neale Hurston, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Our purpose in this class is to use research to create believable fictional worlds. Together, we’ll read a variety of fiction that incorporates various kinds of research, studying these works to better understand how writers move between fact and imagination. Anthony Doerr builds stories around surprising details of the natural world. Julie Otsuka uses historical research to give voice to silenced communities. Andrea Barrett leans on nineteenth-century science to tell fictional stories of doctors, sailors, and marine biologists. Other writers find inspiration in myths, maps, photographs, museum exhibits, and many other sources. As we study these writers and their stories, we’ll ask: How can our curiosity help us push beyond the old adage “write what you know”? How might research help us create compelling characters, meaningful settings, and interesting plots? How can we integrate the language of our research to help write sentences that surprise and delight a reader? And, most importantly, how do we do all of this without ever losing sight of the stories we most want to tell? Writing prompts will help jumpstart stories; research notebooks will help track new knowledge; class presentations will generate useful feedback; and workshops will help students revise and plan next steps.
ENGL 4430: Advanced Poetry Writing | Grimmer
What is poetry in a social media time? What distinguishes it from public scholarship? When do these genres and their modes overlap to create social change? This course workshop-based course will focus on creating, reading, and responding to public-facing poetry and scholarship through the lens of contemporary activist poetry. This means close reading and creating politically engaged work that crosses traditional genre and mode boundaries. Readings will include print-based activist poems from the 1980's to the present, critical essays on both craft and public scholarship, virtual poetry readings, and poet interviews in video and podcast formats. Course assignments emphasize weekly creative writing and multimodal experiments, workshopping creative pieces with peers, discussion boards that respond to course texts, and a final poetry project in students’ preferred medium (i.e., text, video, audio or mixed media).
ENGL 4440: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing | Sinor
In this advanced creative nonfiction workshop, we will be exploring the lyric essay. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with form as they explode the narrative line in favor of association and metaphor. Sitting on the borderlands between prose and poetry, the lyric essay demands an active reader and revels in the delights of ambiguity. You will find that the lyric essay refuses most definitions. That it is hard to pin down. It likes to inhabit the space of not knowing, so maybe it makes sense that the form is rarely defined. But that space of not knowing is exactly the space in which to write from when working with non-linear forms. It’s good to be uncertain, confused, even scared and daunted. After reading a number of lyric essays and completing many writing exercises, students will write several lyric essays and workshop them.
ENGL 5450 Special Topics in Creative Writing: Long Form Fiction | Waugh
The purpose of this special topics course is to explore the structures and creative demands of long forms of fiction: novels, novellas, and long stories. Students will read theories of the novel alongside six exemplary long forms of fiction, map how those stories are structured, make maps of their own long work, and write 40-60 pages of their own fiction that will be workshopped in the second half of the semester.
ENGL 3500: Teaching English | Gunsberg
This course combines with SCED 3300 (“Clinical Experience”) to provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to view the classroom and its students from the perspective of a teacher. Throughout your undergraduate education, you have focused on subject matter content; in this experience, you’ll be looking more closely at the process of teaching and learning. In particular, you’ll be observing how a teacher functions in the classroom as well as the teacher’s relationships with students, parents, colleagues, and school leaders. You will also have the opportunity to practice teaching in the classroom. The clinical practicum requires 30 hours minimum in a middle or secondary school setting. We will learn about teaching English/Language Arts as a subject, and we will reflect on planning, instruction, classroom management, and learning. Our schedule of assignments will be necessarily somewhat flexible to address what we discover in the classroom.
Requirements filled: DHA
ENGL 4500: Teaching Writing | Rivera-Mueller
English 4500 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. This course will combine the content knowledge you have gained in your English coursework with pedagogical theory, enabling you to cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices. The learning activities and projects in this course will help members of the class collectively examine three related concepts: designing, engaging, and assessing writing experiences. Broadly, we will study the following questions: What are meaningful aims for writers? How do secondary writing teachers prompt students to engage in these purposes? What kinds of support do students need to achieve these learning goals?
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required), English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 4510: Teaching Literature | Rivera-Mueller
English 4510 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Broadly, we will study the following questions: What is literature and why do we teach it? What reading processes and strategies do we use to construct meaning from texts? How do educational issues surrounding technology, the canon, genre, media, popular culture, assessment, and social justice interested with the theory and practice of teaching literature? We will study scholarship about reading, literature, and teaching to help you cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices and participate in our profession’s conversations about the teaching of literature.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required), English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 4520: Teaching Literacy in Diverse Classrooms | Manuel-Dupont
Admission to STEP required. English 4520 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Students are required to also register for SCED 4300, the clinical experience that accompanies this course. Paired together, these courses provide an opportunity to peer deeply into classroom moments and learn about teaching and learning from a range of educational stakeholders, including secondary students, peers, mentor teachers, and scholars. Beyond reading about or practicing teaching tasks, these courses aim to help you help you develop a robust understanding of literacy from the perspective of a teacher in diverse classroom settings. Collectively, we use our course reading and experiences in the clinical to examine classroom teachers’ roles as literacy educators. To that end, you will actively study scholarship related to teaching and learning, observe learners and learning communities, provide instructional support, deliver instruction, and reflect upon your process of becoming a teacher. Engaging in each of these processes provides an opportunity to grapple with the connection between educational theory and practice.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Thomas
This explores basic folklore concepts and genres. We focus on supernatural legends, digital folklore, material culture, personal experience narratives, and roots music genres and their influence on contemporary music.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Estiri
In this course, we investigate the concept of folklore and review the major genres studied by folklorists while focusing on the concept of folklore as emergent and dynamic as an integral part of our day-to-day lives. We explore different forms of informal culture, including oral/verbal, customary, and material folklore, and discuss various interpretive and theoretical approaches to the examples of folklore. We particularly explore contemporary forms of folklore, including urban/supernatural legends, personal narratives, jokes, food traditions and celebrations, occupational folklore, folk art, and digital forms of folklore, such as internet memes.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Gabbert
This class covers some of the major genres of folklore with a particular focus on narrative, including fairy tales and legends, as well as on belief and stories supernatural creatures. Course content is drawn from Scandinavia, Russia, the Himalayas, and Japan.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2720: Survey of American Folklore | Gabbert
This class covers some of the major genres of folklore with a special emphasis on how folklore can reveal attitudes and values surrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.
ENGL/HIST 3070: Folklore on the Internet (DHA) | McNeill
This course introduces students to a major new area of folkloristic research: digital culture. It explores the ways in which we can understand folklore in a digital context, the kinds of folklore we find in digital settings, the kinds of folk groups we find through the use of communication technologies, how fieldwork changes in an online environment, and the ways humans make meaning in diverse contexts. In other words, we'll look to the internet to reveal all sorts of crazy, interesting, confusing, contradictory, appalling, appealing, and generally weird things about ourselves.
ENGL/HIST 3700: Regional Folklore (DHA) | Estiri
This course orients students to the folklore of the Middle East. Material to be examined will be diverse across genres and drawn from various ethnic, national, and temporal spheres. Folklore is not necessarily ancient and historical, and there will be an emphasis on Middle Eastern contemporary life. In this course, folklore is conceptualized as everyday life expressive culture, including verbal arts, texts, religion, performative activities, and material culture. Though this is not a theory course, students will gain an attenuated background in folklore studies that includes the history and development of the discipline, its various methods, and contemporary scholarly conversations.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 3710: Topics in Folklore (Foodways (CI) | Rezaei
How did fry sauce and funeral potatoes turn into iconic Utah foods? Why are there so many stories about rats or dog meat in restaurant meals? How do regional, religious, and political identities impact our everyday food choices? In this course, we will answer these and other questions by studying foodways from a folkloristic lens, i.e., examining the symbolic, artistic, and communicative importance of food in our everyday lives. We will look primarily at the role of food in constructing and performing regional and ethnic identities in the US context. In addition, we will address how the preparation, consumption, and presentation of food is related to individuals' performance of gender, class, or racial identities. Students will engage in food-related research of their own and will have the option to pursue an ethnographic or historical project informed by the course themes.
ENGL/HIST 4700: Folk Art and Material Culture (DHA) | Rezaei
From quilting to cosplay, from roadside shrines to yard art and graffiti, folk art is all around us. This course explores various forms of everyday artistry as venues for individual and collective creative expressions, while also examining the relation of material objects with history, market, and cultural heritage. We will address how different forms of folk art and material culture are intertwined with individual and collective expressions of gender, ethnic, and racial identities, as well as the role of folk art in politics, activism, and peace/conflict. The course draws on analytical approaches from folklore, anthropology, cultural studies, and other related fields. Lectures and discussions will be supplemented with films, field trips, workshops, and other activities.
ENGL 4210: History of English: Change and Diversity | McLaughlin
This course examines the history of the English language from its most distant origins in Proto-Indo-European, through Proto-Germanic, and, after the adoption of writing, for the past 1500 years on the island of Great Britain and beyond. The course includes the developments of the English sound and grammar systems, the sociolinguistic diversity of dialects, the influences from other languages (both great and small), and how English has influenced other languages in the modern era through the media of the internet, air travel, banking, and both military and economic domination.
ENGL 4230: Language and Culture | McLaughlin
An introduction to the use of language as a descriptive and analytical tool to understand human culture, and to how speakers use language to manipulate and shape their culture as a whole, including their individual place within it. It looks at a range of topics through the lens of language as well as looking at the theoretical underpinnings of language as a mediator of culture.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Franks
This course focuses on how to read closely and write critically about three forms of literature: poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Upon completion of this course, English majors should feel confident in their ability to develop arguments about texts and should be equipped with the critical vocabulary to do so. This section of 2600 is themed around varying depictions of home and belonging in contemporary literatures and includes texts such as Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God, Letts, August: Osage County, and Trethaway, Domestic Work: Poems.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Mann
Becoming an English major means mastering your powers of interpretation, and literary analysis is at the heart of every English major’s interpretive practice. This course will introduce you to methods of literary analysis, or “close reading.” Specifically, we will focus on analyzing three main genres of literature—poetry, drama, and prose fiction—and course readings will include poems, short stories, a novel, and a play. As we explore these different genres, we’ll also consider what it means for a text to be considered “literary.” You will learn to notice the nuanced construction of a text, become familiar with literary concepts and terms, and understand the relationship between form and meaning. Writing assignments will develop your powers of analysis and synthesis. You will form compelling arguments, support your ideas with evidence, integrate the ideas of others into your writing, and contribute to a scholarly conversation. The course will be organized around a central theme: literature and the body. Readings will explore literary representations of embodied experience from the 10th century to the 21st century. Major texts may include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
ENGL 3335: Nineteenth-Century British Literature | Mann
Bookended by political upheaval and war, the long nineteenth century represents a period of massive social, political, scientific, and philosophical change. The period also lends us some of our most beloved writers: William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, and others. Today, we divide this period of literary history into the Romantic and Victorian eras, but we may also observe an enduring “spirit of the age” that unites writers across the century. The poets, novelists, and creative thinkers of the nineteenth century imagined and reimagined the human experience in times of revolution and radical reform, experimenting with their art forms and developing new modes of expression. In this course, we will explore the period in British literary history from 1789 to 1914 across a variety of genres: poetry, the novel, drama, essays, political documents, and autobiography. Students’ reading, writing, and research will engage a number of different themes: art and aesthetics, race and abolition, gender and sexuality, politics and imperialism, industrialization and science, etc. We will ask: What is the relationship between literature and society? What kinds of knowledge does the literary imagination possess and create?
