Undergraduate Courses 2017-2018

Interim 2017 | Summer 2017 | Fall 2017 | Spring 2018

Interim

EN 311 SPECIAL TOPICS IN LIT

Hodo

Broken Soldiers, Vigilantes & Freaks: Examining the Modern Comics Hero in Print & on the Screen Emerging from the social tensions of WWII, comic book heroes have long been a part of American culture. These heroes’ original purpose was to stand as paragons of virtue and hope for a troubled people: however, the characteristics and motives of these powerful beings have changed over time. This course will explore the characteristics of the modern superhero (1970s – present). We will discuss the changing values, attitudes, and portrayals of the hero and what it means to be heroic. We will read four graphic novels including DC’s Identity Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War. There will also be in class viewings of selected episodes from various television series adapted from comic books such as Smallville, Luke Cage, The Walking Dead and more.

EN 408-001 ADV. CREATIVE WRITING

MTWRF 9:00-12:00p.m.
Estes

Screenplay Writing: Short Forms The beauty of the short film is in its flexibility and variety, its lyric possibilities and the ways in which it’s unconstrained by traditional narrative structure. Add animation to the mix, and the imagination truly has no limits. Students in this course will study a variety of short form film and screenplays, following both conventional and experimental structures. We will work individually but also collaborate as a Writers Room in when devising and executing more commercial-oriented projects. Using Aristotle’s *Poetics* as a reference, we will study the foundations of storytelling and play with how and when those rules can be broken. In collaboration with students from ART 408, we will script animated shorts which art students will then illustrate and produce. This course will require the purchase and use of Final Draft, film industry standard software used for screenwriting and production.

ENG 408-002 ADV. CREATIVE WRITING

MTWRF 10:00-1:00p.m.
Staples

Where the Wild Things Are: Writing Alabama’s Biodiversity This course is dedicated to the imaginative significance of Alabama’s wild areas at a time when the state wants in environmental regulation and research demonstrates the role of the wild in our quests for well-being, joy, and meaning. In this distinctive domestic travel interim offering, we will use creative writing as a tool through which to imaginatively inquire into the concept of wilderness. The course will begin with an intensive first week of coursework on the UA campus, followed by a sequence of field trips into the unique Alabama wild lands. The concept of the wilderness includes rigorous debates doubting its existence as a place apart, as well as enriching expressions arising from within its bounds. In this course, we will research the wild both academically and experientially, familiarizing ourselves with the Mobile-Bay Watershed, a place of global significance for biodiversity—as well as conventional and avant-garde ecowriting techniques in memoir and poetry. During our field work, we will stay in cabins on Lookout Mountain as participants in the four day Birmingham Audobon Mountain Workshop, a series of naturalist workshops led by regional experts. This trip will include the options to go bird watching, hikin’ for lichen, gathering edible plants, canoeing; to study local butterflies, mushrooms, snakes, amphibians; to make pottery using native techniques or textiles applying natural materials. We will read and write together throughout this weekend, culminating in a mid-course reading in the outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Little River. After the Workshop, we will continue with a week of field writing on day trips of hiking, including a visit with the animals and a silent hike to the overlook on Ruffner and a tree-top obstacle course (all-levels welcome) at Hugh Kaul Beanstalk Forest on Red Mountain. We will close our course with an overnight camp out, including a reading of student work and clean-up at Hurricane Creek, as well as a presentation led by our local Creekeeper and internationally renound environmental activitist John Wathen. Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.
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Summer

Summer I

EN 309-050 ADV. EXPOSITORY WRITING

MTWRF 12:00-1:45
Popova

English 309, an advanced writing workshop, aims to help student writers who want additional expository writing instruction after English 101 and 102. Class members will analyze their writing strengths and weaknesses, set goals for improving their writing and work on practical writing assignments depending partly on their majors or fields of interest. Students will study and practice advanced techniques of effective expository prose, including explanation, logic and persuasion, analysis, evaluation, and stylistic sophistication.

EN 319-050 TECHNICAL WRITING

MTWRF 10:00-11:45
Dayton

Focuses on principles and practices of technical writing, including audience analysis, organization and planning, information design and style, usability testing, and collaborative writing. Special emphasis will be placed on composing instructions, various kinds of reporting such as investigative and feasibility studies, document design for technical presentations, proposals and collaborative composition.

EN 329-050 DIRECTED STUDIES

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

EN 408-050 ADV. CREATIVE WRITING

MTWRF 10:00-11:45
Staples

Marianne Moore once famously said that poetry has “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In this course, we will adventure with each other into our imaginative landscapes, cultivating singular literary creations through conversation with other writers, both living and dead. Texts will include an anthology of contemporary poetry and several related full-length collections by established and emerging writers. #toadilyadvanced Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 429-050 DIRECTED READINGS

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

Summer II

EN 309-100 ADV. EXPOSITORY WRITING

MTWRF 10:00-11:45
Popova

English 309, an advanced writing workshop, aims to help student writers who want additional expository writing instruction after English 101 and 102. Class members will analyze their writing strengths and weaknesses, set goals for improving their writing and work on practical writing assignments depending partly on their majors or fields of interest. Students will study and practice advanced techniques of effective expository prose, including explanation, logic and persuasion, analysis, evaluation, and stylistic sophistication.

EN 319-100 TECHNICAL WRITING

MTWRF 10:00-11:45
Buck

Focuses on principles and practices of technical writing, including audience analysis, organization and planning, information design and style, usability testing, and collaborative writing. Special emphasis will be placed on composing instructions, various kinds of reporting such as investigative and feasibility studies, document design for technical presentations, proposals and collaborative composition.

EN 329-100 DIRECTED STUDIES

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

EN 333-100 SHAKESPEARE

MTWRF 2:00-3:45
McConnell

This course is a broad introduction to Shakespearean drama, and places primary emphasis on language: most of our time and energy in this course will be devoted to the analysis and interpretation of Shakespeare’s words, and to an appreciation of their pleasures and complexities. Additionally, we will be giving substantial attention to matters of stagecraft, genre, literary influence, and historical context, and to how these topics relate to Shakespeare’s writing style. We will read seven plays, organized thematically into three course units: 1) Kings of England (Henry V and Richard III); 2) Revenge Tragedy (Titus Andronicus and Hamlet); 3) Stories of Losing and Finding (The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and The Winter’s Tale).

EN 408-100 ADV. CREATIVE WRITING

MTWRF 10:00-11:45

Form and Figure—The Mystery In this multi-genre class we will study the nature and power of mystery and mysteriousness: as a story structure, as a character trait, and as lyric ambience or tone. As readers, we want to be kept guessing, kept in the dark, brought into contact with possibility. We will study films, stories, poems, and nonfiction texts whose writers manage to imbue the work with a sense of the unseen and unknown, the surreal and the surprising, which are able to suggest as much if not more than they show. Students will propose a single project and work on it throughout the session. So whether you want to pen a whodunnit, create a hero with a murky past, generate suspense in your longform journalism, or write poems and stories laden with atmosphere and subtext, this course will provide you models and an occasion to get serious about an idea you’d like to realize. Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 429-100 DIRECTED READINGS

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

EN 455-100 ADV. STUDIES IN WRITING

MTWRF 2:00-3:45
Robinson

Designed for advanced English majors, a special topics course that focuses on the process of writing. The forms this writing may take include, but are not limited to, film, creative nonfiction, autobiography, and local color.

Study Abroad

EN 310-800 SPECIAL TOPICS IN WRITING

McKnight

Study Abroad—Sweden. Travel Writing, Writing Culture Travel writing is an important source for historical study as well as personal reflection. This course asks students to consider how they think about their own lives and the criteria they use to assess the lives of other persons. We will explore the idea of the journey – physical, anthropological, and psychological – as well as the interrelated perspectives of the traveler, “native,” reader, and writer. Students will improve their analytical and writing skills and will compose a series of personal narratives to document their experiences abroad.

EN 311-801 / 422 SPECIAL TOPICS IN LIT

Smith

Study Abroad—Oxford.“‘Black Sails’ and The ‘Real’ Pirates of the Caribbean” Perhaps no counterculture in world history stimulates the modern imagination more than does piracy. From the recent series Black Sails on the cable network Starz and the ever popular Disney blockbuster franchise Pirates of the Caribbean to modern-day pirates attacking vessels off the coast of Somalia, images of pirate culture abound. I propose a course, then, that will ask students to draw relationships between our modern-day fascination with pirates and some of the original manifestations of piracy, focusing especially on English piracy in the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the course, students will interrogate questions such as the following: Who were the real pirates of the Caribbean and how did they differ from buccaneers and privateers? What place did they occupy in English social circles? What made theirs a “counter” culture? To what/whom exactly were they counter? What was life like for pirates? Laws? Customs? Diet? Conditions aboard the ship and off? Why would anyone want to be a pirate – both in the past and present? Why, today, do we have such a fascination with this historical counterculture? In addition to the above points of inquiry, we will examine pirate iconography – the black flag, eye patches, swords, and parrots. We will look for the origins of these icons in primary English texts written in the 17th and 18th centuries. To what extent is Johnnie Depp’s portrayal of Jack Sparrow beholden to historical accounts? And how much of the character is the product of present-day pirate mythology? For those pirates raiding the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia, are they channeling a historical European counterculture of piracy? Or something else? We will screen episodes of the Starz television series and the Disney movies. We will read materials from current periodicals about pirate activity in the Indian Ocean, and we will read primary documents written in the 18th century by pirates and English officials, whose policies toward pirates vacillated between rewarding them and punishing them – as suited the needs at any given time of the English crown in the 17th and 18th centuries. Texts will include: Sir Francis Drake Revived (1629), excerpts from The Buccaneers of America (1684) by Alexandre Exquemelin and excerpts from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724) by Charles Johnson

EN 311-802 SPECIAL TOPICS IN LIT

McKnight

Study Abroad—Sweden. Swedish Popular Culture and Politics. This course is required by all students. The course will consider the social and political aspects of citizenship in Sweden, and compare this with that in the US. Students will learn about Swedish history, politics, and popular culture, and be asked to use this understanding to criticize their own description of citizenship in the US. Students will spend considerable time in the city and on sites around the region of Stockholm exploring these issues, reading fiction texts, museum brochures, and exploring exhibits. Students will write a travel journal and short papers.

