EN 200 THE LIVING WRITER: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING
Introduction to the craft of imaginative writing, the landscape of contemporary literature, and the writer as artist. Students will engage UA’s literary arts culture and regularly attend readings and author events.
EN 201-001 HOW LANGUAGE WORKS TR 11:00-12:15 Poole
This course will introduce students to the wide-ranging discipline of linguistics that incorporates aspects of both the humanities and the social sciences. Students will explore the elements from which languages are composed, examine differences across languages, and see how linguistic data and methods are brought to bear on real-world issues in the realms of psychology, literary studies, sociology, education, and the judicial system. Language will be presented as a constantly changing phenomenon that is embedded in culture and steeped in ideology.
EN 205 ENGLISH LITERATURE I
Survey of English literature from the seventh through the eighteenth century, including works from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment.
EN 206 ENGLISH LITERATURE II
Survey of English literature from 1800 to the present, including, works from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern eras.
EN 207 WORLD LITERATURE I
Survey of world literature from the Classical period to the Renaissance.
EN 208 WORLD LITERATURE II
Survey of world literature from the Enlightenment to the Modern period.
EN 209 AMERICAN LITERATURE I
Survey of American literature from its beginnings to 1865, including, work by Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, among others.
EN 210 AMERICAN LITERATURE II
Survey of American literature from 1865 to the present, including, work by Dickinson, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Morrison.
EN 215-001 HONORS ENGLISH LITERATURE I MWF 11:00-11:50 Whitver
EN 215-002 TR 11:00-12:15 Busby
Honors-level survey of English literature from the seventh through the eighteenth century, including works from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment. Honors section of EN 205.
EN 216-001 HONORS ENGLISH LITERATURE II MWF 10:00-10:50 Emerson
EN 216-002 TR 11:00-12:15 Durant
Survey of English literature from 1800 to the present, including, works from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern eras. Honors section of EN 206.
EN 219-001 HONORS AMERICAN LITERATURE I MW 3:00-4:15 Bilwakesh
EN 219-002 MW 4:30-5:45 Bilwakesh
Honors section of EN 209. Survey of American literature from its beginnings to 1865, including, work by Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, among others.
EN 220-001 HONORS AMERICAN LITERATURE II MW 10:20-11:45 Collum
EN 220-002 TR 11:00-12:15 Collum
Honors section of EN 210. Survey of American literature from 1865 to the present, including, work by Dickinson, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Morrison.
EN 233-001 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE MWF 9:00-9:50 Ainsworth
An introductory survey of Shakespeare’s plays and poems that situates these texts within their broad historical, literary, and cultural contexts. Readings represent a range of dramatic and poetic genres, and students will be introduced to a selection of Shakespeare’s sources as well as to later adaptations.
EN 233-001 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE TR 11:00-12:15 McElroy
This course offers a broad introduction to Shakespeare’s drama. We will read seven plays, drawn from each dramatic genre, plus some poetry, as well as contextual material intended to give you a sense of the culture in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. Our critical tasks will be varied. We will attend closely to Shakespeare’s language, to take pleasure in its rich complexity. We will ask ourselves how and for what purposes Shakespeare adapts his cultural and literary heritage. And we will return to important themes and matters of form. For example, many of the plays in this course rely thematically and dramatically on the use of “green worlds”—those physical and psychological spaces removed from the main or “normative” action of the plays. The resulting contrasts often encourage us to imagine alternatives to the structures that govern his and our worlds. Students will have opportunities to respond to the plays in a variety of ways, including creative projects.
EN 249 AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE I
Survey of African American literature from its earliest expressions to 1935. The course material includes spirituals, slave narratives, poetry, drama, autobiography, fiction, and nonfiction.
EN 250 AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE II
Survey of African American literature from 1935 to the present. The course material includes poetry, drama, autobiography, fiction, and nonfiction.
EN 253-001 LITERATURE AND GENRE MWF 11:00-11:50 Pusch
The Power of Storytelling: Metafiction and Magical Realism
Using “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as a starting point, this class seeks to explore literary texts which engage with the act of storytelling—its power, magic, and cultural influence. The texts themselves will offer a global perspective while remaining rooted in literary genres which explore the creation and the interpretation of narrative. We will focus on a series of novels that ask us why we tell the stories we tell, how those stories affect us on the individual, communal, and national levels. Authors will include Alcott, Allende, Ishiguro, Martel, and a film by Tim Burton.