ENGL 3345: British Literature after 1900 | Nelson
This course will introduce students to the major British literary movements and authors from 1900 to the present. At the outset of the twentieth century, Britain was confident in its position as a global power, but that confidence was shaken by World War I. Coined the “lost generation,” writers responded to a new sense of alienation and loss through experimentation in form, genre, narrative perspective, and numerous other ways, ushering in the new literary movement of Modernism. Following Modernism, we’ll focus on post-World War II literature, especially as it relates to the questioning of ideologies and traditional institutions. As former British colonies gained independence, new voices came onto the scene to forge a new British postcolonial identity by the end of the century. The Norton Anthology of English Literature for the Twentieth Century will provide the foundation for our reading, but we’ll linger a little longer on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, George Orwell’s 1984, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
ENGL 3395: World Literature in Translation: Caribbean Literature Translated from French | Graham
The Haitian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century was arguably the most important event in the history of slavery and colonialism: an uprising of enslaved people overthrew the masters, fought off attempts by French, English, and Spanish forces to take control of the territory, and declared Haiti a sovereign republic. After its independence in 1804, Haiti was never again a colony of France, but the French language has continued to be its language of commerce and government, while a distinctive French Creole remains the language of ordinary Haitians. Haiti has contributed richly to the Francophone world’s literary heritage, and its revolution has served as inspiration for many literary texts, including two plays that will be assigned for this course. France’s “Overseas Departments” in the Caribbean Sea—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana—despite their tiny size and populations, have likewise given the world some of the most important writers of the modern era.
Our exploration of this literature will begin in the early twentieth century, with writers such as Saint-Jean Perse, René Maran, Jean Price-Mars, and Jacques Roumain. The course will give special focus to the Caribbean writers of the global Negritude movement, especially Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Suzanne Césaire. And it will include a representative survey of writing from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including texts by Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Yanick Lahens. All texts will be translated into English, and knowledge of French (while helpful) is neither required nor expected.
Content notice: the readings will include adult language and depictions of sexuality; bodily functions; sexual violence; and suicide.
ENGL 3610: Multicultural American Literature | Straight
The cultural diversity of the United States is matched only by its geographical diversity. This course explores multicultural US literature through the lens of place, and writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Janisse Ray, Mary Clearman Blew, and Jesmyn Ward understand that identities—individual and communal—are located in powerful and complex ways. Thinking about regional cultures as ongoing conversations that involve place helps us to identify important and often overlooked voices, and foregrounding the relationships between culture and environmental context illuminates the long histories and potential futures of our vibrant and diverse American cultures.
ENGL 4300: Shakespeare | Blackstock
This course provides an overview of Shakespeare’s drama and poetry--tragedies, comedies, histories, romances, and sonnets--and examines his work in the historical contexts that produced it, along with the philosophical, political, and social questions it continues to raise.
ENGL 4310: American Writers: Hawthorne and the "Scribbling Writer" | Holt
This course offers a comparative study of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and three leading women writers from the early nineteenth century—Transcendentalist writer and editor Margaret Fuller, working class journalist and humorist Fanny Fern, and abolitionist poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Although Hawthorne famously complained about the growing influence of "scribbling women" in the literary marketplace, all four of these four writers share a commitment to examining and critiquing the challenges and injustices facing women in the 19th century and presenting imaginative literature as an important tool of change. Taking this shared interest in issues of gender as a starting point, this course offers a comparative study of these writers' major works, examining their involvement with issues of social reform, gender and racial equality, and literary aesthetics. We’ll focus on points of agreement as well as moments where their work and attitudes contest and challenge one another, particularly with regard to reimagining the roles of men and women and the value of literature in the early United States.
ENGL 4310: American Writers: Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson | King
“How shall I live my life?” is a question at least as ancient as Aristotle. How might I “express myself,” or locate my “authentic self” or find “subjective well-being” are more modern projects, and one function of literature may be to provide illumination and enduring wisdom on such matters. What, for example, makes for a transcendent, transforming engagement with nature rather than an ordinary one? Willa Cather’s protagonists farming the prairies or absorbed in the American desert, embody the possibilities for a transforming relationship with the American landscape, while Marilynne Robinson’s novels explore the impact of family and history on our lives. This course will survey selected works of Cather and Robinson with these themes in mind, with attention as well to biographical, historical and other critical aspects of their work. Responding to a dynamic, transforming nation, they narrate a critical engagement with an emerging modernity that perhaps pushes them closer to the natural world, community, and an experience of an elusive authenticity.
“We can perceive only what we are capable of perceiving,” it has been said—but who achieves that discernment? The assignments, we hope, allow you the freedom to explore these and other issues the reading engages.
ENGL 4320: British Writers: Medieval British Authors | Cooper-Rompato
This course explores what it means to be an author in medieval Britain by closely examining four texts by different authors—a historical chronicle, a saint’s life, a collection of romance poems, and a memoir. All four texts approach the idea of authorship from radically different perspectives—during the course we will ask, How were written texts produced in the Middle Ages? What did it mean for a medieval man or woman to claim authorship? Why would an author choose to remain anonymous? What challenges did medieval authors face? We will also spend at least two weeks in USU’s Special Collections working on small group manuscript projects! Texts for the course include: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (8th century); Marie de France’s Lais (12th century); The Life of Christina of Markyate (12th century); and The Book of Margery Kempe (15th century).
ENGL 4320: British Writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning Among Women | Mann
As Victorian scholar Marjorie Stone tells us, “Just as it is sometimes difficult to approach Shakespeare because he is an institution, it is difficult to approach Elizabeth Barrett Browning because she is a legend.” We have come to know her as the heroine of a great love story: the invalid, poet-recluse who was held captive by her tyrannical father and set free by the love of Robert Browning. For Virginia Woolf, she was “England’s foremost poetess.” For feminist scholars, she was a radical who cast her poetic eye upon the social and political issues of the day: revolution, abolition, industrial reform, and the “woman question.” This class will examine Barrett Browning’s life and poetic works. How did she make sense of herself as a woman poet during a time when poetry and public life were dominated by men? Who and what influenced her writing, and what sort of legacy did she leave for future writers and scholars? We’ll read biographical excerpts and historical documents alongside her letters, juvenilia, and mature works. As we read, we’ll also explore the lives and writing of her literary foremothers, contemporaries, and inheritors: Charlotte Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Martineau, Virginia Woolf, and others. Together we’ll consider the woman beyond the legend, grounding her poetry in its many layered contexts and understanding its place in the rich and exciting tradition of female authorship in the nineteenth century and beyond.
ENGL 4340: Studies in Fiction: Magical Realism | Graham
In the mode of writing known as “magical realism,” fantastic or supernatural elements are introduced into a story, only to become an accepted and mundane part of the social world of the fiction. We will explore the origins of magical realist fiction, especially in Latin American novels and short stories. Then we will investigate a few of the ways in which the mode of magical realism has been put to use by English-language writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Among the questions we will try to answer this semester: How does magical realism respond to, mimic, or depart from naturalism and social realism? What is the relationship between magical realism and Modernism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism? Why does magical realism so often seem to arise in response to political upheaval and civil strife? What does magical realism teach us about time, memory, and history? What distinguishes magical realism from science fiction or fantasy? What distinguishes it from expressions of religious or cosmological belief? In addition to short stories and essays, we will read four major novels: García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds.
Content notice: the readings will include adult language and depictions of sexuality; bodily functions; sexual violence; and suicide.
ENGL 5310: Contemporary Literature: Medieval Historical Fiction | Cooper-Rompato
“Historical fiction comes out of greed for experience. Violent curiosity drives us on, takes us far from our time, far from our shore, and often beyond our compass,” said novelist Hilary Mantel in a 2017 interview with the Guardian. This course looks at contemporary novels about the early Middle Ages—specifically 5th through 8th centuries in England and Ireland, a time of great religious and cultural upheaval. We will ask what “violent curiosity” inspires authors to recreate the Middle Ages in fiction? What kinds of historical analysis do their novels do? How do these authors use sources to construct a past that speaks to modern audiences? How do novelists negotiate historical and modern understandings of religion, gender, and sexuality? We will read the following texts published in the last decade, along with a few excerpts from medieval texts to help us understand the context: Hild, by Nicola Griffeth (2013): a prophetic girl becomes an abbess in 7th-century England; Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife by Susan Signe Morrison (2015): the story of a (sympathetic) Grendel’s mother; Haven, by Emma Donoghue (2022): three Irish monks seek out an island hermitage in the 7th century; Saint Bridget’s Bones, by Philp Freeman (2015): mystery set at an Irish nunnery in the 6th century; Dark Earth, by Rebecca Stott (2018): two sisters fight for survival in 6th-century London; The Buried Giant, by Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (2015): fantasy and mystery featuring Sir Gawain set in Arthurian Britain.
ENGL 3085: Writing for the Computer Science Workplace | Mathis | Stevens
This class will introduce you to professional and technical writing situations common in computer science workplaces, and we will cultivate adaptive communication strategies and ethical professional behaviors. You will design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information.
TCR 2100 (formerly ENGL 3400): Introduction to Technical Communication | Chen (in-person) | Anabire (online)
This course introduces you to the field of technical communication as an iterative, problem-solving activity useful in any organization with communication needs. Working independently and collaboratively, you will propose, compose, design, and revise a variety of workplace-based documents. This course will also teach you how to synthesize and evaluate arguments about technology and society relevant to technical communicators. This course uses a free open-access textbook along with other freely available media.
TCR 2110 (formerly ENGL 3410): Digital Writing Technologies | Postdoc (in-person, online)
Technologies are always changing, so it’s important that you know how to learn new technologies. That’s what you’ll do in this class. Employers will expect you to be adept at using a variety of technologies and know how to select the best tool(s) to accomplish a particular task. In this course, you will gain experience learning and using three software programs used for 1) photo editing, 2) document layout, and 3) web design. But more importantly, you’ll develop your sense of adventure, tenacity, and confidence in evaluating, learning, and using technologies relevant to the workplace.
TCR 3110: Accessibility and Disability Rhetorics | Colton
In this course, we will explore accessibility through a lens of disability studies and rhetoric in order to understand the importance of accessibility within digital environments. We will also focus on producing rhetorically effective closed-captions and how to convert inaccessible PDF readings into more accessible webpage readings. By the end of the course, you should have a good understanding of disability studies theory, be able to make a strong case for accessible design, learn or improve closed captioning and basic web design skills, and understand how to approach multiple technologies and rhetorical situations for accessibility.
TCR 3120 (formerly ENGL 3460): Rhetorical Theory | Chen
This course introduces you to rhetoric as the art and study of persuasion and meaning-making, and an analytical research method. We will study classical and contemporary theories of rhetoric in this course to discuss how people are persuaded through language to act, how language makes meaning, the role of language in organizing human activity, and how rhetoric influences our view of the world. You will learn to define and understand rhetorical situations and to evaluate rhetorical strategies.
TCR 3210: Usability and Game Studies | Moeller
In this course, we will apply usability, game studies, and rhetorical theory to designing better, more accessible, more useful texts (documents, games, experiences, and interactions) that appeal to a wider and more diverse group of participants or users. You will gain experience in designing and conducting several types of usability tests and collecting game player data, analyzing and reporting on the data you collect.
TCR 3220 (formerly ENGL 4400): Technical Editing | Stevens
Whether or not your job title includes the word “editor,” you will find that good editing skills are an excellent way to move ahead in your workplace. In this course, you will experience first-hand what it means to be an editor by learning and applying the skills of copyediting, proofreading, and comprehensively editing, while also considering the context in which editing currently exists, and moving toward considering what editing could be by engaging in critical frameworks and theories that can inform our conceptualizations of editing.
