Topics Courses, Spring '24
Topics courses cover a wide variety of content, allowing students to explore different subject matter while fulfilling the requirements for the major or minor.
ENG 245A / MUS 290A American Song Making: The Evolution of American Roots Music (W course)
Professor Ron Dye
This course focuses on songwriting as both a literary and a musical creative act. Students will explore how contemporary popular music genres such as rock, R&B, country and hip-hop, among others, have their origins in older musical traditions such as blues, jazz, hillbilly and other indigenous music of the Americas, and how the older musical forms from the past century evolved historically into the commercial music we know today. At the center of all these musical traditions is the craft of making songs. Students will have the opportunity to study songwriting both critically and creatively: they will analyze songs in terms of structure, form and meaning; and will also craft their own original song lyrics. Students with musical skills will also be able to compose music for their songs. While musical abilities will be of value for much of the coursework, it is not necessary to be able to sing well or play an instrument to participate fully in the course.
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ENG 255A World Wide Weird: Global Surrealism and Horror (W Course)
Professor Harry Brown
Beginning with some of the aesthetic and psychological fixations of Edgar Allan Poe, Sigmund Freud, H.P. Lovecraft, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Jeff VanderMeer, our course explores some of the stranger detours of modern and contemporary fiction and poetry. We will consider the ways that Poe’s “perverse,” Freud’s “uncanny,” Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror,” Dalí’s “paranoid critical method,” and VanderMeer’s “weird,” have manifested and metastasized across a geographical spectrum of literature from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Our reading includes work by some of the world’s great literary necromancers of the past century, including Gustav Meyrink, Rabindranath Tagore, Luigi Ugolini, Franz Kafka, Hagiwara Sakutarö, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Mercè Rodoreda, Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Kincaid, Premendra Mitra, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Reza Negarestani. You don’t know them? That’s good. Because once you do, their writing will infect your consciousness and permanently warp your sense of the world, until you remain a hollow shell of your former self, struggling to maintain your sanity under the weight of your newfound and horrific literary knowledge.
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ENG 255B Something Underneath: Modernism in the Arts
Professor Heithaus with Harry Burgan as teaching assistant
While we’ll look especially at poetry, we’ll delve deeply into the creative impulses across all the arts in a period that spans from the late 19th into the middle of the 20th century. “Something Underneath” comes from a poem called “Dream Boogie” by Langston Hughes that hints at the ways black art characterized as “happy” by whites has resistance or anger or at least “something” underneath its beat. We’ll consider works by Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, H.D., Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and a host of artists, dancers, and musicians whose art crossed boundaries of genre, convention, culture, belief, and sense. The Modern wanted something “new” and you will have a front row seat to the ways the new was made across a wide range of individual and collective movements including Cubism, Impressionism, DADA, Surrealism, etc.
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ENG 255C The Red Sea Region (W course)
Professor Amity Reading
The Red Sea region has long been a global nexus—it’s been a shipping and trade route for at least two millennia and it features prominently in the histories of numerous ancient cultures and nation states, including Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Tribes of Israel, the Kingdom of Askum, and the Persian Empire. Today, the Sea sits at the heart of one of the most complicated political, economic, and ecological regions in the world—it directly bridges two continents, six modern nations, five major world religions, and numerous modern ethnic and language groups. The region has withstood some of the most persistent and wide-spread military conflicts in human history, and yet also boasts some of the oldest surviving examples of human ingenuity in engineering, architecture, and art. The Sea itself is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, although modern shipping practices, oil extraction, and desalination plants threaten the coral reefs and ocean life that call the Sea home. This course adopts an area studies approach to trace the complex history of the Red Sea region through disparate but interconnected literary, religious, political, and historical texts, from classical civilizations up to the present day. Unpacking the region’s multi-layered literary and cultural past—and connecting that past to the concerns of the present—will require the tools of a modern global studies framework.
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ENG 255D Seeker, Poet, Lover, Friend (W course)
Professor Andrea Sununu
Drawing inspiration from Eudora Welty's aphorism "all serious daring starts from within," this course will analyze poetry, fiction, and drama while asking questions about the directions that even a "sheltered life" can take. Core poems will include the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, seventeenth-century poems of love and friendship by John Donne and Katherine Philips respectively, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Mary Jo Salter’s “Elegies for Etsuko.” We will also read Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Austen’s Persuasion, and some contemporary fiction: Toni Morrison’s Sula; Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger; Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams; Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. Four of your five papers will be analytical in focus; your penultimate paper will consist of a creative letter or monologue that incorporates research on secondary sources into your explication of poems by Donne, Philips, Keats, or Eliot.