EN 253-002 LITERATURE AND GENRE TR 9:30-10:45 Wittman
Philosophy and Philosophical Literature:: Love and Madness
Did you know that the word “philosophy” means “love of wisdom” in Greek? What then is a “philosophical novel? Or a “philosophical memoir?” In this course we will, together, ponder these timely questions by plunging into relevant philosophy by a variety of great philosophers and writers. Although we will be reading a bit of philosophy, the reading will not be overwhelming—I don’t expect anyone to join the class with a background in philosophy. Philosophers, whom we will pair with literature and memoir, include Nietzsche, Franz Fanon, Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber Jean-Paul Sartre and Marice Merleau-Ponty. The philosophical novels and memoirs that we read in the class are some of the most incredible philosophical novels and memoirs ever written. Philosophical fiction and memoir will include Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maggie Nelson, Dostoyevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, and more. We will make our way through some of the most important questions that confront us as humans, questions about freedom, love, war, death, madness, joy, politics. We will also ponder why are so many philosophers are men and why there is so much gatekeeping around the discipline. We will explore my contention that, if we reclassify some of women’s literature and read it philosophically, we will see if women have been doing philosophy since the Diotima of Manitea, Socrates’s alleged teacher who came up with the concept of what would be called “Platonic Love.”
EN 253-003 LITERATURE AND GENRE MWF 9:00-9:50 Johnson
EN 253-004 LITERATURE AND GENRE MWF 10:00-10:50 Johnson
Detective, Noir, and Crime Fiction
This is an introductory literature course that focuses on Detective, Noir and Crime Fiction. Through the study of the ways in which various authors write about criminality and the pursuit of justice and/or punishment, this course aims to facilitate discussions of social and cultural values, aesthetics, ethics, and a fundamental understanding of the evolution of detective fiction through its key periods of development. We will therefore discuss the commission of the crime, the pursuit of the criminal, and, most importantly, what can be gleaned about the social, economic, political, cultural and personal values and anxieties of the time and place of the story’s composition. In short, throughout the semester, we will ask: What is so compelling about crime? What can crime, written as entertainment, tell us about the cultural and social values and/or anxieties that produces it and consumes it? How do those values change over time and space? How are those changes reflected in the evolution of the genre?
EN 253-005 LITERATURE AND GENRE TR 12:30-1:45 Palmer
The Romance Novel
In this course, we will be focusing on the popular literary genre of the Romance Novel, a tradition of writing acknowledged by scholars and book sellers to be the most popular in the United States. Working from Pamela Regis’s definition of the Romance Novel as “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one of more protagonists,” we will explore the ways authors– from Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott to less canonical writers with loyal fandoms in their time, as well as contemporary authors who currently dominate Romancelandia– meet and challenge these genre boundaries. Best-sellers among British and American readers across nearly three centuries, the texts we will read encompass a variety of trans-Atlantic literary periods and trace an evolution of form and content in this genre. Over the course of the semester, we will analyze these novels’ authors, readership, structure, content, marketing, and reception. In doing so, we will examine the ways these texts function within their historical and cultural contexts as they grapple with questions about gender, sexuality, social status, race, agency, and belonging in society. This course will introduce students to the necessary critical tools to analyze literary texts. Students will respond to texts both informally and formally using close-reading strategies to analyze them and formulate thesis-driven work. You should expect to keep up with the readings and actively participate in class each week. By the end of the semester, you will compose a comparative analysis of two romance novels in the form of a creative project.
EN 253-007 LITERATURE AND GENRE TR 2:00-3:15 Pirkle
There and Back Again: Voyage and Return in British Children’s Literature
This course will introduce students to classic and contemporary children’s literature from Great Britain, with a focus on texts that employ the archetypal plot of Voyage and Return. The course will explore why this plot structure is so prevalent in children’s and YA fiction – is it purely for didactic reasons, or is it because adventures in other worlds offer an escape from the harsh realities of daily life? Readings will include: Peter Pan; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, among others.
EN 254-001 LITERATURE, WORK, AND THE PROFESSIONS TR 11:00-12:15 McSpadden
What Haunts Us: Ghosts and the Spaces They Haunt
This class will examine the literary and cultural fascination with ghosts and the spaces they haunt. Often, ghosts serve as witnesses for what the living would rather forget. They tap into our personal and cultural anxieties. We ignore their warnings at our own peril. In this class we’ll take a look at the essential literary conventions of the genre and how ghost stories have evolved over the years. In short, what are the ghosts trying to tell us?