TCR 4220 (formerly ENGL 5400): Technology and Activism | Postdoc
This course teaches you how to use technologies to advocate for your values. Because activism is about taking action, this course focuses on a specific topic each time it’s taught. You’ll read both academic texts and popular texts that examine topics including ethics, justice, and activism in technical communication. This course is intended to empower you with the tools and vocabulary to do good in the world.
TCR 4250 (formerly ENGL 5430): Careers in Professional Communication | Moeller
In this class, we will study how to successfully negotiate the job market in fields related to English: content writing, technical communication, usability and user experience (UX), editing, publishing, and more. You will practice developing effective application materials such as a portfolio website, resume, and cover letter; using social media for networking, job seeking, and career development; and preparing for job interviews.
Spring 2023 Undergraduate English Courses
ENGL 2060: Reading Across Borders (BHU) | Quistberg
While reading texts representative of the diversity in American and world cultures not usually covered in most traditional literature courses, ENGL 2060 invites students to "read across borders" by considering the dynamic interplay in intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, nationality, language, and ability. We'll read both current and historical texts from authors such as (but not limited to) Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, Louise Erdrich, Mohsin Hamid, and Ling Ma.
ENGL 2230: Intro to Film (BHU) | Crawford
This course introduces students to global film from the 19th century to contemporary award winners and examines how authorship, genre, presentation, and narrative structure contribute to meaning. Students will learn to evaluate films as reflections of culture and mediums for communication while becoming familiar with film techniques, terminology, and basic film concepts through film analysis and criticism.
ENGL 2630: Intro to American Studies (BHU) | Ricketts
In this course, our main focus will be on the construction of American identity through examining one of the most powerful forces to shape it—popular culture. Using American Studies methodologies, we will explore the contested terrain of what it means to be an American through literature, other readings, films, music, and discussions. We will reflect on the prevailing cultural trends, beliefs, and values in the United States, asking questions such as how has popular culture impacted American history and how does popular culture construct and/or impact identity? Through the examination of primary and secondary sources, we will analyze how issues of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and religion all played a role in shaping America and the people within it.
ENGL 2640: Race and Ethnicity in the US (BHU) | Straight
Artists and scholars who examine race and ethnicity in the US must contend with a core paradox of modern societies: “Race” is an invented concept that has no basis in human biology; nonetheless, as the social construct behind racism, race is one of the most powerful factors influencing how we live. In this course we will study the fundamentally important interplay between systemic racism, social constructions of race, racial identity, and more nuanced concepts of ethnicity. The essayists, novelists, poets, and memoirists who provide our course texts grapple with the histories and realities of race in American life and—most importantly—they do so out of a belief that “there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words. That sharing our stories confirms our humanity. That it creates community” (Jesmyn Ward). At heart, then, this course is about the power and responsibility we all have to work toward our unrealized American ideals of equity and justice.
ENGL 3030: Perspectives in Literature (DHA) | Ricketts
This course will examine regional literature with a special emphasis on Utah. Authors often use a specific place to reflect, contest, or even attempt to shape regional identity. We will read several texts with the goal of understanding how place can be as important to consider as character, plot, theme, and other traditional literary devices. By analyzing how authors weave place into their stories, we will consider how a place can drive not only narrative, but also give us insight into American history and culture while perhaps even teaching us something about ourselves along the way.
ENGL 3630: Farm in Lit & Culture (DHA) | Moore
The Literature and Culture of the Farm examines literature related to the farm, farming, and agriculture in the broad definition of the word, including written texts, images, music (folk song, farm ballads, and country), film, and material culture such as quilts. The course covers texts ranging from an ancient Sumerian almanac, to Chaucer, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, African American Slave Narrative, Steinbeck, and Cather to more modern writers like Cesar Chavez, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Novella Carpenter, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Kristin Kimball. Students from a wide variety of majors including music, economics, business, education, communications, English, and engineering, as well as agricultural-related majors have found the course engaging, interesting, and valuable.
ENGL 3640: Nature Writing (DHA) | Whitaker
ENGL 3640: Nature Writing is an interdisciplinary course that introduces students to the study of ecocriticism and examines how practices of reading and writing shape our relationships with the nonhuman world. The course will investigate how American cultures developed within the contexts of colonialism, westward expansion, individual freedom, and the notion of “exceptionalism.” Students will trace and compare these themes as they emerge across different arguments, discourses, and genres. In addition to historical perspectives, students will also read widely from contemporary authors and will consider how the production and consumption of text impacts current conversations on environmental issues. The knowledge students gain from these readings will inform their own intellectual pursuits as they research and write their way into greater environmental consciousness.
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Waugh
This introduction to short story writing will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will learn to: 1) use a basic fiction writing vocabulary, 2) identify the core narratological concepts in a work of fiction, 3) recognize the sound and rhythm of good prose, 4) understand and employ various narrative modes and structures, and 5) participate fully and constructively in a workshop oriented class. The success of this workshop depends on your commitment to your writing community, your careful reading of your peers’ work, + your ability to offer sincere, constructive criticism.
ENGL 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Caron
This workshop is designed for undergraduates who are new to fiction writing and interested in studying the short story form. Students will be introduced to a variety of authors and published stories with a number of questions in mind: What are the components of a story? How do writers create memorable characters? How does time work in a story? How can dialogue reveal character in a short space? In what ways does setting evoke emotion? Together we’ll answer these and other craft-based questions, and students will apply this new knowledge to their own stories. Writing prompts and exercises will push students to take literary risks, and workshops will help them revise their work.
ENGL 3430 Introduction to Poetry Writing | Ballam
In this workshop-based course, we’ll analyze and practice a variety of poetic techniques from musicality to metaphor to drawing material from common stories, such as myths and fairy tales. We’ll complete a wide array of poetry exercises from Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of your Hand, ranging from cross-out/cut-up poems to poems about childhood memories, and we’ll read poems from a diverse variety of voices. Students will write several poems and brief critical essays designed to illuminate specific aspects of poetic craft addressed in the readings and in class. No experience in poetry writing is necessary—all you need is enthusiasm!
ENGL 3430: Introduction to Poetry Writing | Grimmer
What is creative writing, what are poetics, and when do their modes create potential social change? Is popular music also lyric poetry, and are different modes of language-oriented responses considered poetics? What is the relationship between language, the body, and content in different genres and modes of cultural production, and how do we decide to call one activism "poetry" and another not? How is the definition of poetry at times racialized, gendered, classed, etc.? This course is a workshop-styled attempt to create, read, and respond to multi-modal poetics as politically engaged literature that crosses traditional genre and mode boundaries. Readings include print-based poems, craft books and essays such as Gathering Voices by Marty McConnell, community poetry readings, and viewings of audio-visual texts. Course requirements will include attending select readings online, engaged participation in class discussions, weekly writing assignments, one presentation, and a final creative poetics project.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction | Sinor
In this course, we will be establishing the building blocks for creative nonfiction: scene, summary, musing, character, and dialogue. We will focus on autobiographical writing, specifically memoir or personal essay. Creative nonfiction always revolves around the “I,” even when the pronoun makes no appearance on the page, but in memoir and personal essay the “I” is what carries the piece—a thinking mind at work. As Scott Sanders writes, “I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to open a door through which others might pass.” Class time is primarily dedicated to full-class workshops but begins with close readings of example essays and lots of writing exercises.
ENGL 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction | Beck
English 3440 will be a mix of lectures, workshops and out-of-class assignments that will focus on crafting new nonfiction projects. Few parameters will be placed on the subjects of the writing projects, but the class will emphasize narrative and personal writing. Course materials will mostly consist of contemporary essays in both audio and traditional formats. The class will be a safe place to hone existing skills and experiment with form and medium.
ENGL 4420: Advanced Fiction Writing | Caron
In the words of twentieth-century author Zora Neale Hurston, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Our purpose in this class is to use research to create believable fictional worlds. Together, we’ll read a variety of fiction that incorporates various kinds of research, studying these works to better understand how writers move between fact and imagination. Anthony Doerr builds stories around surprising details of the natural world. Julie Otsuka uses historical research to give voice to silenced communities. Andrea Barrett leans on nineteenth-century science to tell fictional stories of doctors, sailors, and marine biologists. Other writers find inspiration in myths, maps, photographs, museum exhibits, and many other sources. As we study these writers and their stories, we’ll ask: How can our curiosity help us push beyond the old adage “write what you know”? How might research help us create compelling characters, meaningful settings, and interesting plots? How can we integrate the language of our research to help write sentences that surprise and delight a reader? And, most importantly, how do we do all of this without ever losing sight of the stories we most want to tell? Writing prompts will help jumpstart stories; research notebooks will help track new knowledge; class presentations will generate useful feedback; and workshops will help students revise and plan next steps.
ENGL 4430: Advanced Poetry Writing | Grimmer
What is poetry in a social media time? What distinguishes it from public scholarship? When do these genres and their modes overlap to create social change? This course workshop-based course will focus on creating, reading, and responding to public-facing poetry and scholarship through the lens of contemporary activist poetry. This means close reading and creating politically engaged work that crosses traditional genre and mode boundaries. Readings will include print-based activist poems from the 1980's to the present, critical essays on both craft and public scholarship, virtual poetry readings, and poet interviews in video and podcast formats. Course assignments emphasize weekly creative writing and multimodal experiments, workshopping creative pieces with peers, discussion boards that respond to course texts, and a final poetry project in students’ preferred medium (i.e., text, video, audio or mixed media).
ENGL 4440: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing | Sinor
In this advanced creative nonfiction workshop, we will be exploring the lyric essay. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with form as they explode the narrative line in favor of association and metaphor. Sitting on the borderlands between prose and poetry, the lyric essay demands an active reader and revels in the delights of ambiguity. You will find that the lyric essay refuses most definitions. That it is hard to pin down. It likes to inhabit the space of not knowing, so maybe it makes sense that the form is rarely defined. But that space of not knowing is exactly the space in which to write from when working with non-linear forms. It’s good to be uncertain, confused, even scared and daunted. After reading a number of lyric essays and completing many writing exercises, students will write several lyric essays and workshop them.
ENGL 5450 Special Topics in Creative Writing: Long Form Fiction | Waugh
The purpose of this special topics course is to explore the structures and creative demands of long forms of fiction: novels, novellas, and long stories. Students will read theories of the novel alongside six exemplary long forms of fiction, map how those stories are structured, make maps of their own long work, and write 40-60 pages of their own fiction that will be workshopped in the second half of the semester.
ENGL 3500: Teaching English | Gunsberg
This course combines with SCED 3300 (“Clinical Experience”) to provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to view the classroom and its students from the perspective of a teacher. Throughout your undergraduate education, you have focused on subject matter content; in this experience, you’ll be looking more closely at the process of teaching and learning. In particular, you’ll be observing how a teacher functions in the classroom as well as the teacher’s relationships with students, parents, colleagues, and school leaders. You will also have the opportunity to practice teaching in the classroom. The clinical practicum requires 30 hours minimum in a middle or secondary school setting. We will learn about teaching English/Language Arts as a subject, and we will reflect on planning, instruction, classroom management, and learning. Our schedule of assignments will be necessarily somewhat flexible to address what we discover in the classroom.
Requirements filled: DHA
ENGL 4500: Teaching Writing | Rivera-Mueller
English 4500 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. This course will combine the content knowledge you have gained in your English coursework with pedagogical theory, enabling you to cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices. The learning activities and projects in this course will help members of the class collectively examine three related concepts: designing, engaging, and assessing writing experiences. Broadly, we will study the following questions: What are meaningful aims for writers? How do secondary writing teachers prompt students to engage in these purposes? What kinds of support do students need to achieve these learning goals?
