Lower-Division Elective
Lower-division Elective courses allow students to choose (or “elect”) courses or faculty specific to their own developing interests, enabling them thereby to shape their own educational experience. Major II students can also use one lower-division elective to fulfill the Writing Requirement with ENG 209 The Craft of the Sentence.
Explores the relationship between folklore and popular culture; examines a diversity of approaches to the analysis of "common culture" including urban legends, comics, cultural performances, youth culture, Internet folklore, street art, and other forms of expression as these relate to various... (read more)
Instructor: Purnama, Ari
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film as... (read more)
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film as an art form and a product of... (read more)
People respond to movies in different ways, and there are many reasons for this. We have all stood in the lobby of a theater and heard conflicting opinions from people who have just seen the same film. Some loved it, some hated it, some found it just OK. Perhaps we've thought, "What do they know... (read more)
Works representing the principal literary genres.
(read more)ENG 106 is an introduction to poetry, one of the major genres in literary studies. Through careful analysis of some of the most exciting poems by major writers and performers, students will be challenged to explain not only what a given poem might mean to its readers and listeners, but also how... (read more)
Public Speaking as a Liberal Art gives students a foundation in the classical principles of rhetoric and teaches application of these arts to contemporary contexts. Students will have multiple opportunities to practice engaged public speaking and learn to craft effective arguments on self-... (read more)
This course is a survey of writings by African American authors. Studying fiction, essays, and poetry, we will read representative texts to consider whether there are specific formal and thematic elements that characterize an African American literary tradition. We will consider how these texts... (read more)
English 250 is an introductory course to Digital Humanities, or DH—a field that explores the intersection of digital culture and the humanities. We live in a time when the written word is undergoing a revolution. The rise of audio dramas and podcasts, e-books, webpages, audible books, and even... (read more)
The major plays in chronological order with emphasis on the early and middle plays through "Hamlet."
(read more)Chicana/os (Mexican Americans) and Latina/os have lived and worked in what is now the United States since before the founding of the country. During this time, they have produced literary texts and critical works designed to document their experiences as racialized subjects and their changing... (read more)
Works representing the principal literary genres.
(read more)This class provides an introduction to the history and art of comics and to the methodologies of the academic discipline of Comics Studies. Students will be exposed to a range of different comic-art forms (including newspaper strips, collections of serialized comic books, and free-standing... (read more)
This course provides an introduction to the analysis of comics and graphic narratives in terms of their poetics, genres, forms, history, and the academic discipline of Comics Studies. Our multifaceted examination will balance close reading with in-depth research and analysis of the development... (read more)
This course takes readers on a journey through the history of one of the world's oldest forms of artistic expression: poetry. From the battlefields of classical epics to the stages of slam poets, from the Japanese haiku to the Italian sonnet, from Shakespeare to Kendrick Lamar, this class will... (read more)
Money Is Life: Twentieth-Century American Drama
This course explores how twentieth-century American playwrights raise concerns about this American life. Through reading Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Lorraine Hansberry’... (read more)
Instructor: Purnama, A.
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film as an... (read more)
ENG 110M: In this face-to-face course, we will see that there are many productive ways of thinking about movies and many approaches we can use to analyze them. These approaches include the study of narrative structure, cinematic form, authorship, genre, stars, reception and categories of social... (read more)
ENG 241 introduces students to African American literature through a survey of short stories, essays, poetry, and autobiography. This course does not require a textbook or the purchase of any course materials. As we move through a selection of literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries,... (read more)
This four-week, asynchronous online course offers students a broad introduction to the study of literary fiction. The course addresses basic questions about the nature of prose narrative and the interrelated activities of reading, writing, and interpretation. What is a story, and what roles do... (read more)
Actual reading lists vary significantly depending on the expertise and teaching philosophy of the instructor, but all sections of the course offer students a broad introduction to the study of literary fiction. Whether readings focus on the stories and novels of major writers or on works from a... (read more)
An introduction to contemporary folklore studies, with emphasis on the meanings of stories, rituals, festivals, body art, subcultures, street art, Internet folklore, and other forms of expression as these relate to a diversity of social identities and cultural contexts.