EN 254-002 LITERATURE, WORK, AND THE PROFESSIONS TR 11:00-12:15 Stewart
EN 254-003 LITERATURE, WORK, AND THE PROFESSIONS TR 3:30-4:45 Stewart
Business Literature
This course will offer a survey of sources from around the world, spanning genres and centuries, offering a complex tour through the world of business. We will read a mix of three strains: instructive literature for people in business (Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, Sigmund Freud, William James), literature about life within business worlds (Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” Philip Levine’s poetry collection What Work Is, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Joshua Ferris’s blistering satire Then We Came to the End), and literature offering thoughtful critiques (Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture). In the end, students should come away with deeper insight into the nature of leadership and the glories and pitfalls of business.
EN 254-004 LITERATURE, WORK, AND THE PROFESSIONS TR 2:00-3:15 Veronie
EN 254-005 LITERATURE, WORK, AND THE PROFESSIONS TR 3:30-4:45 Veronie
Literature and the Investigative Professions
“Literature and the Investigative Professions” is an introductory literature course that explores representations of professions and work in literature. This course asks students to consider issues relating to ethics, national identity, personal or cultural identity, social status, ideas about success, and other themes as they read and discuss relevant literary works. Built around the theme of “investigative professions,” EN 254-004 explores the emergence of detective fiction as a subgenre of crime fiction, its evolution across the second half of the nineteenth century, and developments in the twentieth century. Students will interrogate representations of professions from the trope of the mad doctor to detectives as stock literary characters. Students in this course will engage with the socio-historical details that give rise to detective, crime, and medical fictions as well as consider how these new genres arose from the influence of real-life breakthroughs in scientific perception around the turn of the nineteenth century and later advancements in forensic technologies across the twentieth century. Readings will cover nineteenth-century fiction from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), to the emergence of detective fiction in Edgar Allan Poe’s three short stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter,” and the evolution of investigator characters in Robert Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Students will further explore differences in investigators in Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935) short novels. Finally, students will approach new developments in postmodern detective fiction in David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts (2020).
EN 255-001 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE TR 2:00-3:15 Davis-Abel
American Feminist Literature by Wave
This seminar course primarily focuses on the major literary works of women’s mobilizations in the U.S. from 1900 to present-day. We will read both classic and newer works as we take a chronological approach that both engages and challenges the view of feminism as a series of waves. We will structure our exploration through what can be considered the normative understanding of the feminist waves, but we will also consider the limitations the wave metaphor presents and the voices it both prioritizes and diminishes. We will be emphasizing a Women’s and Gender Studies approach to the texts by considering how the works of literature shape, respond, and challenge the social structures and overall feminist movements of their time. We will question the ways in which sex, gender, sexuality, class, and race intersect to construct meaning and instigate change on a societal and political level as reflected in the style and voice of each text. A central question throughout the semester will be if the metaphor of “feminist waves” is helpful or reductive in understanding the evolving representation of feminism in American culture.
EN 255-002 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE MWF 8:00-8:50 Cherry-Randle
EN 255-003 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE MWF 9:00-9:50 Cherry-Randle
Mania For Freedom: Early Revolutionary Voices
“What would it take to make a farmer, a preacher, or a mother commit treason against the most powerful empire in the world?” In the decades surrounding the American Revolution, ordinary people picked up pens and turned words into weapons, writing speeches, pamphlets, letters, and personal narratives that argued, persuaded, and sometimes shouted their way into history. This course puts you in the middle of that fight. In this course we will explore the vibrant and contentious rhetorical landscape of early America, focusing on texts produced from the 18th century through the early national period. Students will examine speeches, pamphlets, letters, and autobiographical writings that shaped and challenged the ideological foundations of the American Revolution. Examining the persuasive strategies employed by founding figures, Indigenous leaders, enslaved and formerly enslaved people, and women writers, we will trace how their words mobilized resistance, demanded inclusion, or critiqued emerging power structures. Through close reading and contextual analysis, students will grapple with questions of authorship, audience, genre, and legacy, deepening their understanding of rhetoric as both a literary and political tool. Featured authors may include; Thomas Paine, Samson Occom, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatly, Mercy Otis Warren, Benjamin Franklin, William Apess, and David Walker.