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required), English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 4510: Teaching Literature | Rivera-Mueller
English 4510 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Broadly, we will study the following questions: What is literature and why do we teach it? What reading processes and strategies do we use to construct meaning from texts? How do educational issues surrounding technology, the canon, genre, media, popular culture, assessment, and social justice interested with the theory and practice of teaching literature? We will study scholarship about reading, literature, and teaching to help you cultivate theoretically robust teaching practices and participate in our profession’s conversations about the teaching of literature.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required), English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 4520: Teaching Literacy in Diverse Classrooms | Manuel-Dupont
Admission to STEP required. English 4520 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Students are required to also register for SCED 4300, the clinical experience that accompanies this course. Paired together, these courses provide an opportunity to peer deeply into classroom moments and learn about teaching and learning from a range of educational stakeholders, including secondary students, peers, mentor teachers, and scholars. Beyond reading about or practicing teaching tasks, these courses aim to help you help you develop a robust understanding of literacy from the perspective of a teacher in diverse classroom settings. Collectively, we use our course reading and experiences in the clinical to examine classroom teachers’ roles as literacy educators. To that end, you will actively study scholarship related to teaching and learning, observe learners and learning communities, provide instructional support, deliver instruction, and reflect upon your process of becoming a teacher. Engaging in each of these processes provides an opportunity to grapple with the connection between educational theory and practice.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Thomas
This explores basic folklore concepts and genres. We focus on supernatural legends, digital folklore, material culture, personal experience narratives, and roots music genres and their influence on contemporary music.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Estiri
In this course, we investigate the concept of folklore and review the major genres studied by folklorists while focusing on the concept of folklore as emergent and dynamic as an integral part of our day-to-day lives. We explore different forms of informal culture, including oral/verbal, customary, and material folklore, and discuss various interpretive and theoretical approaches to the examples of folklore. We particularly explore contemporary forms of folklore, including urban/supernatural legends, personal narratives, jokes, food traditions and celebrations, occupational folklore, folk art, and digital forms of folklore, such as internet memes.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Gabbert
This class covers some of the major genres of folklore with a particular focus on narrative, including fairy tales and legends, as well as on belief and stories supernatural creatures. Course content is drawn from Scandinavia, Russia, the Himalayas, and Japan.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 2720: Survey of American Folklore | Gabbert
This class covers some of the major genres of folklore with a special emphasis on how folklore can reveal attitudes and values surrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.
ENGL/HIST 3070: Folklore on the Internet (DHA) | McNeill
This course introduces students to a major new area of folkloristic research: digital culture. It explores the ways in which we can understand folklore in a digital context, the kinds of folklore we find in digital settings, the kinds of folk groups we find through the use of communication technologies, how fieldwork changes in an online environment, and the ways humans make meaning in diverse contexts. In other words, we'll look to the internet to reveal all sorts of crazy, interesting, confusing, contradictory, appalling, appealing, and generally weird things about ourselves.
ENGL/HIST 3700: Regional Folklore (DHA) | Estiri
This course orients students to the folklore of the Middle East. Material to be examined will be diverse across genres and drawn from various ethnic, national, and temporal spheres. Folklore is not necessarily ancient and historical, and there will be an emphasis on Middle Eastern contemporary life. In this course, folklore is conceptualized as everyday life expressive culture, including verbal arts, texts, religion, performative activities, and material culture. Though this is not a theory course, students will gain an attenuated background in folklore studies that includes the history and development of the discipline, its various methods, and contemporary scholarly conversations.
ANTH/ENGL/HIST 3710: Topics in Folklore (Foodways (CI) | Rezaei
How did fry sauce and funeral potatoes turn into iconic Utah foods? Why are there so many stories about rats or dog meat in restaurant meals? How do regional, religious, and political identities impact our everyday food choices? In this course, we will answer these and other questions by studying foodways from a folkloristic lens, i.e., examining the symbolic, artistic, and communicative importance of food in our everyday lives. We will look primarily at the role of food in constructing and performing regional and ethnic identities in the US context. In addition, we will address how the preparation, consumption, and presentation of food is related to individuals' performance of gender, class, or racial identities. Students will engage in food-related research of their own and will have the option to pursue an ethnographic or historical project informed by the course themes.
ENGL/HIST 4700: Folk Art and Material Culture (DHA) | Rezaei
From quilting to cosplay, from roadside shrines to yard art and graffiti, folk art is all around us. This course explores various forms of everyday artistry as venues for individual and collective creative expressions, while also examining the relation of material objects with history, market, and cultural heritage. We will address how different forms of folk art and material culture are intertwined with individual and collective expressions of gender, ethnic, and racial identities, as well as the role of folk art in politics, activism, and peace/conflict. The course draws on analytical approaches from folklore, anthropology, cultural studies, and other related fields. Lectures and discussions will be supplemented with films, field trips, workshops, and other activities.
ENGL 4210: History of English: Change and Diversity | McLaughlin
This course examines the history of the English language from its most distant origins in Proto-Indo-European, through Proto-Germanic, and, after the adoption of writing, for the past 1500 years on the island of Great Britain and beyond. The course includes the developments of the English sound and grammar systems, the sociolinguistic diversity of dialects, the influences from other languages (both great and small), and how English has influenced other languages in the modern era through the media of the internet, air travel, banking, and both military and economic domination.
ENGL 4230: Language and Culture | McLaughlin
An introduction to the use of language as a descriptive and analytical tool to understand human culture, and to how speakers use language to manipulate and shape their culture as a whole, including their individual place within it. It looks at a range of topics through the lens of language as well as looking at the theoretical underpinnings of language as a mediator of culture.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Franks
This course focuses on how to read closely and write critically about three forms of literature: poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Upon completion of this course, English majors should feel confident in their ability to develop arguments about texts and should be equipped with the critical vocabulary to do so. This section of 2600 is themed around varying depictions of home and belonging in contemporary literatures and includes texts such as Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God, Letts, August: Osage County, and Trethaway, Domestic Work: Poems.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Mann
Becoming an English major means mastering your powers of interpretation, and literary analysis is at the heart of every English major’s interpretive practice. This course will introduce you to methods of literary analysis, or “close reading.” Specifically, we will focus on analyzing three main genres of literature—poetry, drama, and prose fiction—and course readings will include poems, short stories, a novel, and a play. As we explore these different genres, we’ll also consider what it means for a text to be considered “literary.” You will learn to notice the nuanced construction of a text, become familiar with literary concepts and terms, and understand the relationship between form and meaning. Writing assignments will develop your powers of analysis and synthesis. You will form compelling arguments, support your ideas with evidence, integrate the ideas of others into your writing, and contribute to a scholarly conversation. The course will be organized around a central theme: literature and the body. Readings will explore literary representations of embodied experience from the 10th century to the 21st century. Major texts may include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
ENGL 3335: Nineteenth-Century British Literature | Mann
Bookended by political upheaval and war, the long nineteenth century represents a period of massive social, political, scientific, and philosophical change. The period also lends us some of our most beloved writers: William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, and others. Today, we divide this period of literary history into the Romantic and Victorian eras, but we may also observe an enduring “spirit of the age” that unites writers across the century. The poets, novelists, and creative thinkers of the nineteenth century imagined and reimagined the human experience in times of revolution and radical reform, experimenting with their art forms and developing new modes of expression. In this course, we will explore the period in British literary history from 1789 to 1914 across a variety of genres: poetry, the novel, drama, essays, political documents, and autobiography. Students’ reading, writing, and research will engage a number of different themes: art and aesthetics, race and abolition, gender and sexuality, politics and imperialism, industrialization and science, etc. We will ask: What is the relationship between literature and society? What kinds of knowledge does the literary imagination possess and create?
ENGL 3345: British Literature after 1900 | Nelson
This course will introduce students to the major British literary movements and authors from 1900 to the present. At the outset of the twentieth century, Britain was confident in its position as a global power, but that confidence was shaken by World War I. Coined the “lost generation,” writers responded to a new sense of alienation and loss through experimentation in form, genre, narrative perspective, and numerous other ways, ushering in the new literary movement of Modernism. Following Modernism, we’ll focus on post-World War II literature, especially as it relates to the questioning of ideologies and traditional institutions. As former British colonies gained independence, new voices came onto the scene to forge a new British postcolonial identity by the end of the century. The Norton Anthology of English Literature for the Twentieth Century will provide the foundation for our reading, but we’ll linger a little longer on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, George Orwell’s 1984, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
ENGL 3395: World Literature in Translation: Caribbean Literature Translated from French | Graham
The Haitian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century was arguably the most important event in the history of slavery and colonialism: an uprising of enslaved people overthrew the masters, fought off attempts by French, English, and Spanish forces to take control of the territory, and declared Haiti a sovereign republic. After its independence in 1804, Haiti was never again a colony of France, but the French language has continued to be its language of commerce and government, while a distinctive French Creole remains the language of ordinary Haitians. Haiti has contributed richly to the Francophone world’s literary heritage, and its revolution has served as inspiration for many literary texts, including two plays that will be assigned for this course. France’s “Overseas Departments” in the Caribbean Sea—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana—despite their tiny size and populations, have likewise given the world some of the most important writers of the modern era.
Our exploration of this literature will begin in the early twentieth century, with writers such as Saint-Jean Perse, René Maran, Jean Price-Mars, and Jacques Roumain. The course will give special focus to the Caribbean writers of the global Negritude movement, especially Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Suzanne Césaire. And it will include a representative survey of writing from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including texts by Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Yanick Lahens. All texts will be translated into English, and knowledge of French (while helpful) is neither required nor expected.
Content notice: the readings will include adult language and depictions of sexuality; bodily functions; sexual violence; and suicide.
ENGL 3610: Multicultural American Literature | Straight
The cultural diversity of the United States is matched only by its geographical diversity. This course explores multicultural US literature through the lens of place, and writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Janisse Ray, Mary Clearman Blew, and Jesmyn Ward understand that identities—individual and communal—are located in powerful and complex ways. Thinking about regional cultures as ongoing conversations that involve place helps us to identify important and often overlooked voices, and foregrounding the relationships between culture and environmental context illuminates the long histories and potential futures of our vibrant and diverse American cultures.
ENGL 4300: Shakespeare | Blackstock
This course provides an overview of Shakespeare’s drama and poetry--tragedies, comedies, histories, romances, and sonnets--and examines his work in the historical contexts that produced it, along with the philosophical, political, and social questions it continues to raise.
ENGL 4310: American Writers: Hawthorne and the "Scribbling Writer" | Holt
This course offers a comparative study of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and three leading women writers from the early nineteenth century—Transcendentalist writer and editor Margaret Fuller, working class journalist and humorist Fanny Fern, and abolitionist poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Although Hawthorne famously complained about the growing influence of "scribbling women" in the literary marketplace, all four of these four writers share a commitment to examining and critiquing the challenges and injustices facing women in the 19th century and presenting imaginative literature as an important tool of change. Taking this shared interest in issues of gender as a starting point, this course offers a comparative study of these writers' major works, examining their involvement with issues of social reform, gender and racial equality, and literary aesthetics. We’ll focus on points of agreement as well as moments where their work and attitudes contest and challenge one another, particularly with regard to reimagining the roles of men and women and the value of literature in the early United States.
