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.
32030
In ENG 104, we will explore texts that articulate the connections between the textual body and the human body it seeks to represent. We will pay special attention to themes of joy, resilience, and beauty as they relate to embodiment. To consider how these texts navigate race, gender, embodiment... (read more)
32033
Though the slave narrative genre reached its peak in the mid-19th century, this mode of autobiography has a history that stretches from the 1700s to the present across numerous oceans, islands, and continents. We will take seriously the historical origins of the slave narrative, while also... (read more)
32035
Students in ENG 207 read and discuss Shakespeare's earlier work. Specific topics for discussion may include Shakespeare’s representations of friendship, gender, sexuality and desire, familial and political conflict, consciousness, emotion, history, ethics, power, and authorship itself,... (read more)
32036
In this course you’ll learn the language of grammar: the technical terms and the conceptual principles needed to describe the grammatical structure of sentences. You’ll learn sentence diagramming in order to help see the patterns behind grammatical concepts, and you’ll learn to better apply... (read more)
32038
appreciation for the power of environmental literature to contribute to the move toward a more ethical In order to address the current climate and environmental crises, it is important to look at not just technological and scientific solutions, but at the ways in which cultural productions can... (read more)
32040
This course is a survey of writings by African American authors. We will study fiction, essays, and poetry in their historical, political, and literary contexts from the late-eighteenth century to the present. We will investigate whether there are specific formal and thematic elements that... (read more)
32041
This introductory course explores the forms, cultural resonances, aesthetics, and political exigency of Latinx literatures in the United States. From the Chicano Civil Rights Movement to current debates on citizenship, this course examines how Latinx literature from the 20th and 21st centuries... (read more)
32042
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 production widely... (read more)
32043
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)
32044
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)
32268
Introduces the study of beliefs about the supernatural by examining diverse approaches to the description and analysis of belief traditions and religious cultures. Topics include apparitions, apocalyptic cults, magic, zombies, possession states, and supernatural assault. A&L, IC, ENGL,... (read more)
35694
ENG 104 introduces you to fiction and its formal elements by reading, discussing, and writing about short stories and one short novel. To highlight the imaginative work of fiction, we will focus in this course on speculative fiction, including science fiction, weird fiction, and fantasy. Each... (read more)
35697
This course will ground our ongoing experience of the COVID-19 crisis in the literature of plague and pandemic stretching back four centuries. We will begin with contemporary fiction by Carmen Maria Machado (“Inventory”), Ling Ma (Severance), and Emily St John Mandell (Station... (read more)
35698
This course is an introduction to the genre of comedy. It surveys examples of comedy across a long historical range—from classical Greece to contemporary America—and a breadth of media forms, including drama, novel, film, and stand-up. Among other questions, we’ll ask: why is comedy so difficult... (read more)
36119
Liars, Fools, and Con Artists. In this class, we will read misleading, deceptive stories and untrustworthy narrators. When you can’t trust the narrator, what should you focus on? What do untrustworthy narrators and deceptive stories reveal about the nature of reading, writing, and interpretation... (read more)
36589
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)
36722
Instructor: Lowthorp, L.
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36833
We will engage with a rich tradition of Black-centered essay writing articulating how Blackness shapes (and shapes our understanding of) existence in an anti-Black world. Kelley, Du Bois, and Gordon lead us to the inherent contradictions in Institutions of thought and thought, itself. Sharpe,... (read more)
37005
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, ethnicity, socio-economic status,... (read more)
22039
Theme: Disability in Modern Fiction
Instrucror: A. Steele
ENG 104 introduces you to prose narrative and its formal elements by reading, discussing, and writing about works of modern literature. To help us better recognize these formal elements, we will pay specific attention to the... (read more)
22042
ENG 105 is an introduction to drama—literature written for performance or with the conventions of performance in mind. In this course you will read, discuss, and analyze a diverse selection of influential plays by English and American writers, in addition to works in translation. The texts we... (read more)
22043
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)
22044
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)
22048
The goal of this course is to learn how to analyze the structure, or syntax, of English sentences. Our method will be sentence diagramming, a technique for identifying and separating the elements of a sentence--such as the subject, object, verb, prepositions, phrases and clauses--in a graphic... (read more)
22050
This course is a survey of writings by African American authors from the 18th century through the Harlem Renaissance. Studying fiction, essays, and poetry, we’ll close read representative texts to identify formal and thematic elements that characterize the African American literary tradition. We... (read more)
22053
ENG 250 is the gateway to the English Department’s Digital Humanities Minor. The interdisciplinary field of digital humanities (DH) is concerned with the relationship between digital technology and the humanities (academic disciplines that study language, literature, history, philosophy,... (read more)
22054
Instructor: Ari Purnama
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)
22055
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)
22056
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)
26359
This course is an introductory survey where we will identify and define the field of Chicanx and Latinx literatures and cultural studies through a critical engagement. In addition to considering how history, politics, and literary periods shape these robust fields, we will also examine the ways... (read more)
26360
What is the Age of King Arthur? Legends of King Arthur, Excalibur, Merlin, the Holy Grail, and Camelot have persisted from their medieval origins into our contemporary culture. In this introductory English course, we will read Arthurian literature in translation from French, German, Welsh, Latin... (read more)
26397
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)
26403
ENG 240 introduces students to central concepts and essential texts in disability studies and applies them to literary and cultural texts, with a focus on racial diversity and learning directly from writers and scholars who experience a wide spectrum of body/mind variabilities. The texts in this... (read more)
26428
St. Augustine once wrote, “I have become a question to myself.” What does it mean to turn my self into a question? And how could I possibly capture this self in words? Students in this section of 108 World Literature will look at three Renaissance authors—Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Petrarch—who... (read more)
26845
An introduction to contemporary folklore studies, with emphasis on the meanings of stories, rituals, festivals, body art, subcultures, the supernatural, street art, Internet folklore, and other forms of vernacular expression as these relate to a diversity of social identities and cultural... (read more)
27061
We will engage with a rich tradition of Black-centered essay writing articulating how Blackness shapes (and shapes our understanding of) existence in an anti-Black world. Kelley, Du Bois, and Gordon lead us to the inherent contradictions in Institutions of thought and thought, itself. Sharpe,... (read more)
12459
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12461
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12468
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12470
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