EN 255-004 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE TR 12:30-1:45 Weiland
EN 255-005 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE TR 2:00-3:15 Weiland
Happiness in Literature
How does “happiness” manifest in literature? How can it be defined? To whom is happiness available? Can happiness function as a method of social change? In this course, we will examine works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry over a broad time period in order to explore the nature of happiness as expressed through character, form, and plot. In particular, we will discuss happiness as attained through action, thought process, and isolation to determine in what ways happiness can act as a catalyst to social transformation. Additionally, students will learn how to use literary analysis techniques to write well-supported, in-class responses and a final essay.
EN 255-006 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE TR 11:00-12:15 Landels
EN 255-007 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE TR 12:30-1:45 Landels
Human Rights and Literature
From the Declaration of Independence to the UA Code of Student Conduct, the idea of human rights is deeply ingrained in the political and ethical culture of liberal democratic states. This course asks us to consider how literature has contributed to our understanding of human rights since the Enlightenment. and how it continues to grapple with enduring questions about who (or what) is entitled to rights, what those rights mean, and how they are recognized and lived out in everyday social practice. Together, we’ll explore these questions through three novels that span different historical periods and contexts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Our reading will be enriched by short, discussion-stimulating selections from writers who helped articulate the idea of human rights in the eighteenth century, including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake, as well as later voices such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. We’ll also take a brief look through some landmark documents in the history of human rights, from the Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Civil Rights Act. Running through these readings is a central argument of this course: that human rights depend not only on laws and institutions but on stories–stories that give imaginative shape to the ideals of human dignity and personhood that human rights are meant to protect.
EN 256-001 LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE TR 9:30-10:45 Beatty
Art of the Scam
Scams, grifts, con artists, MLMs, rug pulls, catfishing: We live in a golden (or pyrite?) age of playing each other for suckers. As we navigate a reality that ripples with alienation, atomization and AI, the story of the scam is everywhere. As Joan Didion never wrote, we tell ourselves scams in order to get over. “The Art of the Scam” will trace the lineage of snake oil from the cradle of civilization to the future, via novel excerpts, short stories, poems, non-fiction, podcast and film to ponder why we love to lie and be lied to. Students will explore and learn techniques in literary analysis, run discussion groups, and write (non-scam) weekly responses and a final essay.
EN 256-002 LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE TR 2:00-3:15 O’Rourke
American Independent Cinema
In this class we will study the rise of independent film in America and focus on critical analysis of these films. We will explore the diversity of nontraditional voices in this genre and the artistic contributions to storytelling pioneered by independent filmmakers. Students will watch films, read relevant texts, maintain a viewing journal, engage in an in-depth artist study paper, and write a fully researched analysis of a film of their choosing.
EN 256-003 LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE TR 11:00-12:15 Collum
EN 256-004 LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE TR 12:30-1:45 Collum
Literature and the Mind
This course will explore the intersection of literature and the human psyche by examining literary depictions of specific “realms” of the human psyche that we often see portrayed, romanticized, or demonized in popular culture. In order to examine current trends and philosophies in popular culture, we’ll analyze literary characters under duress, discuss how psychological and social factors influence individual choice, dissect the psychosocial impacts of rebellion, and explore what compels humans to seek out risk/danger. In short, we’ll examine works that reflect the complexity of the mind and the scope of its capabilities for both inspiring, surprising, and sometimes deplorable behavior.
EN 256-005 LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE TR 11:00-12:15 Pardo
EN 256-006 LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE TR 12:30-1:45 Pardo
Southern Literature and Film in the 20th Century
This course considers how Southern distinctiveness forms throughout the 20th century with a variety of Southern writings, including novels, plays, autobiographies, podcasts, and poetry, along with short critical readings from landmark Southern studies. From The Clansman/Birth of a Nation to The Color Purple, our journey takes us throughout the century and the South—questioning whether such a place even exists. Along the way, we’ll visit the Whistle Stop Café for a plate of fried green tomatoes, and spend a bit of time pondering why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. Come join us as we begin our quest to consider the definitions of Southern identities through popular culture values, whether “we are bound by a common anguish” or trapped in “webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” In-class essay writings throughout the semester and a final essay exam.
EN 280-001 DATA AND SOCIETY MW 2:00-3:15 Eubanks
An introductory survey of the role of data and technology in society with an emphasis on communicating data to public audiences. Provides considerations of the ethical and contextual issues surrounding data collection, representation, and analysis. Students will read and explore theory on data technologies, write about data, and learn to represent data visually.