ENGL 4310: American Writers: Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson | King
“How shall I live my life?” is a question at least as ancient as Aristotle. How might I “express myself,” or locate my “authentic self” or find “subjective well-being” are more modern projects, and one function of literature may be to provide illumination and enduring wisdom on such matters. What, for example, makes for a transcendent, transforming engagement with nature rather than an ordinary one? Willa Cather’s protagonists farming the prairies or absorbed in the American desert, embody the possibilities for a transforming relationship with the American landscape, while Marilynne Robinson’s novels explore the impact of family and history on our lives. This course will survey selected works of Cather and Robinson with these themes in mind, with attention as well to biographical, historical and other critical aspects of their work. Responding to a dynamic, transforming nation, they narrate a critical engagement with an emerging modernity that perhaps pushes them closer to the natural world, community, and an experience of an elusive authenticity.
“We can perceive only what we are capable of perceiving,” it has been said—but who achieves that discernment? The assignments, we hope, allow you the freedom to explore these and other issues the reading engages.
ENGL 4320: British Writers: Medieval British Authors | Cooper-Rompato
This course explores what it means to be an author in medieval Britain by closely examining four texts by different authors—a historical chronicle, a saint’s life, a collection of romance poems, and a memoir. All four texts approach the idea of authorship from radically different perspectives—during the course we will ask, How were written texts produced in the Middle Ages? What did it mean for a medieval man or woman to claim authorship? Why would an author choose to remain anonymous? What challenges did medieval authors face? We will also spend at least two weeks in USU’s Special Collections working on small group manuscript projects! Texts for the course include: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (8th century); Marie de France’s Lais (12th century); The Life of Christina of Markyate (12th century); and The Book of Margery Kempe (15th century).
ENGL 4320: British Writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning Among Women | Mann
As Victorian scholar Marjorie Stone tells us, “Just as it is sometimes difficult to approach Shakespeare because he is an institution, it is difficult to approach Elizabeth Barrett Browning because she is a legend.” We have come to know her as the heroine of a great love story: the invalid, poet-recluse who was held captive by her tyrannical father and set free by the love of Robert Browning. For Virginia Woolf, she was “England’s foremost poetess.” For feminist scholars, she was a radical who cast her poetic eye upon the social and political issues of the day: revolution, abolition, industrial reform, and the “woman question.” This class will examine Barrett Browning’s life and poetic works. How did she make sense of herself as a woman poet during a time when poetry and public life were dominated by men? Who and what influenced her writing, and what sort of legacy did she leave for future writers and scholars? We’ll read biographical excerpts and historical documents alongside her letters, juvenilia, and mature works. As we read, we’ll also explore the lives and writing of her literary foremothers, contemporaries, and inheritors: Charlotte Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Martineau, Virginia Woolf, and others. Together we’ll consider the woman beyond the legend, grounding her poetry in its many layered contexts and understanding its place in the rich and exciting tradition of female authorship in the nineteenth century and beyond.
ENGL 4340: Studies in Fiction: Magical Realism | Graham
In the mode of writing known as “magical realism,” fantastic or supernatural elements are introduced into a story, only to become an accepted and mundane part of the social world of the fiction. We will explore the origins of magical realist fiction, especially in Latin American novels and short stories. Then we will investigate a few of the ways in which the mode of magical realism has been put to use by English-language writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Among the questions we will try to answer this semester: How does magical realism respond to, mimic, or depart from naturalism and social realism? What is the relationship between magical realism and Modernism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism? Why does magical realism so often seem to arise in response to political upheaval and civil strife? What does magical realism teach us about time, memory, and history? What distinguishes magical realism from science fiction or fantasy? What distinguishes it from expressions of religious or cosmological belief? In addition to short stories and essays, we will read four major novels: García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds.
Content notice: the readings will include adult language and depictions of sexuality; bodily functions; sexual violence; and suicide.
ENGL 5310: Contemporary Literature: Medieval Historical Fiction | Cooper-Rompato
“Historical fiction comes out of greed for experience. Violent curiosity drives us on, takes us far from our time, far from our shore, and often beyond our compass,” said novelist Hilary Mantel in a 2017 interview with the Guardian. This course looks at contemporary novels about the early Middle Ages—specifically 5th through 8th centuries in England and Ireland, a time of great religious and cultural upheaval. We will ask what “violent curiosity” inspires authors to recreate the Middle Ages in fiction? What kinds of historical analysis do their novels do? How do these authors use sources to construct a past that speaks to modern audiences? How do novelists negotiate historical and modern understandings of religion, gender, and sexuality? We will read the following texts published in the last decade, along with a few excerpts from medieval texts to help us understand the context: Hild, by Nicola Griffeth (2013): a prophetic girl becomes an abbess in 7th-century England; Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife by Susan Signe Morrison (2015): the story of a (sympathetic) Grendel’s mother; Haven, by Emma Donoghue (2022): three Irish monks seek out an island hermitage in the 7th century; Saint Bridget’s Bones, by Philp Freeman (2015): mystery set at an Irish nunnery in the 6th century; Dark Earth, by Rebecca Stott (2018): two sisters fight for survival in 6th-century London; The Buried Giant, by Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (2015): fantasy and mystery featuring Sir Gawain set in Arthurian Britain.
ENGL 3085: Writing for the Computer Science Workplace | Mathis | Stevens
This class will introduce you to professional and technical writing situations common in computer science workplaces, and we will cultivate adaptive communication strategies and ethical professional behaviors. You will design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information.
TCR 2100 (formerly ENGL 3400): Introduction to Technical Communication | Chen (in-person) | Anabire (online)
This course introduces you to the field of technical communication as an iterative, problem-solving activity useful in any organization with communication needs. Working independently and collaboratively, you will propose, compose, design, and revise a variety of workplace-based documents. This course will also teach you how to synthesize and evaluate arguments about technology and society relevant to technical communicators. This course uses a free open-access textbook along with other freely available media.
TCR 2110 (formerly ENGL 3410): Digital Writing Technologies | Postdoc (in-person, online)
Technologies are always changing, so it’s important that you know how to learn new technologies. That’s what you’ll do in this class. Employers will expect you to be adept at using a variety of technologies and know how to select the best tool(s) to accomplish a particular task. In this course, you will gain experience learning and using three software programs used for 1) photo editing, 2) document layout, and 3) web design. But more importantly, you’ll develop your sense of adventure, tenacity, and confidence in evaluating, learning, and using technologies relevant to the workplace.
TCR 3110: Accessibility and Disability Rhetorics | Colton
In this course, we will explore accessibility through a lens of disability studies and rhetoric in order to understand the importance of accessibility within digital environments. We will also focus on producing rhetorically effective closed-captions and how to convert inaccessible PDF readings into more accessible webpage readings. By the end of the course, you should have a good understanding of disability studies theory, be able to make a strong case for accessible design, learn or improve closed captioning and basic web design skills, and understand how to approach multiple technologies and rhetorical situations for accessibility.
TCR 3120 (formerly ENGL 3460): Rhetorical Theory | Chen
This course introduces you to rhetoric as the art and study of persuasion and meaning-making, and an analytical research method. We will study classical and contemporary theories of rhetoric in this course to discuss how people are persuaded through language to act, how language makes meaning, the role of language in organizing human activity, and how rhetoric influences our view of the world. You will learn to define and understand rhetorical situations and to evaluate rhetorical strategies.
TCR 3210: Usability and Game Studies | Moeller
In this course, we will apply usability, game studies, and rhetorical theory to designing better, more accessible, more useful texts (documents, games, experiences, and interactions) that appeal to a wider and more diverse group of participants or users. You will gain experience in designing and conducting several types of usability tests and collecting game player data, analyzing and reporting on the data you collect.
TCR 3220 (formerly ENGL 4400): Technical Editing | Stevens
Whether or not your job title includes the word “editor,” you will find that good editing skills are an excellent way to move ahead in your workplace. In this course, you will experience first-hand what it means to be an editor by learning and applying the skills of copyediting, proofreading, and comprehensively editing, while also considering the context in which editing currently exists, and moving toward considering what editing could be by engaging in critical frameworks and theories that can inform our conceptualizations of editing.
TCR 4220 (formerly ENGL 5400): Technology and Activism | Postdoc
This course teaches you how to use technologies to advocate for your values. Because activism is about taking action, this course focuses on a specific topic each time it’s taught. You’ll read both academic texts and popular texts that examine topics including ethics, justice, and activism in technical communication. This course is intended to empower you with the tools and vocabulary to do good in the world.
TCR 4250 (formerly ENGL 5430): Careers in Professional Communication | Moeller
In this class, we will study how to successfully negotiate the job market in fields related to English: content writing, technical communication, usability and user experience (UX), editing, publishing, and more. You will practice developing effective application materials such as a portfolio website, resume, and cover letter; using social media for networking, job seeking, and career development; and preparing for job interviews.
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Fall 2022 Undergraduate English Courses
ENGL 2050: Literature by Women (BHU) | Icard
Did you ever wish you had the time to read well-known works of fiction like Pride & Prejudice or Jane Eyre? Have you been curious about the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson? Or the awardwinning author Sandra Cisneros? English 2050 is a fun introductory survey where you will read and learn about literature written by women. Emphasis will be on approaching texts with understanding and appreciation. Readings may include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. This three-credit course fulfills the BHU requirement.
ENGL 2200: Understanding Literature (BHU) | Icard
The course is an introduction to reading literature--as a subject for college study, and also as an intellectual and artistic experience for individual readers. Representative texts will be discussed, with attention to characters, language, and meaning, and to such matters as irony, metaphor, and allusion. The class will practice building confidence and pleasure as readers.
ENGL 2200: Understanding Literature (BHU) | Winn
English 2200 is an introduction to representative works of world literature including short fiction, poetry, and theatrical plays/films. The course emphasizes the study and consideration of the literary and cultural of selected works from both Western and non-Western literary traditions. Texts are selected from among a diverse group of authors for what they reflect and reveal about the evolving human experience and character. An important goal of the class is to promote understanding of the works in their cultural/historical contexts and of the enduring human values which unite the different literary traditions. Students will respond critically to readings through class discussion and produce written, evidence-based arguments.
ENGL 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Thomas
Introduction to Folklore (English 2210) explores basic folklore concepts and genres. We focus on supernatural legends, digital folklore, material culture, personal experience narratives, and roots music genres and their influence on contemporary music.
ENGL 2210: Into to Folklore (BHU) | Estiri
In this course, we will investigate the concept of folklore and review the major genres studied by folklorists while focusing on folklore as emergent and dynamic and an integral part of our day-to-day lives. We will explore different forms of vernacular culture, including oral/verbal, customary, and material folklore, and consider various interpretive and theoretical approaches that highlight the significance of dynamics usually framed as trivial and quotidian. We will particularly explore contemporary forms of folklore, including urban/supernatural legends, personal narratives, jokes, food traditions and celebrations, occupational folklore, folk art, and digital forms of folklore such as internet memes.
ENGL 2230: Intro to Film (BHU) | Crawford
This course introduces students to global film from the 19th century to contemporary award winners and examines how authorship, genre, presentation, and narrative structure contribute to meaning. Students will learn to evaluate films as reflections of culture and mediums for communication while becoming familiar with film techniques, terminology, and basic film concepts through film analysis and criticism.
ENGL 2630: Introduction to American Studies (BHU) | Holt
This section of Introduction to American Studies focuses on how US culture has been shaped by protest.. This course examines different periods of protest in US history, beginning with the American Revolution and continuing on with protests involving Indigenous dispossession, slavery, women’s rights, labor, and immigration, and civil rights involving race, gender, sexuality, and disability. We will also examine recent protest movements involving Occupy Wall Street, Me Too, Black Rights Matter, Covid-19, and the 2021 takeover of the U.S. Capitol. This course also introduces students to the interdisciplinary methods involved in American Studies, working with a range of sources, including essays, poems, fiction, advertisements, newspaper articles, songs, posters, visual art, speeches, cartoons, photographs, and film.