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Introduction to Comics Poetry
It may seem strange to think of comics and poetry in connection with one another. Yet comics, in their way, have always been an intensely poetic medium even when no outright poetry has been involved. The increasing number of scholarly papers and web articles... (read more)
In this course, students will read four innovative works from the first half of Shakespeare’s career: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, the Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Together, we will gain an appreciation for the plays’ mixture of entertainment and... (read more)
This course will introduce students to environmental literature, focusing on narratives written about — and sometimes even with — nonhuman species. We will consider how animals, plants, and fungi operate not only as characters that come alive on the page, but also as lively interlocuters through... (read more)
Latinxs have lived, worked, and thrived in what is now considered the United States for a long time. This course is an introductory survey of U.S. Latinx literature that will give students a glimpse of the wide range of formal, thematic, and cultural diversity of Latinx novels, short stories,... (read more)
This class provides an introduction to the academic discipline of Comics Studies. We will explore a spectrum of comic-art forms (the newspaper strip, the comic book, the graphic novel) and a variety of modes and genres. We will closely read primary texts as well as contemporary comics... (read more)
Instructor: A. Nadalizadeh
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film... (read more)
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film as an art form and a product of... (read more)
Folklore and the Supernatural (4). Introduces the study of beliefs about the supernatural by examining diverse theoretical approaches to the description and analysis of belief traditions and religious cultures. Topics include apparitions, apocalyptic cults, magic, zombies, possession states, and... (read more)
Instructor: Lowthorp, L.
This course introduces students to the research questions, theoretical orientations, and fieldwork methods used to study folklore, and therefore satisfies the Arts and Letters group requirements. Students will examine concepts that are central to folkloristic... (read more)
Utopia/Dystopia
What would be the perfect place to live? And how could we create heaven—or hell—on earth? These and other questions will be our focus as we examine fictional texts representing the idea of the utopia (or “ideal society”) as well as its unsettling mirror image: the dystopia... (read more)
This section of ENG 104 will focus on detective fiction and the archetypal figure of the detective, situating its development within social and historical contexts. We will begin by thinking about the genre as a reactionary mode for expressing anxieties about race, gender, and nation, later... (read more)
Poetry is often regarded as the most demanding of all literary genres — the loftiest and most profound, the hardest to write, the most difficult to study. Thanks to this challenging reputation, even English Majors are unlikely to read poetry for their own entertainment. In fact, many people... (read more)
In this course, you will review and explore important concepts in rhetoric and argumentation theory, and you will gain skill in discovering the questions that drive controversies and the arguments that can be made on all the different sides of an issue. You will also practice speaking, writing,... (read more)
Students in ENG 208 read and discuss Shakespeare's later work. In this section, we’ll examine Shakespeare’s complex representations of desire, gender, intimacy, power, and anxiety within romantic and sexual relationships in his Sonnets and his plays Measure for Measure and The... (read more)
In this course, you’ll learn about syntax, or the structure of sentences. The course will teach you the language used to describe that structure, the concepts and terms used to analyze how a sentence is put together. Most of our learning will be through examples—real sentences by real writers—... (read more)
ENG 240 introduces students to essential texts and concepts in disability studies and applies them to American history, popular culture, and literature, with a focus on racial diversity and learning directly from people who experience a wide spectrum of bodymind variabilities. Disability is not... (read more)
Chicana/os (Mexican Americans) and Latina/os have lived and worked in what is now the United States since before the founding of the country. During this time, they have produced literary texts and critical works designed to document their experiences as racialized subjects and their changing... (read more)
In 1968, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American literature. Momaday's award signaled for many the “arrival” of Native authors to the American literary scene and ushered in an unprecedented era of Native literary and cultural... (read more)
Culture as Data, Data as Culture
Digital technologies make it possible to study and communicate about literature and culture in new ways. Today, we can create interactive maps of ancient cities with geolocation data, use machine learning algorithms to discover patterns of... (read more)
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film as an art form and a product of... (read more)
Instructor: Purnama A
This course explores the fundamentals of film and media aesthetics, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. By learning how to analyze film and utilize proper cinematic language, students will begin to critically understand film as an... (read more)
This course provides an introduction to the analysis of comics and graphic narratives in terms of their poetics, genres, forms, history, and the academic discipline of Comics Studies. Our multifaceted examination will balance close reading with in-depth research and analysis of the development... (read more)
People respond to movies in different ways, and there are many reasons for this. We have all stood in the lobby of a theater and heard conflicting opinions from people who have just seen the same film. Some loved it, some hated it, some found it just OK. Perhaps we've thought, "What do they know... (read more)
This course provides a framework for thinking critically about illness, medical access, and the concept of health using humanities methodologies. Students will examine questions of structural inequities in medical outcomes and experiences based on gender, race, socio-economic status, immigrant... (read more)