What a wild ride this semester has been! Daily life is feeling increasingly stressful and existential: a global pandemic, a national election, and a whole host of pressing social issues that our community is facing. Despite this, it is a great time to take an upper division English course, because they have the unique ability of placing current times in context and providing fresh perspectives on many issues that are affecting us today.
Included in this course preview are detailed personal responses from our phenomenal English Department professors, in order to help better inform your registration process for classes being offered this coming spring. Please note that all upper division English classes will be taught over Zoom.
ENG 225 – Intro to Literary Studies with Prof. J. Swidzinski
Why are you excited to teach the course:
I’m excited to teach ENG 225 because it offers an opportunity to explore not only literature but the very concept of reading itself. What happens when we read? What are we doing, both consciously and unconsciously, when we make sense of a poem, play, or novel? ENG 225 is essentially a ‘boot camp’ for English majors: it’s designed to introduce students to the long history of literary criticism and to provide them with an exciting array of tools and theories with which to unpack and appreciate literature.
A short summary of course content:
Our critical readings will run the gamut from the ancient world (e.g. Aristotle’s Poetics) to the present day (e.g. attempts to subject literature to computational analysis); our literary readings will include a wide variety of familiar and unfamiliar genres ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment. (I can promise that we’ll be spending some time on Frankenstein.)
What students will be creating:
Obviously, students will write some analytical pieces—but there’s more to the study of literature than analysis, so we’ll also be learning how to annotate, research, and present.
ENG 301 – British Lit. Survey I (Medieval through 18th century) with Prof. C. Hersh
Why are you excited to teach this course:
I love the variety of this class. One day we may be discussing monster theory and how it applies to Anglo-Saxon culture, the next week we might map out utopian communities in early modern literature, confront a depiction of Satan that we are actually enthralled by, or debate the role of race in 18th century texts. Dipping our feet into so many different authors’ worlds, and from so many different time periods, while still considering how they construct a literary timeline is also fun. I also love teaching this early British survey because it often defies students’ expectations of what “ye olde” literature is about and like.
A short summary of course content:
In this course we will read some of the most significant and influential works of literature written in England between the medieval period and the 18th century and explore how these works respond to and shape issues of their time, including war, political regimes, the emergence of national, racial, gendered, and religious identities. Engaging with both the continuities and discontinuities of literary history, we will also consider how these texts self-reflectively present ideas about fiction, art, writing, and language. Authors and/or texts may include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Julian of Norwich, More, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Behn, and Johnson.
What students will be creating:
Last time I taught the course we made an online class blog. I’m considering returning to this project but am also thinking about creating podcasts or an online exhibition with a really cool tech platform. Finally, I’m super psyched to work with medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. We’ll be doing our very first transcribe-a-thon this semester! I’m still constructing the class—if you plan on enrolling and have strong ideas about what you want to read and do please be in touch!
ENG 311 – Advanced Writing with Prof. J. McDonald
Why are you excited to teach this course:
I teach ENG 311 every semester (2 sections this spring) and it never ceases to be my favorite class. It is exciting to see students step out from the way they have been conditioned to write academically, and see them share their stories in various types of narrative and descriptive writing. There is a lot of freedom in the subjects students can write about.
A short summary of course content / what students will be creating:
Students write and revise 4 or so essays. Revisions are ongoing, so there is no “one and done” grade, instead I want students to see their writing as something that evolves and improves because of drafting, peer feedback, and revision. Students read several essays most weeks and keep a reading journal. We have all sorts of fun workshops.
ENG 311 – Advanced Writing with Prof. P. Hannon
Why are you excited to teach this course:
“Excited” doesn’t quite describe my feelings about teaching Advanced Writing. I am thrilled to teach my ENG 311 students. They inspire me by their creativity, their daring, their willingness to take risks. Creating each term the writing community that we do, I look forward to every single class because I am always surprised where my students will go in their thinking and in their imaginations. I am a serious writer who loves to teach writing, so, finally, I love it when my students discover that they have a distinct voice, a way of looking at the world and humans and ideas that is different from everyone else’s.
A short summary of course content / what students will be creating:
We read amazing, moving, crazy (in a good way!) beautiful, published essays and talk about them as gifted mechanics talk about car engines. And then we write. I give my students writing prompts and they take them and run with them: in class, outside of class. Sometimes I join them. We share our writing with each other and talk about them with the kind of grace and kindness and honesty that is, quite frankly, invigorating. My students in the end will produce a portfolio of 8 essays: 3 longer ones, 5 shorter ones: in all around 23-24 pages of writing. We also have workshop days when they will have their drafts (already pre-read and commented on) discussed by their workshop mates. This experience has been consistently recognized as one of the great strengths of my class. Students are encouraged to revise throughout the semester and their essay’s grades will rise with them. So, in short: we read, write, and discuss essays, particularly narrative essays: those that tell true stories.
ENG 360 – Literature and Social Change with Prof. M. Hiro
Why are you excited to teach this course:
I am always excited to teach this course, because as a college student myself, I often wrestled with the question of whether literature can DO anything to intervene in social problems. I knew I loved to read, but I also didn’t want to feel I was merely ensconced in an ivory tower when doing so. I suspect some UP folks might feel the same and be curious about how literature has been written and read in the service of social protest and change.
A short summary of course content:
College students often wonder about the value of reading, writing about, or even writing literature when there is so much injustice and suffering in the world. In this course, we will investigate the rich tradition of American literature that aimed to play an active role in engaging with that very injustice and suffering. We will ask, among other things: what role have literary texts played in American movements of social change? Can a work of social or political protest also count as a work of good literature? What constitutes the line between art and propaganda? Can literature really make a difference in the real world? Readings include works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Rachel Carson, and others.