EN 362-800 TOPICS IN BRITISH LIT 1900-1945

Study Abroad—Ireland. A cross-genre survey of major literary figures, critical movements, historical events, and significant texts within the first half of the twentieth century in Britain. Authors may include Joseph Conrad, Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot.

EN 408-801 ADV. CREATIVE WRITING

Study Abroad—Ireland. Special topics in imaginative writing. Focus may be on poetry, fiction, non-fiction or a combination. Students produce imaginative writing and read related texts. Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 422-800 ADV. STUDIES IN AMERICAN LIT

Study Abroad—Oxford. Designed for advanced English majors, a special topics course that focuses on issues in American literature.

EN 433-802 ADV. STUDIES IN BRITISH LIT

Study Abroad—Ireland. Designed for advanced English majors, a special topics course that focuses on issues in British literature.

EN 444 / ADV. STUDIES LIT CRIT & THEORY

Purvis

Study Abroad—Liverpool (WS 410 / AAST 413): Based at Liverpool John Moores University in the vibrant port city of Liverpool, England, named European Capital of Culture in 2008 and frequently voted the U.K.’s “friendliest city,” this course examines regional “othering” that positions the U.S. South and U.K. North as “backwards,” “provincial,” or otherwise inferior within these two national frameworks. Through collaborative learning, students will explore the geographical and affective connection of the U.K. North to histories of enslavement and other modalities of oppression; interrogate regionalisms; and examine the workings of intersectionality concerning subjects such as race, region, and LGBTQ issues in Europe. Liverpool’s theatres, galleries, museums, parks, concert halls, shops, and restaurants are easily accessible, and the course will provide opportunities for students to experience local music, art, and history, as well as museums, archives, tours, lectures, and historical sites in Manchester and London. The course combines these excursions with scholarly content in the classroom, including guest lectures from U.K.-based academics, activists, and community organizers.

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Fall 2017

Methodology

EN 300-001: Intro to English Studies

Pionke
MW 3:00-4:15

This course seeks to acquaint students majoring in English, as well as non-English majors interested in further developing their reading, writing and analytical skills, with the tools, techniques and critical attitude necessary for in-depth literary study. Our collective approach to the study of literature will focus on close, rather than voluminous, reading and careful analysis in the form of papers and others writing assignments. We will touch on research techniques and the varieties of literary criticism, but will concentrate most of our attention on mastering the vocabulary and techniques of textual analysis. We will also read some fascinating and provocative works, including Collins’s The Woman in White, Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and Valdez’s Los Vendidos.

EN 300-002: Intro to English Studies

Cardon
TR 2:00-3:15

You’ve perhaps read The Great Gatsby, but how would you teach it? Why, do you think, is it so important that nearly every high school requires its students to read it? What do we do with famous works of literature? Why does literature even matter in the Real World? EN 300 is designed primarily for English majors, but also for anyone interested in literary analysis. This class aims to

  • Provide an introduction to methods employed in our discipline for in-depth literary study;
  • Enrich skills in critical reading, writing, and analysis;
  • Introduce a range of critical and theoretical approaches to primary texts;
  • Help students to identify which of these approaches fits their style, their interests, and the nuances of a particular literary work;
  • Enhance students’ ability to close read texts in the form of papers and other assignments;
  • Teach the vocabulary, techniques, and research methods associated with literary analysis.

To become more adept at reading and interpreting literary texts, students will begin the course by revisiting a canonical work of literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby) and learning about different methods for approaching, analyzing, and writing. From there, students will learn to apply these critical methods to other genres, including poetry, drama, and other texts and media.

Creative Writing

EN 301-001 to 004: Prose Tour

Study of basic principles of composing creative prose. Reading and assigned writing experiments in a broad range of prose forms. Required of all creative writing minors.
Prerequisites: EN 200.

EN 304-001 to 004: Poetry Tour

Study of basic principles of composing poetry. Reading and assigned writing experiments in a broad range of poetic forms. Required of all creative writing minors.
Prerequisites: EN 200

Rhetoric and Composition

EN 309-001: Adv. Expository Writing

McKnight
TR 12:30-1:45

Study and practice in methods of exposition, explanation and explication, logic and persuasion, definition and analogy, analysis and evaluation. Writing proficiency within this discipline is required for a passing grade in this course.

EN 319-001: Technical Writing

Focuses on principles and practices of technical writing, including audience analysis, organization and planning, information design and style, usability testing, and collaborative writing. Special emphasis will be placed on composing instructions, various kinds of reporting such as investigative and feasibility studies, document design for technical presentations, proposals and collaborative composition.

Special Topics in Writing

EN 310-001: Special Topics in Writing

Buck
TR 11:00-12:15

How often do you stop to think about the medium in which you are communicating? How does a specific medium change the way you write? What does it mean to “ read” an image? How does our use of technology shape the way we communicate? What theories inform our relationships with media? In this class, we will explore the intersections between various media: print, film, images, sound, social media, etc. We will develop an approach for understanding and composing multimedia products while attempting to identify (and challenge) the implicit conventions of media. Along the way, we will consider the ways writing (as an object and as a practice) is shaped by these multimedia interactions from both theoretical and practical perspectives. By integrating practical activities with broader theoretical issues, we will work on developing effective strategies for designing multimedia presentations, and through this class, you will create image, audio, remix, and interactive projects.

EN 310-002: Special Topics in Writing

A. Wilson
MWF 11:00-11:50

Writing and memory are inextricably linked. Beyond serving as an aid or record of events, writing shapes our understanding of memory, its indexical quality, and our ability recall events, interpret them, and integrate them into a coherent, narrative whole. This view of “writing,” explored by philosophers, literary theorists, and cognitive linguists (to name a few), challenges us to recognize the act of producing and interpreting texts as more than the communication of facts and ideas. Rather, this view compels us to see the act of writing as a way of experiencing the world and our relationship to it. In this class, we will grapple with these daunting concepts through practices of personal, autobiographical, and otherwise “creative nonfiction” writing. While reading a variety of nonfiction texts on writing theories and processes, students will be expected to put the concepts of these texts to use in their own narrative reflections, requiring them to approach writing theory and practice as one in the same act. This course aims to provide students with meaningful challenges to their writing abilities while also offering a critical introduction to writing and textual theory.

Linguistics

EN 320-001: Intro to Linguistics

Popova
TR 9:30-10:45

Introduction to the study of language, including subjects such as language acquisition, variation, and origins. The system of sounds, syntax, and meaning are illustrated in English and other languages.

EN 321-001: Linguistic Approaches to Gram

Worden
TR 2:00-3:15

This class focuses on the study of English grammar integrating principles from linguistic theory with structural approaches to grammar. The course includes a focus on the expectations of grammatical usage in different contexts and an understanding of how to apply this knowledge in a pedagogical setting.

Literature, Pre-1700

EN 332-001: Sixteenth Century Lit

MW 3:00-4:15

A cross-genre survey of the literature of the Elizabethan period. Authors may include Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare.

EN 333-001: Shakespeare

Drouin
TR 2:00-3:15

Through lectures and a screening of Shakespeare in Love, this class begins with an introduction to the early modern historical and cultural context in which Shakespeare’s plays were written and performed. Following the generic divisions laid out by the editors of Shakespeare’s First Folio, students then examine a comedy (Twelfth Night), history (Henry V), and tragedy (King Lear), before turning to what critics now classify as a problem play (Measure for Measure). Students then evaluate contemporary issues within Shakespeare studies, such as postcolonialism (The Tempest). The course ends with what may be Shakespeare’s most famous play (Hamlet). Throughout the course, students view excerpts from various film versions of the plays in order to discern how performance may influence textual interpretation.

EN 333-002: Shakespeare

Drouin
TR 12:30-1:45

Through lectures and a screening of Shakespeare in Love, this class begins with an introduction to the early modern historical and cultural context in which Shakespeare’s plays were written and performed. Following the generic divisions laid out by the editors of Shakespeare’s First Folio, students then examine a comedy (Twelfth Night), history (Henry V), and tragedy (King Lear), before turning to what critics now classify as a problem play (Measure for Measure). Students then evaluate contemporary issues within Shakespeare studies, such as postcolonialism (The Tempest). The course ends with what may be Shakespeare’s most famous play (Hamlet). Throughout the course, students view excerpts from various film versions of the plays in order to discern how performance may influence textual interpretation.