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ENG 255E No Place Like Home: Identity, Memory, and Exile in World Literature and Film
Professor Wimbley
Whether real or imagined, “home” defines who we were, reflects who we are, and shapes who we aspire to be. In fact, our identities are curated by our ever changing relationship to home. This course explores narratives about home in world literature and cinema. Specifically, we will explore plays, essays, poetry, short stories, and films from across the world to query: What is the definition of “home”? How does memory and the sensual world articulate our connection(s) to home? How can dislocation and exile alter our sense of home and belonging? Can the dislocation caused by exile be both a disabling estrangement and liberating insight? Course texts include works by Aimé Césaire, Kayo Hatta, Carmen Maria Machado, Ousmane Sembene, Dominique Loreau, to name a few.
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ENG 343A / FLME 311A Creative Writing II: Dramatic Writing Topics, Writing for Stage, Screen and TV
Professor Ron Dye
An upper level writing course that focuses on specific elements or forms within a genre of dramatic writing. Offerings might include The One Act Play, The Dramatic Monologue, The Short Film Script, Advanced Screenwriting or Advanced Playwriting. Prerequisite: ENG 149.
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ENG 265A Asian American Voices
Professor Eugene Gloria
English 265 is designed to introduce students to the cultural diversity of Asian American creative writing. Through books showcasing works of poetry, short stories, novels, films, and a play, this course will, I hope, help you develop a deeper understanding of the diverse works of Asian American writers, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers. Since Asian American literature is typically presented from the perspective of race, our topics will focus on racial and cultural identity, immigration experience, displacement, gender identities, and language. The goal of this class is not to suggest a cohesive tradition of Asian American communities, but rather to explore the different histories and origins of Asian American writers and how their backgrounds inform their work.
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ENG 302A Creative Writing II: Fiction Topics
Professor Ivelisse Rodriguez
Undertaking the writing of a novel is an ambitious project. One has to write a substantial amount, remain committed, and endure over the long haul. In this class, we will focus on writing a generative first draft of a novel through weekly assignments. Our workshops will focus on the possibilities we see in the pages in front of us. We will also read craft books on writing novels, paying attention to structure and outlines. Lastly, we will focus on the emotional aspects of writing and practice strategies to combat the fears that arise when we commit to a large project.
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ENG 332A Creative Writing II: Advanced Reporting Topics – Feature Writing
Professor Renee Thomas-Woods
Incorporating a storytelling style of writing in journalism allows students to add color and depth through feature writing. This course will explore the feature writing side of journalism in print and digital newspapers and magazines. Work in the course will involve various styles of feature writing including profiles, investigative reporting, reviews and opinion/editorials. Students will cover a number of topics including idea generation, article development and structure, design and publishing work.
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ENG 349A Form and Genre: Playwriting and Screenwriting
Professor Chris White
Genre is a rather broad term which can be used to differentiate larger categories of the arts (e.g. painting, literature, film, music), to differentiate different forms within a particular art discipline (e.g. fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting, and screenwriting in the category of creative writing or literature), or, for example in regards to film or literature, to categorize stories with different types of narrative elements, content or style (e.g., mystery, sci-fi, romance, coming-of-age, thriller, young adult, horror, or drama). In this hybrid literature and creative writing course, we will focus on two genres of dramatic writing, plays and screenplays, and the elements that go into their creation. We will pay special attention to forms within each of those genres, examine their structures, and analyze them as literary texts. And we will look at some forms and styles (also sometimes termed “genres”) born of artistic, philosophical, and/or socio-political movements that have influenced both plays and films.
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ENG 396/WLIT 315 The Devil
Professor Harry Brown
Any good plot has its protagonist and its antagonist. This course is about The Antagonist. The Adversary. The Enemy. The Tempter. The Trickster. Satan. Lucifer. Mephistopheles. The Inflatable Demon in the ice bath in the Ninth Circle of Hell. He has many names, and we will survey the world’s literary registry of them. We begin with his origins in the ancient Middle East, tracing his emergence in the biblical books of Genesis, Job, the Gospels, and Revelations. We then follow his ascendance as the celebrated and scorned supervillain of the Western literary canon, in Dante’s The Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s Faust. From the nineteenth century to the present, literature reflects his face in dizzying kaleidoscope, which we will glimpse in works by William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Mikhail Bulgakov, James Baldwin, William Peter Blatty, Cormac McCarthy, Ben Okri, and Beth Underdown. We will also note his prominent role in selected historical spasms, from waves witch hunting in Europe and Salem, to blood libel conspiracy theories, to the more recent satanic panics inflamed by Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music. Finally, we will sample his many Hollywood turns, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Witch. Through this survey, we will see that his purpose is as plastic as his form, as we make him the dark icon of whatever troubles us then and there. In this sense, he is the worst part of us that we’re always trying to exorcize.
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