ENGL 2640: Race and Ethnicity in the United States (BHU) | Straight
Artists and scholars who examine race and ethnicity in the US must contend with a core paradox of modern societies: “Race” is an invented concept that has no basis in human biology; nonetheless, as the social construct behind racism, race is one of the most powerful factors influencing how we live. In this course we will study the fundamentally important interplay between systemic racism, social constructions of race, racial identity, and more nuanced concepts of ethnicity. The essayists, novelists, poets, and memoirists who provide our course texts grapple with the histories and realities of race in American life and—most importantly—they do so out of a belief that “there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words. That sharing our stories confirms our humanity. That it creates community” (Jesmyn Ward). At heart, then, this course is about the power and responsibility we all have to work toward our unrealized American ideals of equity and justice.
ENGL 3030: Perspectives in Literature (DHA) | Ricketts
This course will examine literature of the Southwest with a special emphasis on Utah. Authors often use a specific place to reflect, contest, or even attempt to shape regional identity. We will read several texts with the goal of understanding how place can be as important to consider as character, plot, theme, and other traditional literary devices. By analyzing how authors weave place into their stories, we will consider how a place can drive not only narrative, but also give us insight into American history and culture while perhaps even teaching us something about ourselves along the way.
ENGL 3070: Folklore and the Internet (DHA) | McNeill
This course introduces students to a major new area of folkloristic research: digital culture. It explores the ways in which we can understand folklore in a digital context, the kinds of folklore we find in digital settings, the kinds of folk groups we find through the use of communication technologies, how fieldwork changes in an online environment, and the ways humans make meaning in diverse contexts. In other words, we'll look to the internet to reveal all sorts of crazy, interesting, confusing, contradictory, appalling, appealing, and generally weird things about ourselves.
ENGL 3270: Children's Folklore (DHA) | Gabbert
This course focuses on the culture of children by examining children's folklore and folklife. Materials to be examined include games, stories, songs, rhymes and other verbal routines created and adapted by children for children. Children's literature—material written by adults for children—will not be covered. The course is organized around themes that arise in the study of childhood traditions, providing a window into the culture of childhood as presented by members of that culture themselves. In taking this course, students will learn to interpret children’s behavior, play, and folklore/folklife in order to better understand the culture of childhood.
ENGL 3470: Research English Studies (QI) | Kinkead
This course for English majors introduces students to multiple methods of conducting research in English, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The course examines current research, principles of research design, and instruments of data collection. Students will undertake two research projects: a whole class research project that provides practice in research methods, and an individual research project. We will present research findings orally and in writing. The course also gives attention to conducting research ethically.
ENGL 3630: Farm in Literature and Culture (DHA) | Moore
The Literature and Culture of the Farm examines literature related to the farm, farming, and agriculture in the broad definition of the word, including written texts, images, music (folk song, farm ballads, and country), film, and material culture such as quilts. The course covers texts ranging from an ancient Sumerian almanac, to Chaucer, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, African American Slave Narrative, Steinbeck, and Cather to more modern writers like Cesar Chavez, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Novella Carpenter, and Kristin Kimball. Students from a wide variety of majors including music, economics, business, education, communications, English, and engineering, as well as agricultural-related majors have found the course engaging, interesting, and valuable.
ENGL 3630: Farm in Literature and Culture (DHA) | Kinkead
This Depth-Humanities/Arts course explores the theme of agriculture, food, and land and also requires extensive reading and writing to meet the objectives of the CI criteria. The Farm in Literature and Culture investigates the “culture of agriculture.” Students read classical texts that provide a foundation and other texts of the American farm. We also explore farming through the lens of art, architecture, popular culture, and genre. By reading fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as viewing film and visual arts, students will enhance their understanding of the role that agriculture, food, and land have played in American life.
ENGL 3640: Reading and Writing the Environment (DHA) | Whitaker
ENGL 3640: Reading and Writing the Environment is an interdisciplinary course that explores practices of reading and writing and their effect on the human-environment relationship. The course will investigate how American cultures developed within the contexts of colonialism, westward expansion, individual freedom, and the notion of “exceptionalism.” Students will trace and compare these themes as they emerge across different arguments, discourses, and genres. In addition to historical perspectives, students will also read widely from contemporary authors and will consider how the production and consumption of text impacts current conversations on environmental issues. The knowledge students gain from these readings will inform their own intellectual pursuits as they research and write their way into greater environmental consciousness.
ENGL 3700: Regional Folklore (CI/DHA) | Estiri
This course orients students to the folklore of the Middle East. Material to be examined will be diverse across genres and drawn from various ethnic, national, and temporal spheres. Folklore is not necessarily ancient and historical, and there will be an emphasis on Middle Eastern contemporary life. In this course, folklore is conceptualized as everyday life expressive culture, including verbal arts, texts, religion, performative activities, and material culture. Though this is not a theory course, students will gain an attenuated background in folklore studies that includes the history and development of the discipline, its various methods, and contemporary scholarly conversations.
ENGL 4230: Language and Culture (DSS) | McLaughlin
An introduction to the diversity of language in the world and its use as a descriptive and analytical tool to understand human culture, and to how speakers use language to manipulate and shape their culture as a whole, including their individual place within it. It looks at a range of topics through the lens of language as well as looking at the theoretical underpinnings of language as a mediator of culture.
ENGL 4610: Western American Literature (DHA) | Straight
In many ways, the US West has always been a fiction, and fictions about the West abound in US literature. This course studies the mercurial US West through the lens of historical fiction, a provocative subgenre uniquely suited to the complexities of an amorphous region that is also at the heart of our national mythology. The novels we will read—including works by Colson Whitehead, Linda Hogan, Julie Otsuka, and Leslie Marmon Silko—go beyond the cowboy and sagebrush veneer of the rugged frontier to explore our complicated West as a shifting place, as a contested idea, and as a living history that we still inhabit.
ENGL 4700: Folk Material Culture (DHA) | Rezaei
From quilting to cosplay, from roadside shrines to yard art and graffiti, folk art is all around us. This course explores various forms of everyday artistry as venues for individual and collective creative expressions, while also examining the relation of material objects with history, market, and cultural heritage. We will address how different forms of folk art and material culture are intertwined with individual and collective expressions of gender, ethnic, and racial identities, as well as the role of folk art in politics, activism, and peace/conflict. The course draws on analytical approaches from folklore, anthropology, cultural studies, and other related fields. Lectures and discussions will be supplemented with films, (virtual) field trips, and other activities.
English 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Caron
This fiction class is designed for undergraduates who are new to fiction writing. Students will be introduced to a variety of authors and published stories with a number of questions in mind: What are the components of a story? How do writers create memorable characters? How does time work in a story? How can dialogue reveal character? In what ways does setting evoke emotion? Together we’ll answer these and other craft-based questions, and students will apply this new knowledge to their own stories. Writing prompts and exercises will push students to take literary risks, and workshops will help them revise their work.
English 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Waugh
This introduction to fiction writing course will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will learn: 1) to use a basic fiction writing vocabulary, 2) to identify the core narratological concepts in a work of fiction, 3) to recognize the sound and rhythm of good prose, 4) to understand and employ various narrative structures, and 5) to participate fully and constructively in a workshop oriented class.
English 3420: Introduction to Fiction Writing | Olsen
This is a fiction writing course that is accessible to beginning fiction writers and beneficial to writers who have had practical experience with fiction writing but minimal academic study. The course is workshop-driven (meaning there will be extensive hands-on analysis of student work) but will also feature serious craft discussion and thorough readings of published material to help students better understand how to approach their own work. It is structured as a hybrid course with every-other-week in-class meetings that alternate with weeks where we discuss specific issues related to craft and contemporary fiction.
English 3430: Introduction to Poetry Writing | Sowder
English 3430 is an introductory poetry-writing workshop. In this class we will experiment with writing various, exciting forms of poetry, using an excellent introductory book, Steven Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand. In addition, we will study two individual poet’s books of poetry, one by one of our own faculty poets, as well as exploring a treasure trove of other poets and poems. We will analyze poems together, from ancient Greek poems to contemporary spoken word poems, to see how they work and achieve their power. We will practice the craft of writing, learning from each other in large and small group workshops. Students will write and revise ten new poems, including several poems in form, and write an ars poetica, a personal philosophy of poetry writing, and memorize a poem to recite the last day of class.
English 3430: Introduction to Poetry Writing | Ballam
In this workshop-based course, we’ll analyze and practice a variety of poetic techniques from musicality to metaphor to drawing material from common stories, such as myths and fairy tales. We’ll complete a wide array of poetry exercises from Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of your Hand, ranging from cross-out/cut-up poems to poems about childhood memories, and we’ll read poetry collections by USU faculty members and poems from a diverse variety of voices. Students will write several poems and brief critical essays designed to illuminate specific aspects of poetic craft addressed in the readings and in class. No experience in poetry writing is necessary—all you need is enthusiasm!
English 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction | Beck
English 3440 will be a mix of lectures, workshops and out-of-class assignments that will focus on crafting new nonfiction projects. Few parameters will be placed on the subjects of the writing projects, but the class will emphasize narrative and personal writing. Course materials will mostly consist of contemporary essays in both audio and traditional formats. The class will be a safe place to hone existing skills and experiment with form and medium.
English 3440: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction | Kunz
English 3440, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction will introduce students to contemporary writers within an increasingly hard to define genre. Students will study the narrative approaches and techniques employed by professional writers, while being asked to apply that knowledge to the crafting of their own Creative Nonfiction pieces. Students will work in small group workshops as well as taking part in a whole class workshop. We will read a selection of essays and larger works.
English 4420: Advanced Poetry Writing | Waugh
The purpose of this advanced fiction writing course is to allow you to make the step from story dabbler to serious fiction writer, and to help you, as M.S. Bell says, “deploy unconsciously, intuitively, instinctively” the rudimentary skills you learned in the introductory course. The readings of our own work will be the basis for our workshop discussions, which means you must read the work in advance and come to class prepared with notes to help you give thoughtful, constructive criticism. We will also read exemplary texts to help us better understand what creates good writing, to train ourselves always to read as a writer, and to find how a particular word or sentence contributes to the overall effect.
English 4430: Advanced Poetry Writing | Sowder
English 4430 is an advanced poetry-writing workshop. Accordingly, much of the work of the semester will involve reading and responding to each other’s work in a rigorous yet supportive environment. As you may know, world literature began with poetry—deriving from religious ritual, magical spells, chants, and incantations. Other forms of creative writing—novels, fiction, and creative nonfiction—derived from poetry. Poetry employs the tools of creative writing in the most intense, compressed, and sophisticated ways possible. If you study the poetry of the last several millennia, you’ll sharpen and hone your writing in whatever genre you ultimately choose to write in.
In addition to weekly workshops, we’ll read several contemporary books of poetry, beginning with a famous twentieth-century collection, Ariel, by Sylvia Plath, and a collection by her equally famous—and infamous—husband, Ted Hughes’s, Birthday Letters. We’ll read a fantastic book of poems, African American poet Ross Gay’s exuberant Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, which will lighten our mood after Plath and Hughes. We’ll read Monument, by African American, Natasha Tretheway, Welcome, Dangerous Life, by our own Ben Gunsberg, and a collection of essays by Tony Hoagland. These works will help us deepen our understanding of the diversity of styles and themes of contemporary poetry and help us see how it achieves its power.
Grades will be based on a portfolio of poems turned in at the end of the semester and class participation.