Literature, 1700 to 1900

EN 340-001: American Literature to 1900

Beidler
TR 8:00-9:15

American Writers to 1820
Early American Literature from the Atlantic World to the early National Era. Figures covered include Smith, Bradford, Winthrop, Rowlandson, Bradstreet, Wigglesworth, Taylor, Cooke, Edwards, Woolman, Byrd, Knight, Equiano, Franklin, Crevecoeur, Paine, Freneau, Wheatley, Barlow, Tyler, Foster, Bryant, and Irving. Texts include a variety of genres, both literary and popular. Tests include a midterm and a final, each consisting of 20 major IDs. To improve expository prose skills, out-of-class assignments include two short (2-3 page) critical essays.

EN 344-001: Major Authors 1660-1900

Weiss
TR 12:30-1:45

Jane Austen
Jane Austen was certainly a respected author in her own day, but she has now reached an extraordinary level of popularity. In today’s Austen craze, however, in addition to being subjected to sea monsters and zombies, she been misinterpreted, underestimated, and overly simplified in other ways. The goal of this course is to give students—dedicated Austen fans and new initiates alike—an understanding of Austen’s work that combines depth with breadth. To this end, the course will explore Austen’s formal innovations and intellectual commitments. In particular, we will look at how Austen used novelistic conventions to explore the ethics of interpersonal relationships, the stresses of social class, and the tension between individual desire and responsibility to others. Students will read all six of Austen’s published novels, as well as a few unpublished, shorter works. Short secondary readings will help students develop an understanding of the social, economic, and literary context of Austen’s career. Discussion in this course will be based on careful, close readings of Jane Austen’s novels, and all students will be expected to participate regularly.

EN 348-001: Romantic Literature

Tedeschi
MW 4:30-5:45

This course provides a survey of literature written during the British Romantic period (roughly 1789-1832), a period marked by intense political turmoil, rapid social change, and an evolving literary field. The course considers literature in several genres, including poetry, the novel, and nonfiction prose; introduces many of the period’s most influential authors, including Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, and Keats; and provides an introduction to the social, political, and intellectual history of the Romantic period.

Literature, Post-1900

EN 350-001: Topics in African American Lit

Harris
M 3:00-5:30

The Promised Land: African American Literature and Urban Spaces
Throughout their history on American soil, African Americans have believed that the northern part of the United States was a freer place for them to dwell than in the slavery-infested, then Jim Crow era, discriminatory and violent South. They especially believed this of large cities such as New York and Chicago, as they envisioned opportunities that awaited them if they just applied themselves. But what happens to that dream of freedom? Was it truly realized once blacks moved to the cities? Did they achieve economic, educational, and social equality? This course will examine several classic works in which African American writers depict characters in northern, urban environments. In novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, and visual arts, African American creative artists illustrate the challenges and shortcomings, and sometimes the successes, of African Americans on northern, urban territory.
Required texts for the course:

  • Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (1963)
  • Alice Childress, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich (1973)
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902)
  • Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
  • Langston Hughes, The Return of Semple, ed. Donna Akiba Harper (1994)
  • James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, 1927)
  • Tayari Jones, Leaving Atlanta (2002)
  • Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
  • Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog, Underdog (2001)
  • James Van Der Zee, Selections from The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)
  • August Wilson, Fences (1986)
  • Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

The course will be run by lecture and discussion, with occasional reports from students. Students will be expected to complete two short research papers (6-8 pages), in-class quizzes, a mid-semester examination, and a final examination.

EN 362-001: Topics in British Lit, 1900 to 1945

McNaughton
MW 3:00-4:15

In the first half of the last century, British writers contended with the rise of authoritarian politics across Europe and in the Soviet Union. Some, like Christopher Isherwood, wrote about their experiences in Nazi Germany. Others, such as George Orwell, documented the Spanish civil war, and later wrote dystopian novels of warning, as would Aldous Huxley. Ezra Pound wrote the Pisan Cantos while incarcerated for giving radio broadcasts for Mussolini. What about William Butler Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Gertrude Stein? Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett? Do their works reflect the pressures that propaganda, aestheticized political vision, and, finally, war exerted on language, art, and everyday experience? Let’s find out. The professor expects robust participation and a number of essays.

EN 364: Modern Drama

Crank
TR 12:30-1:45

Modern Drama: The Empire Talks Back
This version of MODERN DRAMA is a bit different from a conventional “survey of the major American, British, European, and African plays from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” In this class, we’ll be looking at dramatic texts from the 19th-21st centuries that write/talk/dialogue with dramatic texts from other authors, historical moments, time periods, ethnicities, sexualities, and nationalities. We’ll be especially interested in themes of empire and colony and tropes of crossing/transversing/transacting in the dramatic texts we read. Some works might include: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Dybbuk, Zoo Story, Betrayal, Buried Child, Dutchman, The America Play, Seven Guitars, Cloud Nine, Marisol, Mulatto, and Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

EN 367-001: Postcolonial Writing in English

Iheka
TR 11:00-12:15

The 20th century was marked by the colonial condition which not only altered the invading countries but also the colonized societies disrupted as a consequence of forced contact. Postcolonial literature then is a genre/rubric that accounts for the ensemble of texts that colonized people have produced to articulate their subjectivities, illuminate vectors of colonial oppression, and to demonstrate the manner in which neocolonial forms of exploitation characterize the contemporary age. Focusing on texts from Africa, a continent significantly impacted by the colonial encounter, this course tracks the responses to the colonial moment in literature as well as the manner in which the writings grapple with post-independent realities of the societies they represent. Class readings will draw from the various regions of Sub Saharan Africa in order to reflect the diversity and complexity of the continent. We will read the works of Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, NoViolet Bulawayo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others.

Directed Studies

EN 329-001 and 002: Directed Studies

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

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Creative Writing

EN 408-002: Adv. Creative Writing

Wyatt
MW 3:00-4:15

Writing for Children (Playwriting, Multi-Genre)
The early 21st century has been called a golden age of children’s literature, and there has never been a time with more opportunities for writers able to appeal to young people. Not to mention, writing for kids is itself a joy: their capacity for wonder, their love of play and pleasure, coupled with their innate curiosity and ability to grasp complex material gives writers an amazing range of possibilities. In this course you will study how to reach and engage children through story and image and in addition will produce work intended for an audience of very real local children. The first part of the semester will be devoted to writing three short plays (aimed at elementaryaged kids) based on events from Tuscaloosa and Alabama state history. This collaboration with the Department of Theater & Dance will culminate in campus and community performances in the Spring of 2018. The balance of the semester will be spent exploring other forms of writing for children such as picture and chapter books, film, and television.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 408-003: Adv. Creative Writing

Coryell
MW 3:00-4:15

Advanced Fiction Writing: The Novel
In this class we will deconstruct the novel-writing process, and move from brainstorming ideas all the way to workshopping books-in-progress. No matter the genre you’re looking to write, you’ll find this course an invaluable aid to developing a new or existing project. We will read and discuss a couple of novels in order to help inspire the writing process, and discuss the many challenges of writing longform narrative and strategies for overcoming them. Workshops will occur throughout the semester and novel sections will be turned in regularly. The goal of this course is not to write a perfect, complete text, but rather to learn how to forgive yourself for bad sentences and to do a lot of writing. You can expect to end the semester with a partial or completed draft of a novel, to have a plan for revising or finishing it in hand, and to understand how the publishing process works for the particular market niche your book occupies.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 408-004: Adv. Creative Writing

Rawlings
TR 2:00-3:15

Writing Comedy (Prose Genre)
For Plato, comedy was a contaminant that belonged to the “lower orders” and therefore worked against the production of an ideal citizen in an ideal state. In Aristotle’s Poetics, he establishes an opposition between tragedy and comedy and conceives of the latter as a “low art” associated with error, inferiority and failure to hold up moral virtues. Yet from ancient agrarian rituals and fertility rites, to Shakespeare’s fools, to the Restoration’s comedy of manners, to Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball, to “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” comedy has persisted, changed and thrived. This course will focus specifically on comedy and contemporary writing. We will explore a variety of comic genres and modes and consider the many functions of comedy, from entertainment to political and cultural critique. In the process, we will experiment with a variety of comic writing techniques and styles. Everyone will tell a joke or two.

EN 408-005: Adv. Creative Writing

Staples
TR 11:00-12:15

Writing Climate Change (Multi-Genre)
According to Rebecca Solnit, “Climate change…will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumour, and being prepared to adjust our worldview.” Our contemporary predicament demands that we’re at once precise and imaginative thinkers, and in this course, we’ll realize together how writing can help us meet these challenges with heart, vision, and even, somehow, humor. Assignments will range from writing a unique speculative apocalypse narrative to a nonfiction oral presentation to a poem in 12 lines that has the entire world in it. Course texts may include 10:04 (Ben Lerner), The Stone Gods (Jeannette Winterson), and the anthology Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change.

EN 408-006: Adv. Creative Writing

P. White
TR 3:30-4:45

Chaos Aesthetics (Multi-Genre)
This advanced course in creative writing will focus on the aesthetics and forms of chaos, from the astounding structures of fractals and strange attractors to the tipping points of complex systems. We will read popular science explanations of chaos theory and literary texts that exemplify chaotic turbulence. Students will engage chaos as a subject of their writing and also seek out new forms of poetry and prose that model chaotic structures, deploy randomness as a path to order, and break open systems of composition. In addition to in-class exercises and responses to assigned readings, students will produce four major pieces of creative work: (1) a long poem or series of poems; (2) a short story; (3) a lyric essay or memoir; and (4) a piece incorporating four dimensions.

EN 408-007: Adv. Creative Writing

L. Wilson
TR 2:00-4:30

Advanced Poetry Writing: The Sonnet
After spending time with Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Spenser, we’ll see what writers of the last century—among them, Rilke, cummings, Brooks, Lowell, Heaney, Berryman, and Dove—and those publishing today have done with this classic form. Among recent works we’ll study are Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005) and sequences in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2007) and Samiya Bashir’s forthcoming Field Studies (2017). Essayist-scholar Anne Fadiman once posited: “A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.” Not only are these linked little songs not too hard to master, they just may be the music we need in times like these, with so many uncertainties and myriad subtleties to mine.

EN 408-008: Adv. Creative Writing

Oliu
TR 9:30-10:45

Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing
The burgeoning of creative nonfiction has spawned several sub-genres including memoir, the personal essay, the journalistic essay, and the lyric essay. This class is an experiment in these sub-genres of creative nonfiction. This class is a course in contemporary literature, approached from a creative writer’s perspective. In order to learn a form, you must read widely in that form, to get a sense for at least some of its various possibilities. You will be reading quite a bit of challenging work, nonfiction that works in ways with which you may not be familiar. You will also write work that challenges your own preconceptions of prose. You are invited to play: the word “essay” means “to attempt”, so consider this course a whirlwind tour in telling the stories of ourselves and others. We will seek to create our own definitions of nonfiction by reading various writers in the genre, modeling our own writing efforts on their work, and reading and critiquing each other’s pieces in a workshop setting.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 408-320: Adv. Creative Writing

Felt
T 5:00-7:30

Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing
Writing well, like pitching well or drumming well, requires practice; this semester you’ll work at practicing five things: reading, thinking, researching, talking about your work, and revising. These five skills will provide the framework around which this course will be built, a framework that you’ll use to learn more about your writing process. During the first few weeks of class you’ll read and respond to examples of exemplary published nonfiction. The rest of the course will be devoted to workshopping student writing. Please note that this is a nonfiction course; you’ll be expected to turn in 20 polished pages of nonfiction prose by the end of the term. Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

Advanced Studies in Literature

EN 411-001: Adv. Comparitive/Multicultural Lit

Yoon
TR 12:30-1:45

Anatomy of a Bestseller
What makes a novel a bestseller? Is it memorable characters? A scintillating subject matter? Provocative descriptions? A masterful plot? In order to answer these questions this seminar will work to assemble the ‘bag of tricks’ many authors use in creating narratives that resonate with both the reader and the market. Of particular interest will be the distinctions between audiences (national vs. international) and registers (high vs. low). For example, what is the difference between ‘literary’ and ‘mass-paperback’ bestsellers? Are all bestsellers just hard-boiled detective novels? What makes a bestseller ‘high-brow’? Readings will range from classic narrative theorists like Aristotle, Vladimir Propp and Roland Barthes, to recent books on plot by Christopher Booker, Jodie Archer, and Mathew Jocker. Using narrative theory, we will dissect popular novels from world literature in order to sketch the anatomy of a bestseller.

EN 422-001: Adv. Studies in American Lit

Beidler
TR 9:30-10:45

American Renaissance
An expanded study of the period frequently considered America’s first great literary flourishing, with emphasis on relationships between elite and popular print cultures. Figures covered include Emerson, Poe, Longfellow, Sigourney, Hawthorne, Douglass, Thoreau, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Texts include a variety of genres, both literary and popular. Tests include a midterm and a final, each consisting of 20 major IDs. To improve expository prose skills, out-of-class assignments include two short (3-5 page) critical essays.

EN 433-001: Adv. Studies in British Lit

Wittman
MW 3:00-4:15

In this course we will read fiction and autobiographical work by a range of British Modernists. We will read, among others, works by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence. We may read two works by the same author in order to understand the evolution of style over time.

EN 433-002: Adv. Studies in British Lit

Ulmer
TR 12:30-1:45

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats
This course provides a perspective on the origins and development of English Romanticism. It features the poetry of two writers often credited with originating the Romantic movement— William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and moves then to a second generation Romantic poet, John Keats, who pursued his career in part by engaging and adapting the work of his great Romantic precursors. The course will attempt to read major poems closely, spending a week on some of them, and will require reading quizzes, two lengthy research papers, and a final exam. Course text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edition, Volume D, The Romantic Period (ISBN 978-0-393-91252-4).

EN 444-001 (WS 430): Adv. Study Lit/Critical Theory

Purvis
TR 2:00-3:15

Heteronormativity
Heteronormativity asserts that there is only one way to be, which is straight; and there is only one way to be straight. Whether we identify as straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pan-/poly-/bi- /asexual, or otherwise (queer), we have something to gain from an interrogation of the workings of heteronormativity, where all people are assigned a sex at birth (from a set of two choices), and all people are expected to perform one of two established sets of “complementary” gender roles based on their supposed “nature.” The perfect alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality is impossible for anyone; and the effects of sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism in the realms of sexuality and gender compromise and threaten everyone in many aspects of their lives (though of course some are compromised and threatened more than others). Through the study of the contributions of early sex-radical feminists, such as Gayle Rubin and Adrienne Rich, as well as a host of contemporary queer and transgender theorists, this course takes Michael Warner’s definition of “queer”—“resistance to regimes of the normal”—as the starting point for an examination of straight sex, or the “many heterosexualities” of which Christine Overall and Lynne Segal speak; the limits of the hetero-/homo binary; the workings of hetero-and homo-normativity; and “sex-positive” practices and politics. It investigates the “surprisingly short history of heterosexuality,” tracing the establishment of a category, “straight,” as well as its “constitutive outside.” It examines both the fear of queer and the need for queer politics in a time where many normative subjects continue to ignore and reify their privilege through entrenched practices and politics, while the disenfranchised, seduced by inclusion, too often embrace assimilationist agendas and politics. An assortment of authors, including those above and well as Cathy Cohen, Hortense Spillers, Dorothy Allison, Hanne Blank, and others highlight the ways in which sexual regimes intersect with those of gender, race, and class oppression and examine the workings of normative sexual discourses, which reward white, gender-normative, upper and middle-class persons with disproportionate levels of privilege and power. Through this study of key feminist and queer theory texts, students will develop advanced undergraduate research skills and gain a substantial foundation for further study, including graduate work in this area.
Prerequisites: Women’s Studies: WS 200: “Introduction to Women’s Studies” or equivalent; English: 12 hours of English study

Linguistics

EN 423-001: History of English Language

Davies
TR 11:00-12:15

This course is an introduction to the external history of the English language along with the study of the accompanying internal changes in structure. It considers questions such as the following: Why does Southern English have to propose “y’all” for a plural “you”? And while we’re at it, what happened to “thou”? What’s the deal with the subjunctive? How did Scandinavian pronouns (they, their, them) creep into English? Why can’t we ask “Have you not heard?” without sounding weird? Who decided that we can’t say “Ain’t nothin’ like ‘em nowhere” in standardized English? Since 1066 was called “the Norman Conquest,” why aren’t we speaking French instead of English? What’s going on with, like, quotatives, “and he was like….!”? Why can’t everybody open their book? How is English being affected by globalization and the internet?

EN 424-001: Adv. English Grammar

Liu
TR 12:30-1:45

This advanced grammar course examines the structure and usage of the English language, including morphology (word formation/structure), syntax (the patterns of sentences), and discourse (the context in which utterances are patterned and made meaningful). We will review both traditional and contemporary approaches to English grammar, such as cognitive grammar, construction grammar, lexico-grammar, pattern grammar, and systemic functional grammar. Through reading, research projects, and discussion, students will attain a solid understanding of the English language’s structure and usage. Writing proficiency within this discipline is required for a passing grade in this course.

Independent/Directed Courses

EN 429-001 and 002: Directed Readings

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

EN 430-001 through 004: English Internship

An on- or off-campus training position in which students use the skills they have gained as English majors and enhance their employment opportunities after graduation. Interns work approximately 10 hours a week, holding responsible positions with, among others, Alabama Heritage, Alabama Alumni Magazine, and the Tuscaloosa Public Defender’s Office. Applications for the Enlish Internship should be submitted to the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English.
Prerequisites: English major, 3.00 grade point average, and second-semester junior or senior standing in the semester in which the internship is held. EN 430 does not count towards the 400- level major electives.

EN 499-001 through 011: Honors Thesis

Open only to students in the Honors Program in English. The Honors Thesis in English course is an individualized, directed readings class that culminates in a 30-50 pp. thesis. It is the final required course for the Honors in English program. Each student enrolled will work individually with a faculty mentor.