English 4440: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing | Sinor
Speculative Nonfiction. In this advanced creative nonfiction workshop, we will be exploring what happens when writers take speculative and imaginative leaps in their work. John D’Agata suggests that art must destabilize if it is to remain meaningful. To that end, many contemporary nonfiction writers disrupt our understanding of the genre by pushing on the boundaries of fact and truth. Initially such efforts included “perhapsing,” especially in memoir, but more recent work is less concerned with reassuring the reader and more concerned with offering a truth that is more true because it never happened. That said, they write creative nonfiction, not fiction, which makes for fascinating conversation.
English 5450: Special Topics: Mixtures and Margins: An Introduction to Multimodal Composition | Gunsberg
How do contemporary writers use digital technology to adapt their poems, stories, and essays to a diverse and rapidly changing media textscape? English 5450 investigates this question by exploring different media forms and modes of representation, including alphanumeric writing, film, music, electronic literature, visual art, performances, and installations. Students will have opportunities to create new media texts that combine audio, visual, and interactive elements, such as printed poems that also occur as audio files or videos in conversation with alphanumeric text. After a brief introduction, we’ll discuss theories and historical antecedents of contemporary multimodal work. The first of three major assignments asks you to adapt a piece of conventional writing (poem, story, essay) into a multimedia artifact. Next, you’ll create a multimedia project from scratch. The third major assignment is a performance or installation that can be experienced live or through an audio/video recording. Your efforts on these assignments will be supported by readings, experiments, and class visits from writers who steer their work toward both the page and the screen.
English 3500/SCED 3300: Teaching English and Clinical Experience | Rivera-Mueller
Admission to STEP is required. The Teaching English course is paired with the one-credit course, SCED 3300 Clinical 1 (English) to provide students with hands-on experience working in secondary school classrooms. Students will meet in class and also work in schools 30 hours over the semester. The goal of the clinical experience is for pre-service teachers to begin to view the classroom and its students from the perspective of a teacher. Throughout your undergraduate education, you have focused on subject matter content; in this experience, you’ll be looking more closely at the process of teaching and learning. In particular, you’ll be observing how a teacher functions in the classroom as well as the teacher’s relationships with students, parents, colleagues, and school leaders. You will also have the opportunity to practice teaching in the classroom. You must register for ENGL 3500 plus the appropriate section of SCED 3300 paired by instructor.
Requirements filled: English Teaching; English Teaching Composite (Required)
English 3500/SCED 3300: Teaching English and Clinical Experience I Piotrowski
Admission to STEP is required. Teaching English is paired with the one-credit course, SCED 3300 Clinical 1, to provide students with hands-on experience working in secondary school classrooms. Students will meet in class and also work in schools 30 hours over the semester. The goal of the clinical experience is for pre-service teachers to begin to view the classroom and its students from the perspective of a teacher. You must register for ENGL 3500 plus the appropriate section of SCED 3300 paired by instructor.
Requirements filled: English Teaching; English Teaching Composite (Required)
English 3510: Teaching Young Adult Literature | Piotrowski
English 3510 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Study of a variety of genres written specifically for adolescent audience. Intended for those interested in teaching secondary school English. This course will be a blended mix of in class participation and online content.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required); English Teaching Composite (Required)
English 4510: Teaching Literature | Gunsberg
English 4510 prepares students to teach literature, including print literature, film, television, and print journalism. The course explores a variety of pedagogical strategies for teaching diverse literary traditions to students of various backgrounds and developmental levels. Students will engage both the philosophical and practical dimensions of secondary English teaching by reflecting on readings, designing units, and delivering instruction to one another. Woven into this course will be opportunities for regular writing, examination of digital resources, and sustained work on a piece of literature that is of special interest to each student. Students will build a library of digital and print-based professional resources that will support their efforts within and beyond this course. Engaging the complexities of lesson planning and assessment, students will create a unit centered on a literary text(s) of their choosing.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required)
ENGL 4520/SCED 4300: Teaching Literacy in Diverse Classrooms/Clinical Experience II English | Rivera-Mueller
Admission to STEP required. English 4520 is one of the required courses designed specifically for students in the English Education degree program. Students are required to also register for SCED 4300, the clinical experience that accompanies this course. Paired together, these courses provide an opportunity to peer deeply into classroom moments and learn about teaching and learning from a range of educational stakeholders, including secondary students, peers, mentor teachers, and scholars. Beyond reading about or practicing teaching tasks, these courses aim to help you help you develop a robust understanding of literacy from the perspective of a teacher in diverse classroom settings. Collectively, we use our course reading and experiences in the clinical to examine classroom teachers’ roles as literacy educators. To that end, you will actively study scholarship related to teaching and learning, observe learners and learning communities, provide instructional support, deliver instruction, and reflect upon your process of becoming a teacher. Engaging in each of these processes provides an opportunity to grapple with the connection between educational theory and practice.
You must register for both ENGL 4520 and SCED 4300 in the same semester.
Requirements filled: English Teaching (Required)/ English Teaching Composite (Required)
ENGL 2210: Intro to Folklore (BHU) | Estiri
In this course, we will investigate the concept of folklore and review the major genres studied by folklorists while focusing on folklore as emergent and dynamic and an integral part of our day-to-day lives. We will explore different forms of vernacular culture, including oral/verbal, customary, and material folklore, and consider various interpretive and theoretical approaches that highlight the significance of dynamics usually framed as trivial and quotidian. We will particularly explore contemporary forms of folklore, including urban/supernatural legends, personal narratives, jokes, food traditions and celebrations, occupational folklore, folk art, and digital forms of folklore such as internet memes.
ENGL 2210: Introduction to Folklore (BHU) | Thomas
This course explores basic folklore concepts and genres. We focus on supernatural legends, digital folklore, material culture, personal experience narratives, and roots music genres and their influence on contemporary music.
ENGL 2720: American Folklore | Thomas
This course explores the diverse and changing landscape of the United States by analyzing legends, memes, conspiracy theories, regional foodways, and Native American narratives.
ENGL 3070: Folklore on the Internet (DHA) | McNeill
This course introduces students to a major new area of folkloristic research: digital culture. It explores the ways in which we can understand folklore in a digital context, the kinds of folklore we find in digital settings, the kinds of folk groups we find through the use of communication technologies, how fieldwork changes in an online environment, and the ways humans make meaning in diverse contexts. In other words, we'll look to the internet to reveal all sorts of crazy, interesting, confusing, contradictory, appalling, appealing, and generally weird things about ourselves.
ENGL 3700: Regional Folklore (CI/DHA) | Estiri
This course orients students to the folklore of the Middle East. Material to be examined will be diverse across genres and drawn from various ethnic, national, and temporal spheres. Folklore is not necessarily ancient and historical, and there will be an emphasis on Middle Eastern contemporary life. In this course, folklore is conceptualized as everyday life expressive culture, including verbal arts, texts, religion, performative activities, and material culture. Though this is not a theory course, students will gain an attenuated background in folklore studies that includes the history and development of the discipline, its various methods, and contemporary scholarly conversations.
ENGL 3710: Topics in Folklore (Legend, Belief, and Conspiracy) | McNeill
This course will cover the genres of legend, belief, and conspiracy theory, ranging from supernatural beliefs to contemporary legends, conspiracy theories to public perception. This is an important topic for the current cultural moment, which is experiencing a growing awareness of the influence of folk culture on some of the most important structures of daily life, including politics, religion, and health. In this class we will consider the rhetorical nature of legends, the mechanics of conspiracy theories, the nature of belief, and the ways that narratives infuse our daily lived existence and influence our decision making.
ENGL 3720: Children’s Folklore | Gabbert
This course focuses on the culture of children by examining children's folklore and folklife. Materials to be examined include games, stories, songs, rhymes and other verbal routines created and adapted by children for children. Children's literature—material written by adults for children—will not be covered. The course is organized around themes that arise in the study of childhood traditions, providing a window into the culture of childhood as presented by members of that culture themselves. In taking this course, students will learn to interpret children’s behavior, play, and folklore/folklife in order to better understand the culture of childhood.
ENGL 4200: Linguistics (Online) | Manuel-Dupont
This is a 3-credit course that covers the following areas: morphology, phonology, syntax, child language acquisition, dialects, second language acquisition, world languages, and endangered languages. It takes you through the process of what it takes to be a linguist and what linguists do. From sub-Sahara Africa to the Navajo Nation, you learn how language makes a human being uniquely equipped to deal with the world around us. Assessment involves traditional exams, essays, and projects. This is also a service learning class where you will create a language enhancement experience for a primary school in Uganda.
ENGL 4230: Language and Culture Online | McLaughlin
An introduction to the use of language as a descriptive and analytical tool to understand human culture, and to how speakers use language to manipulate and shape their culture as a whole, including their individual place within it. It looks at a range of topics through the lens of language as well as looking at the theoretical underpinnings of language as a mediator of culture.
Requirements filled: Prof/Tech Writing (Linguistics)
Note: John is also teaching ENGL 5490, Topics in TCR: Social Media Perspectives (Online)
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Franks
Literary analysis is the foundation of our discipline—it’s what makes us literary critics and scholars. In this class, we’ll engage with multiple genres to better understand what we mean when we talk about “close reading,” and, more importantly, the many strategies we have for doing the work of analysis. We’ll build your vocabulary of specialized literary terms and your confidence in applying specific analytical techniques as we read poems from Layli Long Soldier and Claudia Rankine, novels from Louise Erdrich and Zane Grey, and plays from August Wilson and Tracey Letts, among others.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Graham
This course is designed especially for aspiring English majors and minors, but it will be valuable to anyone wanting to learn fundamental concepts and methods in the study of literature. You will learn the formal elements of three basic genres of literature—poetry, drama, and fiction—and the critical terminology for the kinds of figurative language that characterize literary writing in all genres. We will discuss how to research, organize, and write essays in literary studies, how to cite sources, and how to sharpen your writing style in general. Ultimately, the skills and methods you acquire in this class will help you better appreciate the richness, complexity, and beauty of the works you will read as a student of literature in English, and it will help you begin to develop the critical thinking skills, the mental flexibility, and the ability to cope with ambiguity required for most any career you might pursue.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis | Nelson
British Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his Defense of Poetry that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”. By this Shelley meant that poetry--literature, broadly defined—has the power to invoke sympathy, inspire passion, and motivate us to change the world we live in. Indeed, the story of Malcom X illustrates the power of literature to change lives. When Malcom X entered prison, he could not read or write, but by painfully copying every word in the dictionary, he taught himself how to read. He says that “ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books . . . I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life”. Literature is important because it leads to discovery of self and important insights into the nature of humanity and culture. Literature helps us understand and make sense of the world around us, and how we fit into that world. As the foundational course for the English Major, we will particularly focus on learning to read texts closely, articulating a central interpretation of a text, and using textual evidence and outside sources to support our argument. The Norton Introduction to Literature will provide the foundation for our course, and this course will survey a history of the development of literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present. Along the way, we’ll become familiar with the conventions of drama, poetry, and fiction. We’ll learn to analyze literature for its point of view, narrative frame, character development, and the universal themes that have tied us together for 2,500 years of human history.
ENGL 3315: Early Modern British Literature
Instructor and description to be announced.
ENGL 3335: Nineteenth Century British Literature | McCuskey
This course introduces students to British Victorian literature and its historical context, with an emphasis on four major themes: Industry and Society; Ladies and Gentlemen; Science and Religion; and Fantasies and Nightmares. This semester, we will pay special attention to the relationship between literature, history, and visual art: Victorian portraits, paintings, pictures, and photos. On one level, we will juxtapose texts and images: for example, reading Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” next to Waterhouse’s painting of the Lady in her boat, or Gaskell's "Our Society at Cranford" next to a painting of nearby urban Manchester. On another level, we will also analyze the representation of visual art within literary texts: for example, the portrait that hangs on the wall in Browning’s “My Last Duchess." The goal is to learn to develop arguments that bring together text, image, and history.
ENGL 3365: 19th-Century American Literature | King
A survey of American literature from 1800-1900, a century of great change, growth, tragedies, and progress. Much of these historical transformations were imagined in literature, in the minds of poets, playwrights, philosophers, and fiction writers. Our survey will emphasize the relation of literary to historical studies; the paradoxes of defining an American identity—the tensions between consensus and conflict that still resonate; and the effort to bring writers on the margins—women and people of color, e.g.—closer to the center. Pedagogical approaches—how to teach American literature—will also be a focus.
ENGL 3375 American Literature Since 1900: Black Speculative Fiction | Rivera-Dundas
You can only enact change if you can imagine it first. Writers of science and speculative fiction have leaned into this idea, imagining alternate worlds and far-flung futures in order to make sense of our present day, manifest futures outside of our current social dynamics, or explore alternatives to the status quo. In this class, we will read works of science and speculative fiction by Black American writers from the mid-20th century to today. We'll read novels that re-imagine language, gender, environmental collapse, and what it means to be human. We'll read stories that take place hundreds of years in the future and some that travel back and forth between the 1870s and the 1970s. We'll talk about social hierarchies, systems of power, and manifestations of oppression and we'll talk about joy, and celebration, and love. In this class, we'll work on a semester-long research project as well as write our own speculative fictions spun from the stories of our own lives.
ENGL 3395: World Literature in Translation: Medieval African Literature | Cooper-Rompato
Many people don’t realize that rich traditions of African literature survive from the precolonial period. This class offers a survey of both written and oral literary texts from several areas of medieval Africa, including Ethiopia, the Mali empire, Ile-Ife, and Great Zimbabwe. We will spend time reading and discussing a range of texts, including charters and political writings, religious writings, epic poetry, and songs, as well as learning about different genres of art, including sculpture and architecture. Special attention will be paid to texts that English Teaching students can bring into their secondary school classrooms. This class will meet face-to-face on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Assignments include short essays, some Canvas work, and one oral presentation. All readings are in modern English translation, and no previous knowledge of African literature or history is required—but expect to learn more than you would think possible in one semester!
ENGL 3620: Native American Studies | Franks
This multidisciplinary course will survey the formation of Native American Studies as a distinct area of study, as well as some of its primary concerns. Readings/viewings will draw from scholars, creative writers, filmmakers, traditional storytellers, and activists on issue ranging from Indigenous sovereignty, the long-term effects of settler colonialism, current struggles over reconciliation politics, and the continuing fight against Anti-Indigenous racism in the US.
ENGL 4300: Shakespeare
Instructor and description to be announced.
ENGL 4320: British Writers: “Only Connect” Liberalism in the Novels of E.M. Forster and Willa Cather | Blackstock
The novels of British writer E. M. Forster and American writer Willa Cather, while stylistically distinct, appeared in a transatlantic atmosphere of what Cather scholar Guy Reynolds has called “‘only connect’ liberalism.” “Only connect” serves as the epigraph to Forster’s novel Howard’s End, and as Cyril Connolly observed, “might be the motto of all his work.” But in Forster, the desires of human beings to establish genuine connections with other humans are typically frustrated by the social forces that conspire against such intimacy. On the other hand, says Reynolds, Cather “developed empathy into a form of ‘only connect’ liberalism attuned to moments when cultural or racial gaps are at least temporarily bridged.” This course will examine three novels by each writer, along with selected shorter works, that grapple with questions about whether and how human beings can “only connect” across barriers created by gender, class, culture, and religion.
ENGL 4330: World Writers: Two Zimbabwean Women Writers | Graham
Like almost every other country in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Zimbabwe was a European colony—in this case, the British colony of Southern Rhodesia—with a bloody and depressing history. A group of rogue white settlers seized control and declared it an independent country in 1964; African freedom fighters waged a long guerrilla war against Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime, and succeeded in overthrowing the regime in 1980. But the revolutionary leader Robert Mugabe soon made himself a dictator for life and eventually oversaw the collapse of democratic rule and civil society.
This history, in turns dispiriting and inspiring, is the backdrop for all the works of literature and film by two Zimbabwean women: Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. They write stories of love and heartbreak, trauma and survival, grief and recovery, all attempting to make sense of their country’s past. In this class we will read two novels and a collection of short stories by Vera; we’ll read all three novels by Dangarembga, as well as watching one of the films for which she has written the script; and we’ll encounter assorted essays, poems, stories, and interviews from both writers.
ENGL 4340: Studies in Fiction: Novel Forms | Caron
In this class, we’ll focus our attention on novels that challenge conventional narrative forms. We’ll look at a range of novels, including novels-in-stories, novels-in-fragments, collage novels, and novels that resist easy categorization. Through our close reading and careful study, we’ll consider each novel on its own terms, examining how authors create their fictional worlds. We’ll then expand the conversation to consider how these books make space for new kinds of stories and new ways of telling them. Authors will include Gwendolyn Brooks, William Maxwell, Julie Otsuka, Justin Torres, Jenny Offill, Max Porter, and Lindsey Drager.
ENGL 4345: Studies in Nonfiction: Black American Life Writing | Rivera-Dundas
What does it mean to represent yourself through writing? What does it mean to write something that's "true"? How do we tell veracity from fiction and why does that matter? In this class, we'll read nonfiction from Black American writers from the founding of the US to today and think about how writers represent themselves to different audiences. We'll explore a variety of genres within the "nonfiction" umbrella including slave narratives, long-form essays, speeches, autobiographical novels, epistolary texts, and memoirs. To better understand the content, the form, and ourselves, the writing in this class will be mostly in the form of creative nonfiction rather than traditional academic papers.
ENGL 4610: Western American Literature | Straight
In many ways, the US West has always been a fiction, and fictions about the West abound in US literature. This course studies the mercurial US West through the lens of historical fiction, a provocative subgenre uniquely suited to the complexities of an amorphous region that is also at the heart of our national mythology. The novels we will read—including works by Colson Whitehead, Linda Hogan, Julie Otsuka, and Leslie Marmon Silko—go beyond the cowboy and sagebrush veneer of the rugged frontier to explore our complicated West as a shifting place, as a contested idea, and as a living history that we still inhabit.
ENGL 5330: Race and Ethnicity in Literature | Holt
This course examines the role that literature plays in shaping public perceptions of race and ethnicity, as well as its role in reinforcing and transforming public responses to racism, focusing specifically on US history and culture. The course focuses on the 1619 Project, a collaborative work of long-form journalism sponsored by the New York Times. Originally published in the New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project was recently expanded and published as a full-length book featuring contemporary essays, fiction, and poetry that seek to re-frame the history of the United States in relation to the consequences of slavery and the experiences and contributions of Black Americans. In addition to studying the literary works published in the 1619 Project, this class examines a range of literary works (fiction, essays, poetry) that represent experiences associated with slavery in the American colonies and United States from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The class also examines criticism of the 1619 Project, exploring the various arguments surrounding this project and evaluating the critical and controversial role that literature plays in ongoing discussions about race, ethnicity, and racism in the United States.
ENGL 3085: Writing for the Computer Science Workplace
Students are introduced to professional and technical writing contexts in the computer science workplace, with a focus on adaptive communication strategies and ethical professional behaviors. Students design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information.
ENGL 3400: Writing for the Workplace
This course introduces you to the field of technical communication. In this course, you will create a variety of workplace documents through the process of proposing, composing, designing, and revising. In so doing, you will apply fundamental concepts required to be a skilled communicator in a variety of workplaces. This course will also teach you how to synthesize and evaluate arguments about technology and society relevant to technical communicators. You will draw upon these competencies when you work collaboratively to present technical information to a variety of audiences. This course uses a free open access textbook along with other freely available media.
ENGL 3410: Digital Writing Technologies
The main focus of this course is learning how to learn technologies. The technical communication field increasingly requires professionals to be adept at using a variety of technologies and knowing how to select the best tool(s) to accomplish a particular task. In this course, you will not only gain experience with three core software programs but also develop or strengthen your sense of adventure, tenacity, and confidence in evaluating, learning, and using technologies relevant to technical communication. Professional Communication Technologies is a pre-requisite for several courses such as ENGL 4400 Professional Editing, and it is a prerequisite for entering the technical communication and rhetoric emphasis.
ENGL 3450: Workplace Research
Technical communicators frequently engage in research to answer questions or address problems in the workplace. This course is designed to prepare you to work successfully as a technical writer by learning how to craft a research question; how to select appropriate methods to address a particular research question; how to ethically collect and analyze data; and how to report research findings and their associated implications (i.e., research-based recommendations). By partnering with a client for the full semester, you will practice applying all that you are learning within a real organizational context, learning about how you can conduct research to address real organizational problems and questions.
ENGL 3460: Rhetorical Theory
Prepares students to analyze persuasive communication as it is enacted in a variety of texts and contexts. Students learn to define and understand rhetorical situations and theories and to evaluate rhetorical strategies.
ENGL 4230: Language and Culture
An introduction to the diversity of language in the world and its use as a descriptive and analytical tool to understand human culture, and to how speakers use language to manipulate and shape their culture as a whole, including their individual place within it. It looks at a range of topics through the lens of language as well as looking at the theoretical underpinnings of language as a mediator of culture.
ENGL 4400: Professional Editing
Whether or not your job title includes the word “editor,” you will find that good editing skills are an excellent way to move ahead in your workplace. A good professional/technical editor understands how language works, how others will likely expect it to be used, and how to craft it effectively—not just by copyediting and proofreading but also by editing comprehensively for content, organization, style, graphics, and document design. Most of your work in this course will be hands-on editing.
By the end of the course, you should be able to do these things:
- Evaluate documents’ editing needs and state specific editing priorities and objectives for the given rhetorical situation,
- Copyedit and comprehensively edit documents written for a variety of audiences and/or clients, using both traditional copy marking and proofreading methods and electronic editing methods,
- Assess the ethical, social, and technological implications of editing and act responsibly in light of these implications.
ENGL 5400: Technology and Activism | Colton
Topic: Disability Studies and Accessibility Rhetorics. To design accessible environments and documents, technical communicators must understand how people with disabilities access digital media. 41 million Americans (or 15% of the total U.S. population) “have some level of disability" (U.S. Census Bureau).It seems like common sense to keep accessibility in mind from the start of and throughout the life of a project; however, many technical communicators still see certain aspects of accessible design as a painful necessity or a nearly forgotten add-on at the end of a project.
In this course, we will explore accessibility through a lens of disability studies and the ethics of technology. We will gain a strong understanding of disability and accessibility rhetorics scholarship and practice, and we will discuss and practice rhetorical and legal standards of effective and accessible design through an “intervention” assignment with the Center for Innovative Design and Instruction at USU, for which you will take inaccessible PDF documents and make them accessible for screen reading software (great for your resume/CV/portfolio, btw).
By the end of the course, students should have a good understanding of disability theory, be able to make a strong case for accessible design, have improved closed captioning and basic web design skills, and understand how to approach multiple technologies and rhetorical situations for accessibility.
ENGL 5430: Technical Communication Capstone
Students study how to successfully negotiate the job market in fields related to English, such as technical communication, user experience (UX), and publishing. Students learn how to professionalize; to develop successful job application materials such as a portfolio website, resumes, cover letters, and social media profiles; and to prepare for job interviews.
English 5490: Social Media Perspectives
Describing social media as a tool to influence social, political, and religious movements throughout history focusing especially on the last two decades. Examining how contemporary social media changes attitudes and decision-making processes on micro- and macro-scales and how its power can be successfully harnessed.