Advanced Studies in Writing

EN 455-001: Adv. Studies in Writing

Cardon
TR 11:00-12:15

Designed for advanced English majors, EN 455 is a special topics course that focuses on the process of writing. Students will read, discuss, and analyze a series of texts about food. Most texts will be found in the reader, Eating Words, or Anthony Bourdain’s collection Medium Raw; we will also read Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest, as well as additional materials. These readings will prepare students for different modes of writing by raising questions for reflection and discussion:

  1. How does what we eat affect who we are?
  2. How important are culinary traditions in family and community? Why are they important?
  3. How can food writing depict tastes, textures, and aromas for readers?
  4. What are the ethical responsibilities of the modern cook and consumer?
  5. What are the benefits of decreasing independence on the food industry? (By cooking from scratch, by gardening, by foraging, by shopping at local markets, etc.?)

EN 455-002: Adv. Studies in Writing

A. Wilson
MW 3:00-4:15

What is the relationship between ideas and experience? How do our conceptual structures interact with our daily lives? This advanced writing studies course engages students in various forms of what Theodor Adorno calls “critical self-reflection.” Throughout the semester, students will write and rewrite a series of personal essays through a variety of conceptual lenses. These conceptual parameters, which we will construct through readings in critical theory, philosophy, and aesthetics, will compel students to reclassify and reassess the “meaning” of individual experiences. This work, while certainly lending itself to the possibility of personal discovery, serves as a powerful foundation for the intellectual and practical work of writing in a theoretical milieu. Specifically, this class will examine the inextricable role of “writing” in the construction and interpretation of personal experience. Students will leave this course with a deeper understanding of textual theory, their own writing processes, and the creative interplay between description, exposition, and argumentation.

Senior Seminar

EN 400-359, 361: Senior Seminar

Gadsden Campus

Designed to provide advanced undergraduates with a small-section, participatory, rigorous course that demands both the use of critical sources and the writing of a long paper. The department views these seminars as graduate courses for undergraduates. Topics will vary from semester to semester. A student may take only one senior seminar. Prerequisites: Twenty-four hours toward the English major.

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Spring 2018

Literature, Pre-1700

EN 330-001: Chaucer and Medieval Lit

A. Cook
MWF 10:00-10:50

Examines works of the Old and Middle English Periods, the formative years of British literature. Works from pre-conquest England may include Beowulf, Bede’s History of the English Church, and poems from the Exeter and Vercelli manuscripts. The major works from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales.

EN 333-001: Shakespeare

R. McConnell
TR 12:30-1:45

This course is a broad introduction to Shakespearean drama, and places primary emphasis on language: most of our time and energy in this course will be devoted to the analysis and interpretation of Shakespeare’s words, and to understanding and appreciating their pleasures and complexities. Additionally, we will be giving substantial attention to matters of stagecraft, genre, literary influence, and historical context, and to how these relate to Shakespeare’s writing style.

EN 335-001: Milton

D. Ainsworth
MWF 11:00-11:50

Milton and Poetry
An introduction to Milton’s English poetry and its many complexities. Anchored by an intensive investigation of Paradise Lost, Milton’s great epic, this class will address the technical and theoretical aspects of Milton’s writing as well as discussing the underpinnings of its meaning. We’ll master together some of the best and most intimidating poetry ever written. This year’s course topic will be “Milton and Poetry.” We will think about how Milton works as a poet, talk about the design of his poetry, and even discuss his work with guest poets who will be joining us over the course of the semester. Students interested in creative writing may find this course topic of particular interest to them. We’ll also be the beneficiaries of The Edifice Project, which I will explain on the first day and also describe in some detail at the end of the syllabus. In effect, this class is designed to take your thinking and ideas seriously outside the bounds of this single semester. For some of you, your work will be preserved for use in future EN 335 classes, just as the work of the last class on Milton, Milton and Women (and the previous classes’ topics) will come into play this semester. Over time, groups of EN 335 students can together construct a larger understanding of Milton through collective effort and investigation of specific aspects or questions in Milton’s work. I expect someone from the previous class will pay us a visit over the course of the semester to talk about Milton with you.

Literature, 1700-1900

EN 340-001: American Literature to 1900

S. Blount
TR 2:00-3:15

A cross-genre survey of American literature from its beginnings to 1900. Authors may include Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry James and Mark Twain.

EN 344-001: Major Authors, 1660-1990

S. Tedeschi
MW 3:00-4:15

Byron and Shelby
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron became close friends during the summer of 1816, which they spent in self-exile along the shores of Lake Geneva discussing literature late into the night. The two poets shared much in common: both had slipped out of the country under suspicions of gross immorality, and both were champions of liberal political causes. Their literary careers both reveal the logic of the literary field during the Regency, albeit for very different reasons. As the best-selling poet of the age and a heavily-marketed icon, Byron artfully designed his works to capitalize on, and at the same time critique, the commercial logic of the literary marketplace. As a little-read author variously publishing scandalous pamphlets, novels, and poetry at his own expense, Shelley passed through the field as if he had set out programmatically to test the moral, economic, and political limits of what could be published. This course seeks to provide students with an advanced knowledge of the major works of Byron and Shelley and of the place of poetry in the literary field during the Romantic period. Readings will include Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Beppo, and Don Juan and Shelley’s Queen Mab, Alastor, and Prometheus Unbound.

EN 347-001: English Lit During the Enlightenment

D. Weiss
TR 2:00-3:15

Many of the ideas that structure modern society had their origin in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that lasted through much of the eighteenth century. Our own ideas about democracy, education, human psychology, secularism, science, economics, and gender, for example, all had their beginnings in the Enlightenment. As a consequence of the intellectual ferment, the eighteenth century was a period of profound change in Great Britain, as new developments in philosophical thought seeped into intellectual culture and prompted fundamental shifts in how people understood themselves and the social world. In order to access these shifts, the course is divided into four thematic parts: Science and Philosophy; Global Expansion and the Slave Trade; Faith, Feeling, and the Imagination; and Women and Society. Working with novels, poems, short stories, plays, and essays, students will examine the ways in which the intellectual and ideological transformations of the Enlightenment were explored and explained through literature.

Literature, Post-1900

EN 350-001/AAST 350-001: Topics in African-American Lit

Cardon
MW 4:30-5:45

African American Literature and Movement: City, Country, Suburb, and Beyond
Readings include works by James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Danzy Senna, and Octavia Butler, among others. Flight, relocation, pilgrimage––twentieth-century African-American literature has a legacy of movement from one space to another. Characters travel from North to South or South to North; from city to suburb; from the U.S. to the Caribbean, Europe or Africa and back. As we read these works, we ask: What visions of the American city emerge? How do the writers contrast life in the city with life in the suburb or country? How does a pilgrimage abroad change a narrator’s rendering of “home”? Does moving from one space to another connote flight and avoidance or growth and self-knowledge? Students are expected to complete reading quizzes, a literary analysis (4-6 pages), a midterm, a final research paper (7-8 pages), and a class presentation.

EN 361-001: Topics in American Lit, 1945-Present

H. White
TR 11:00-12:15

Tolstoy said “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This course will examine the idea of family in post-WWII America by reading a selection of the era’s most important fiction and poetry on the subject. As we will see, post-war writers have come back and back to the idea of family as a lens through which to write about ideas of identity, including race, religion, and sexuality. It has also been a shaping force in our contemporary understanding of the individual as both a member of, and a figure apart from, the innumerable groupings that comprise our intimate lives. We will read Philip Roth, Gloria Naylor, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Franzen, among others.

EN 363-001: Topics in British Lit, 1945-Present

J. McNaughton
TR 8:00-9:15

Contemporary Irish Writing
In this course we study major works of contemporary Irish literature. We cover a sweep of extraordinary poetry, theater, and fiction, as well as some important critical essays, artworks, and film. Writers could include the likes of Flann O’Brien, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Dermot Healey, Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry for fiction; Samuel Beckett, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, for theater; and for poetry, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, Nuala NíDhomhnaill, others besides. Students will write three analytical essays.

EN 373-001: Women in Literature

E. Wittman
MW 4:30-5:45

Women’s Literature: On the Margins
In this course we will survey novels, short fiction, and prose non-fiction by women writing about the margins of society. Topics will include sexuality, race, mental illness, discrimination, violence, prostitution, and liberation. We will consider works by both British and American writers. Readings may include Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin, Patricia Highsmith, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Conner, Joan Didion, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, and Zadie Smith.

Creative Writing

EN 301-001 through 004: Prose Tour

Various Staff

Close study of the basic principles for composing creative prose. Reading and assigned writing experiments in a broad range of prose strategies. Required of all creative writing minors.
Prerequisite: EN 200 (This prerequisite is never waived).

EN 303-001 through 003: Poetry Tour

Various Staff

Close study of basic principles for composing poetry. Reading and assigned writing experiments in a broad range of poetic styles. Required of all creative writing minors.
Prerequisite: EN 200 (This prerequisite is never waived).

EN 303-004: Poetry Tour

L. Wilson
T 2:00-4:30

We will read and experiment with a variety of poetic strategies and forms as you begin the journey of sorting out the sense of self you had when you arrived from the varying points of view you’ll have an opportunity to inhabit. Short lectures on craft and mechanics, writing exercises, and discussion of readings will help make sense of your evolving worldviews, artistic voices, and creative ideas. Peer workshops aim to demystify the revision process as you improve your facility with written language and learn the importance of respectfully giving and receiving constructive feedback on written art’s resonance with an audience. We will cover a vast survey of formal poetic conventions emerging from historical & contemporary traditions in the West & East. After we develop facility with key terms—including image/object, introspection, voice, the line, syntax, prosody, etc.—we will experiment with traditional forms (Shakespearean & Petrarchan sonnet, villanelle, sestina, haiku, abecedarian, ballad stanza, etc.) as well as those you might not have encountered, including the blues ballad, ghazal, bop, gigan, and others that have emerged from the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Conceptual poetry movements.
Prerequisite: EN 200 (This prerequisite is never waived).

Linguistics

EN 320-001: Introduction to Linguistics

Popova
TR 9:30-10:45

Introduction to the study of language, including subjects such as language acquisition, variation, and origins. The system of sounds, syntax, and meaning are illustrated in English and other languages.

EN 320-002: Introduction to Linguistics

Popova
TR 11:00-12:15

Introduction to the study of language, including subjects such as language acquisition, variation, and origins. The system of sounds, syntax, and meaning are illustrated in English and other languages.

EN 321-001: Linguistic Approaches to Grammer

Worden
TR 2:00-3:15

A study of English grammar integrating principles from linguistic theory with structural approaches to grammar. The course includes a focus on the expectations of grammatical usage in different contexts and an understanding of how to apply this knowledge in a pedagogical setting. This course is a prerequisite for EN 423, EN 424, EN 425, EN 466.

Methodology

EN 300-001: Introduction to English Studies

A. Pionke
TR 12:30-1:45

Designed primarily for English majors, especially for those at the early stages of fulfilling the major requirements, this course seeks to acquaint you with the tools, techniques and critical attitude necessary for in-depth literary study. Students majoring in other disciplines are also welcome, of course, and will find their reading, writing and analytical skills enhanced as a result. Our collective approach to the study of literature will focus on close, rather than voluminous, reading and careful analysis in the form of papers and others writing assignments. We will touch on research techniques and the varieties of literary criticism, but will concentrate most of our attention on mastering the vocabulary and techniques of textual analysis. Lest all this sounds frighteningly intimidating or, worse yet, frightfully boring, rest assured that we shall set our shoulders to an attractive wheel indeed, and that our time in and out of the classroom will be spent reading and discussing stories, poems and plays chosen both to instruct and to delight.

EN 300-002: Introduction to English Studies

L. Cardon
TR 2:00-3:15

You’ve perhaps read The Great Gatsby, but how would you teach it? Why, do you think, is it so important that nearly every high school requires its students to read it? What do we do with famous works of literature? Why does literature even matter in the Real World? EN 300 is designed primarily for English majors, but also for anyone interested in literary analysis. This class aims to:

  • Provide an introduction to methods employed in our discipline for in-depth literary study;
  • Enrich skills in critical reading, writing, and analysis;
  • Introduce a range of critical and theoretical approaches to primary texts;
  • Help students to identify which of these approaches fits their style, their interests, and the nuances of a particular literary work;
  • Enhance students’ ability to close read texts in the form of papers and other assignments;
  • Teach the vocabulary, techniques, and research methods associated with literary analysis.

To become more adept at reading and interpreting literary texts, students will begin the course by revisiting a canonical work of literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby) and learning about different methods for approaching, analyzing, and writing. From there, students will learn to apply these critical methods to other genres, including poetry, drama, and other texts and media.

Rhetoric and Composition

EN 309-001: Advanced Expository Writing

E. McKnight
TR 11:00-12:15

Study and practice in methods of exposition, explanation and explication, logic and persuasion, definition and analogy, analysis and evaluation. Enrollment is limited to 15. Writing proficiency within this discipline is required for a passing grade in this course.

EN 317-001: Writing Center Practicum

A. Dayton
TR 11:00-12:15

Students must apply and be accepted to do the Writing Center. For information on how to apply, go to: https://writingcenter.ua.edu/jobs/ This course will introduce you to the principles and practices of Writing Center work. The course is structured as a practicum, in which you will do some reading and reflecting on composition theory, and some hands-on work in the Center, including observations and consultations. In the first eight weeks of the semester we will focus on preparing you to work in the Center; in the second eight weeks, you will do three hours of consulting per week. In this course, you can expect to read and reflect on issues related to the study and teaching of writing, to analyze your own literacy experiences, and to develop a range of strategies to help you work effectively with diverse students and texts. This course is required for students who wish to work for pay in the Writing Center; students who pass this course with an A or a B, and with excellent attendance, will be eligible to work for pay when the semester has ended.

EN 319-001 through 006: Technical Writing

Various Staff

Focuses on principles and practices of technical writing, including audience analysis, organization and planning, information design and style, usability testing, and collaborative writing. Special emphasis will be placed on composing instructions, various kinds of reporting such as investigative and feasibility studies, document design for technical presentations, proposals and collaborative composition.
Prerequisites: EN 101 and EN 102 (or equivalent) and junior standing.

Special Topics in Writing or Literature

EN 310-001: Special Topics in Writing

M. Presnall
TR 9:30-10:45

Creaturely Writing: Animals, Objects, the Dead, and the Divine
Over the last few decades, rhetoric has become an ecology within which human and non-human actors affect each other. This challenges the traditional view that places the knowing human at the center of “the rhetorical situation.” If I speak to a rock and don’t get a response, does that mean it doesn’t affect me, direct my movement? Does it invoke me? Does my cat? If my cat leaves a dead mouse on the step and I interpret it as a gift, have I missed a chance at communication? Rather than starting from a known purpose and thesis and advancing an argument, this class begins by questioning what we know and uses extrahuman relations to promote new thoughts and modes of expression. Writing with animals, objects, the dead, and the divine, we ask how “the human” affects and is affected, responds, and requires response.

EN 310-002: Special Topics in Writing

M. Meyers
TR 12:30-1:45

Writers in the Schools
This class will explore best practices in relation to teaching creative writing through in-schools and afterschool programs. Students will learn to generate innovative lesson plans for a variety of teaching settings and will gain practical experience by volunteering at one of Tuscaloosa WITS’ afterschool programs. Ideal for students interested in community engagement and/or considering careers in teaching and arts nonprofits.

EN 310-320: Special Topics in Writing

N. Blanchard
M 5:00-7:30

Techniques of Audio Storytelling
This class will explore best practices in relation to teaching creative writing through in-schools and afterschool programs. Students will learn to generate innovative lesson plans for a variety of teaching settings and will gain practical experience by volunteering at one of Tuscaloosa WITS’ afterschool programs. Ideal for students interested in community engagement and/or considering careers in teaching and arts nonprofits.

EN 311-001: Special Topics in Literature

Sasser
MWF 10:00-10:50

Children’s Literature
This course attempts to answer two outwardly simple questions: 1) What is a children’s book? (i.e., how can The Cat in the Hat, Little Women, and the Harry Potter series all possibly belong to the same genre?); and 2) Who decides what children get to read? (i.e., Why is children’s literature the only literary genre not written, purchased, marketed, and often not even read by its presumed audience?). These two questions will guide us through a “wild rumpus” of the major genres and conventions of literature for children, such as fairy tales, fantasy, poetry, picture books, adventure stories, domestic stories, and school stories. Further, we will spend much of the course discussing the complex relationships between author, distributor, parent, and child, as we reflect on how our readings challenge, confirm, and/or complicate constructions of Western childhood. In addition to several picture books on reserve at Gorgas, the required texts for the course may include:

  • Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  • Barrie, Peter and Wendy
  • Tatar, The Norton Critical Edition to the Classic Fairy Tales
  • Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends
  • Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen
  • Burnett, The Secret Garden
  • Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
  • Jarrell, The Bat-Poet
  • Keats, The Snowy Day
  • Block, Weetzie Bat
  • Lester, Black Folktales
  • Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
  • Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till
  • Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
  • Myers, Fallen Angels
  • Hintz and Tribunella, Reading Children’s Literature

Warning (Teaser?): Be aware! This course will engage directly and intellectually with often touchy subjects, such as sexuality, race, class, politics, aesthetics, and violence, and their relationship with children and children’s culture.

Directed Courses

EN 329: Directed Studies

Various Staff

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

EN 399-001: Honors Seminar in English

E. Wilson
M 3:00-5:30

If Shakespeare was the best, who were the rest? This course teaches advanced English research methods to prepare students for their future honors theses, in this instance deploying those methods to enable students to investigate the friendships and bitter rivalries among the network of dramatists who revolutionized the English stage in the age of Shakespeare. The primary texts of the course will be taken from the populous crowd of playwrights jockeying with Shakespeare for glory on the early modern stage. From famed rivalries with Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to competitive co-writers Middleton and Fletcher, to next-generation upstarts with bloodthirsty ideals like John Webster, students will meet Shakespeare’s competition, whose work they will explore through extensive critical engagement. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were among some of the earliest subjects of English literary critical attention, and as such, students can expect to encounter critical materials drawn not only from modern sources, but also from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, giving a broad wingspan to this preparatory thesis work. During the semester a class session will be devoted to a faculty-led set of lightning talks in the form of a roundtable to introduce students to professional research. The course will culminate in a symposium at which students will present their work in panels to one another, and be challenged to bring the critical process to life by engaging in question and answer sessions.

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Advanced Studies in Literature

EN 411-001: Adv. Studies Comparative/Multicultural Literature

Wittman
MW 3:00-4:15

World Literature
In this course, we will read seven critically acclaimed novels from around the world and investigate how literature arrives on the global stage. This course is run as a literary prizegranting committee loosely based on the Nobel Prize committee. Every student is a committee member. In this course, it is the students themselves who come up with their own evaluative criteria. Throughout the semester we will then debate—in class and anonymously—the merits of the seven novels. On the first day of class, students discuss what foreign language books they have read; on the last day, they debate and decide which of the novels should win the prize. This year we have the unique opportunity to spend classroom time with one of the award-winning writers.

EN 422-001: Adv. Studies in American Literature

N. Bilwakesh
TR 9:30-10:45

Scarlet Letters
This course takes as its starting point one seminal novel (The Scarlet Letter), and then looks at critical and creative responses to it in order to more broadly think about questions of originality, the use of history, repetition, and reclamation in American Literature. Major readings will include Nathanael Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; John Updike, Roger’s Version; Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School; Suzan-Lori Parks, The Red Letter Plays; and Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth.

EN 422-002: Adv. Studies in American Literature

J. Hubbs
TR 2:00-3:15

This course explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. Novels and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Gish Jen, and other writers are studied in the context of debates over slavery, national identity, women’s roles, immigration and assimilation, social mobility, sexual mores, consumer culture, and race relations. Paper assignments emphasize close reading techniques and process-oriented writing. Assigned literary critical readings include papers written by students in this class and subsequently published in The Explicator, a journal of text-based critical essays.

EN 422-003: Adv. Studies in American Literature

C. Smith
TR 2:00-3:15

Pirates, Cannibals, Slaves: ‘Black Sails’ and the Making of Early American (Counter-) Cultures
Perhaps no counterculture in world history stimulates the modern imagination more than does piracy. From the recent series Black Sails on the cable network Starz and the ever popular Disney franchise Pirates of the Caribbean to modern-day pirates attacking vessels off the coast of Somalia, images of pirate culture abound. This course, then, asks you to draw relationships between our modern-day fascination with pirates and some of the original manifestations of piracy, focusing especially on piracy in the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the course, you will interrogate questions such as the following: Who were the real pirates of the Caribbean and how did they differ from buccaneers and privateers? What place did they occupy in early American social circles? What made theirs a “counter” culture? To what/whom exactly were they counter? What was life like for pirates? Laws? Customs? Diet? Conditions aboard the ship and off? Why would anyone want to be a pirate – both in the past and present? Why, today, do we have such a fascination with this historical counterculture? Today, popular forms of piracy include downloading music and movies and hijacking planes and other structures. How, then, do space, place, and product determine the contours of piracy? In addition to the above points of inquiry, we will establish parallels among piracy and cannibalism and slavery. We will explore the three categories of identity to determine points of intersection and think about how and why these three groups were popular villains and monsters in the narratives early American writers told. Readings will include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the anonymous Female American, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and episodes of the Starz series Black Sails.

EN 433-001: Adv. Studies in British Literature

S. Tedeschi
MW 4:30-5:45

Toward a Romantic Theory of Poetic Communication
What is poetry? What does it do? And what is it for? Can poetry after the Enlightenment still claim to be the privileged medium for communicating whatever harmony or love subsists between humankind, the universe, and the gods? How did the Romantic poets adapt traditional claims of the privileges and powers of poetry in response to the social and intellectual pressures of middle modernity? This course considers these questions by studying of Romantic-period poetry and poetic theory, the deep roots of that theory, and selections of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century literary and communication theory. Readings may include Plato’s Symposium and Ion, Dante’s La Vita Nuova and excerpts from Il Convivio, Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy,” and excerpts from the work of David Hume and Adam Smith; poetry and essays by Coleridge (including Religious Musings and excerpts from the Biographia Literaria), Wordsworth (including Home at Grasmere and selections from the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes), Peacock (“The Four Ages of Poetry”), and Shelley (including Epipsychidion and A Defence of Poetry); and essays by Roman Jakobson, Raymond Williams, James Carey, John Guillory, and John Durham Peters. The course assignments prepare students to write a final research paper.

EN 444-001/WS 410-001: Adv. Studies in Literature Criticism & Theory

J. Purvis
TR 2:00-3:15

Essential Readings and Writings in Women’s Studies
If feminist scholars and practitioners actively contest essentialist narratives about women, expose the instability of the foundational category, women, and consistently draw attention to the intersectionality of oppressions within the vast interdisciplinary field traditionally known as Women’s Studies, what can we say of its “essence”? This course considers these and other challenges as it locates key texts and themes that are, among many, “essential” to the field of Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as central to feminist scholarship and praxis across disciplines. Course readings include “classic,” visionary texts and influential contributions by iconic authors, such as Angela Davis and Barbara Ehrenreich, literary writers, such as Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, as well as new and groundbreaking writings by contemporary authors, such as Ariel Levy and Roxane Gay. Through readings, class discussions, and writing assignments, students will become familiar with texts and debates central to the field of Women’s and Gender Studies. Students can look forward to becoming acquainted with major feminist themes and the fundamentals of feminist theory; gaining proficiency in advanced undergraduate research and writing skills; developing an awareness of how normative logics contribute to the subjection of women and other racial, sexual, and gender minorities; and discovering how feminist writers, past and present, have contributed to our understanding of these issues and have suggested possibilities for change or issued calls to action. Note: Writing proficiency is required for a passing grade in this course. Prerequisites: WS 200: “Introduction to Women’s Studies” (or equivalent) or permission of the professor. EN 444: 18 hours of English Study, including 6 hours at the 200 level and 6 hours at the 300 level.

EN 477-001: Adv. Studies in Literary Genre

D. Weiss
TR 11:00-12:15

Frightful Transitions: The British Gothic Novel
The horror genre as we know it today has its roots in British Gothic, a literary and artistic mode known for Medieval castles, underground passageways, supernatural occurrences, victimized women, and the heightened emotions of terror and awe. This course will focus on the Gothic novel and will ask questions linking issues of form to those of intellectual and social history in order to pinpoint the reasons for the emergence of this new fictional form at a particular place and time. Gothic fiction can be understood as a literary genre that embodied the shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism—a genre in which central contradictions between the culture of sensibility, which relied on passion and intuition, battled against the rationalist tradition of empiricism and intellectual skepticism. As a literary form that focused on persecuted women, Gothic fiction can also be seen as a genre that explored the female fears and feelings that came from living in a time in which ideas of domesticity and feminine propriety were becoming increasingly restrictive. Course readings will include influential Gothic novels such The Castle of Otranto, The Romance of the Forest, The Monk, Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights, as well as extracts of other primary texts and secondary sources available on Blackboard. Students can expect weekly reading quizzes, response papers, a short paper early in the semester, and a 10-page, research-based seminar paper due during finals week.

Advanced Studies in Writing

EN 455-001: Adv. Studies in Writing

K. Gardiner
TR 2:00-3:15

“Dirt Poor”
Designed for advanced English majors, this special topics course focuses on the process of writing, with a special emphasis on multimodal composition. This section includes experiential learning opportunities, and students will enhance their research and writing skills as they document and visualize historical and cultural landscapes of the Great Depression. Using a rhetoric text to guide writing and document-design activities, students will also read works such as James Agee’s Cotton Tenants and Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, while doing family research in Ancestry.com and archival research in the Hoole Special Collections and the Library of Congress photo collections. Course work includes composing in traditional, oral, visual, and digital formats.

EN 455-002: Adv. Studies in Writing

L. Cardon
TR 3:30-4:45

Global Foodways
Designed for advanced English majors, EN 455 is a special topics course that focuses on the process of writing. Our topic this semester is Global Foodways. The discussions and assignments are framed around the following questions: How do local foodways become a cuisine? Why, when we visit a foreign country, do we find the cuisine so different from the version back home? How do social, geographical, economic, and political factors shape the way a cuisine develops over time? Each student will select a cuisine to research, explore, and write about over the course of the semester, meanwhile contributing to a Global Foodways class website. In addition, students will read, discuss, and analyze a series of texts about food. Most texts will be found in our supplemental reading folder on Blackboard, or Anthony Bourdain’s collection Medium Raw; we will also read Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest, as well as additional materials.

Creative Writing

EN 408-001: Adv. Creative Writing

K. Waltman
MWF 11:00-11:50

This course will focus on young adult fiction, with particular attention to how young adult texts treat the “reality” of being a contemporary young adult—or how they build narrative without vampires or wizards at their disposal. We’ll examine how “realism” itself is often a loose term, especially in the y.a. genre, and how that what’s “real” may vary greatly from narrator to narrator. Of course, we’ll take our own shots at capturing the “real” in the young adult genre. Lastly, this does not exclude—for our reading or our writing—the fantastic or the speculative, even if for the purposes of contrast. Texts may include Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, PUSH by Sapphire, Feed by M.T. Anderson, and more.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

EN 408-002: Adv. Creative Writing

B. Guthrie
MW 3:00-4:15

Humor in Poetry
“Ours is an age in which Aristotle’s ranking of tragedy as superior to comedy becomes more and more suspect. Like other contemporary artists, comic poets use humor as a device ideally suited to capture the absurdities, enormities, and pathos of modern life,” says humorous poet Charles Harper Webb. This workshop will explore the presence of humor in contemporary poetry, supplementing and enriching our poetic models and exercises with recent critical texts. Topics will include basic humor techniques; the concept of dark humor, which reminds us of the pain and misery often underlying what we laugh at; humor as subversion—as method for expressing anger and rage; humor as method for opening discourse on taboo subjects; the similarities between poetry and stand-up comedy; humor as strategy in the live poetry reading. Students will produce original poems and occasional reading responses. Writers of all genres are welcome— your serious memoirs and fictions can become seriously funny poems. No joke! Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

EN 408-003: Adv. Creative Writing

W. Rawlings
TR 2:00-3:15

Forms of Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction Workshop
Students in this class will comprise a close-knit and supportive workshop that functions to provide specific and constructive feedback on short stories we’ll work on together, from inception to revision to editing stages. We’ll explore craft issues such as point of view, narrative voice, structure, and ways to innovate and develop our skills as fiction writers. Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303.

EN 408-004: Adv. Creative Writing

E. Parker
TR 9:30-10:45

Immersion Writing
During the emergence of “The New Journalism” in the 1960s and ‘70s, with writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and University of Alabama alumnus Gay Talese, straight nonfiction reportage began adopting the techniques of fiction––dialogue, scene-setting, intimate personal details, the use of interior monologue, metaphorical depth, etc.–– and abandoned the sterile objective perspective of “newsworthy subjects” in favor of turning the lens toward less traditional subjects, even the journalists themselves, and a whole new genre of immersion writing evolved. We will look at the evolution of this trend from the 1960s and earlier, following it to the contemporary explosion of immersion project literature in magazines, books, radio, podcasts, documentaries, and blogs. As writers, we will immerse ourselves in our own communities and lives to find subjects and produce essays, blogs, audio pieces, and/or short documentaries. We will be what Gay Talese calls “nonfiction writer[s] pursuing the literature of reality.”
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

EN 408-005: Adv. Creative Writing

A. McWaters
TR 11:00-12:15

Comics artist Lynda Barry says that “pictures can help us find words to help us find images.” This class will explore that dynamic relationship of the visual and the verbal via the rapidly growing and increasingly influential world of graphic novels. Beginning with the literary and historic precedents of the genre, we will move through a series of works that show the range of artistic and storytelling approaches to such common cultural themes as sexuality, class, race, violence, religion and politics. Texts will include classic nonfiction graphic novels like Maus and Persepolis, as well as newer graphic fictions like Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and Richard McGuire’s Here. We will explore examples from the various subgenres within the comics world: manga, fantasy/sci fi, superhero, as well as the burgeoning field of web comics. With all these resources at hand, we will seek the best expressions of madness and happiness that writing + illustration may hold for the individual writers enrolled. Come as you are, whatever your level of drawing skill, whatever your prior knowledge of comics. This class will be a place to experiment with the form, from weekly visual exercises ranging from collage to selfportraiture, to the eventual collaborative creation of a graphic novel/comic of your own.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

EN 408-006: Adv. Creative Writing

H. Staples
TR 12:30-1:45

[Re]Marks of the Beast
“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.” –Heinrich Hein In this course, we will asking questions like: How do writers query the beast as a cultural trope with political implications? What forms, styles, and practices might emerge from the position of beast? What does it mean invent a new beast? What does it mean to write our inner beast? Prompts inviting collage, syntactical disruption, documentary poetics, nonlinear narrativity, fairytale retellings, and other strategies will help writers track the beast across genres. Readings may include Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar; The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter; Bestiary, Lily Hoang; Humanimal, Bhanu Kapil; In The Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae; and Whereas, Layli Long Solider, as well as excerpts from Dante’s Inferno and Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud. #rrrrrrTiderrrrrrrr
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

EN 408-007: Adv. Creative Writing

P. White
TR 3:30-4:45

Exploding Forms (poetry writing/workshop)
Students will engage with and explode a number of traditional forms (such as the sestina, the terza rima, and the decima) as well as found poetry and neo-forms invented by the students themselves. The class demands: fearless writing, close attention to conventions (before breaking them), a desire for poetic community, and a willingness to support (through helpful critique) the work of others. Some outside activities likely.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

EN 408-008: Adv. Creative Writing

H. Felt
T 2:00-4:30

Family Ties: Writing the Queer Family (Multi-genre)
Queer folks have long been creating their own family structures, so in this class we’ll read and watch recent texts in which authors create, imagine, and analyze their chosen families. Some questions we’ll consider: what happens to a family when one (or several) of its members comes out; how do race, socioeconomic class, ability and geography influence an LGBTQ+ person’s ability to openly move through the world; are queer families providing models for how the larger human family might evolve? You’ll be expected to write three essays, with the understanding that by the end of the semester you’ll produce at least 20 pages of polished prose. Our range of texts will be wide, including fiction, nonfiction, graphic memoir/novels, YA, and at least one film. Possible texts include: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out for, The Narrow Door, Intolerable, Since I Laid My Burden Down, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, Jam on the Vine, and The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
Prerequisites: EN 200 and EN 301 and EN 303

Linguistics

EN 423-001/EN 523: History of English

C. Davies
TR 11:00-12:15

This course considers questions such as the following: Why does Southern English have to propose “y’all” for a plural “you”? And while we’re at it, what happened to “thou”? What’s the deal with the subjunctive? How did Scandinavian pronouns (they, their, them) creep into English? Why can’t we ask “Have you not heard?” without sounding weird? Since the momentous event in 1066 was called “the Norman Conquest,” why aren’t we speaking French instead of English? Who decided that we can’t say “Ain’t nothin’ like ‘em nowhere” in standardized English? What’s going on with, like, quotatives, “and he was like….!”? Why can’t everybody open their book? How is English being affected by globalization and the internet?

The course is an introduction to the external history of the English language along with the study of the accompanying internal changes in structure. It begins by peering back through the mists of history by means of linguistic tools that allow us to reconstruct what the original language in our “family” was like. Then we will track changes in English through its close encounters with other languages (most notably the Celtic languages, Old Norse, and French), through attempts at standardization, through the effects of globalization, to its diverse contemporary forms. For English majors the course should provide a basis for understanding the evolution of English grammar, pronunciation, and spelling as a background for studying English literature. The course examines the development of English from two perspectives: its outer history (i.e., the sociohistorical, cultural, and political forces that have helped shape the language) and its inner history (the phonological, grammatical, and lexical changes that have taken place). In addition, it looks at some general principles of language change and relates them to specific developments in English. By the end of the course you should understand why the English language is the way it is and be able to predict how it may change.
Prerequisite(s): EN 320 or EN 321 or ANT 210 or ANT 401 or ANT 450 or FR 361 or IT 361 or SP 361.

EN 425-001/EN 525: Variation in American English

C. Davies
TR 2:00-3:15

At the annual conference every year, the American Dialect Society selects a Word of the Year. For 2016, it was “dumpster fire.” In the year 2000, the ADS declared that the Word of the Twentieth Century was “jazz,” and the Word of the Millennium was “she.” Have you ever wondered where words like “okra,” or “bungalow,” or “ketchup,” or “cyberspace” come from? Who creates brand-new words in American English? How do we know the “correct” grammar to use in various forms of writing (an essay for your English literature class versus a text to a friend) and in different contexts for speaking? Do men and women communicate differently? Is it possible to place a person (within the United States or even within Alabama) by accent? Who uses “y’all” versus “you guys”? What is a foreign accent and are some accents more prestigious than others? Under what circumstances do people change the way they speak? Are Southerners more polite than other Americans? If you’ve ever contemplated questions like these, then this course will be of interest to you, especially if you are planning a career that involves language and communication (e.g., majors in English, Communication, Education, Journalism, Communicative Disorders, Marketing, Social Work…..).

The course is designed for anyone who would like to understand more about linguistic diversity within what we think of as “American English.” Using films such as “My Fair Lady” (and American versions of this film such as “Pretty Woman”), “My Cousin Vinny,” classic clips by Key and Peele, and other resources that highlight regional, ethnic, and social distinctions, we’ll explore differences in accent, vocabulary, grammar, and patterns of language use among people from across the United States. We’ll look at how dialect differences developed and how they are changing, reflect on how language is a part of our identity, and consider the consequences of linguistic stereotyping, both positive and negative. Students will have an opportunity to contribute to a website on Language in Alabama for the citizens of our state.
Prerequisite(s): EN 320 or EN 321 or ANT 210 or ANT 401 or ANT 450 or FR 361 or IT 361 or SP 361

Directed Courses

EN 429: Directed Readings

Various Staff

Prerequisite: Enrollment only by previous arrangement with a specific instructor and with the permission of the director of undergraduate English studies.

EN 430: English Internship

Various Staff

An on- or off-campus training position in which students use the skills they have gained as English majors and enhance their employment opportunities after graduation. Interns work approximately 10 hours a week, holding responsible positions with, among others, Alabama Heritage, Alabama Alumni Magazine, and the Tuscaloosa Public Defender’s Office. Apply to the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English. Please see the departmental website for the application form and further details.

EN 499: Honors Thesis

Various Staff

The Honors Thesis in English course is an individualized, directed readings class that culminates in a 30-50 pp. thesis. It is the final required course for the Honors in English program. Each student enrolled will work individually with a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite: EN 399

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