What students will be creating:
This is evolving. There will be standard close readings, because in this case it’s really interesting to think about strategies the authors used to maximize readers’ response toward the cause they were intervening in, right? But I’m also going to build in some kind of assignment or project that engages in our current national and global crises and asks students to think about how books or just narratives in general have interceded—successfully or unsuccessfully—in these crises.
ENG 361 – Northwest Literature with Prof. L. Larson
Why are you excited to teach this course:
The literature of the Pacific Northwest doesn’t get talked about much. And so this class gives us a chance to learn about the history, places, and stories of the region our campus is located in. I still feel like a newcomer to this land (even after 15 years) and so I’m eager to share what I’ve found so far while continuing to learn more about the place many of us call home. Turns out our own backyard offers up some truly profound ideas and riveting ethical tensions.
A short summary of course content:
The lineup of authors we’ll read is still in flux, but we’ll be sticking to mostly contemporary works, the better to engage with the problems of our time: of living on stolen land, of the tension between using and preserving our resources, the challenges of being homeless or being a misfit, and the conundrum of living on the mainstream’s margin (in a thousand intersectional ways). While works on the page will be our core, we’ll also consider Pacific Northwest film, TV, song, tourist attractions, etc., interrogating if there’s something uniquely regional about these stories, or if they are part of global patterns that have been around for centuries. And so even as we center on our region, we’ll often consider the scale of the planet.
What students will be creating:
Our course will be predominantly synchronous via Zoom, so we can maximize face-time together during another distant semester. And while our separations might seem to work against a course about our regional togetherness, it may work to our advantage that many of us are logging in from different regions. For the ultimate aim of the course is not merely to learn about this particular region, but to learn to be sharper readers of whatever place you happen to find yourself in (across a lifetime). For space is a text that is laden with as much politics, mystery, madness, and wonder as any novel. We’ll become stronger readers of spaces and their stories by taking a number of walks through whatever places we happen to be living in and writing up our observations, literary interpretation/argument papers, giving presentations on subjects of our choice, and reading a number of Northwest authors of our own choosing. We’ll increase our appreciation for a region that is proudly ec-centric (i.e. away from the center).
ENG 375 – Studies in Irish Writers with Prof. G. Brassard
Why are you excited to teach this course:
I’m especially excited to offer Studies in Irish Writers this year because it’s a completely revamped version of the course content. Because I’m part of this year’s Public Research Fellows program as a Teaching Fellow, I drew inspiration from the program’s theme of “Displacement and Justice” to select literary works (primarily from the past 20 years or so) that reflect the changing nature of Irish culture and society due to an influx of immigrants from foreign countries. Each text explores one or more instances of displacement or injustice, be it economic, linguistic, ethnic, or psychological. This new ‘edition’ of the course is also a way to explore continuities and ruptures between traditional Irish tropes and contemporary iterations or revisions of these tropes.
A short summary of course content:
This edition of Studies in Irish Writers will take as its guiding principle the theme of this year’s Public Research Fellows program: “Displacement and Justice,” with special attention to the ways emigration and immigration have impacted contemporary literature and culture in Ireland. Starting with Joyce’s Dubliners as our ‘classic’ Irish text, we will explore the way gender, class, and ethnicity intersect with major thematic concerns such as history, nation, identity, religion, family, sexuality, and the rural/urban divide, among others. Authors and texts will include Friel’s Translations, Toibin’s Brooklyn, Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs, Frowley’s Flight, Lally’s Eggshells, and the edited anthology Being Various. Students who enroll in English 375 this spring should expect a primarily discussion-based course, with a variety of assignments exploring the historical background and cultural context surrounding our texts, including the option of creating a public-facing research project to be shared through the Public Research Fellows program.
What students will be creating:
In addition to the activities and assignments typically found in my upper-division courses such as informal/low stakes written responses, discussion questions developed by students, and an overview of the critical reception of a text, this version of ENG 375 will include researching historical and cultural events to provide contextual understanding of the literature, and a final project highlighting connections between a chosen text and the PRF theme of Displacement and Justice.
ENG 402 – Seminar in American Literature: American Romanticism with Prof. J. Orr
Why are you excited to teach this course:
I always tell people that I love the 19th century so much because I grew up in it. I grew up on a farm in West Texas in the 1960s, and if you took away telephone, television, and automobiles, it was pretty much the 19th century. So I’m comfortable with the world that gets depicted. And these are some bold experimenters in language and form; they are collectively breaking a lot of bounds of what literature can be and how it should look.
A short summary of course content:
The highlight for me in this course is Moby-Dick, and I worship Dickinson.
We will be looking at representative works from the first flowering of a distinct American literature covering roughly the years 1836 through 1865. A part of the course will focus on questions of identity: What does it mean to be an American? What are the implications of a radical sense of individuality? How does the experience of being American diverge among different minority groups in contrast to the dominant group? How do we come to understand who we are? How do these motifs play out in the current American culture? How do we experience personal power, and from what does it derive? (AND any student who reads the entirety of Moby-Dick receives a bookmark that I designed that signifies their accomplishment.)
What students will be creating:
In addition to several short argument papers, there will be a standard literary research paper, but the first project will be internet-based, where students investigate the era we are looking at and the ways it appears on the internet. I’m also interested in trying to use Google analytics as a way to get a glimpse of how the writers and works that we are reading are trending there. Students will likely have a lot of say in what that project will look like.
ENG 499 – Senior English Capstone Seminar with Prof. S. Weiger
Seminar course required of all majors, with emphasis on applying and mastering all major skills (close reading, critical thinking, integration of sources, and persuasive writing) through the development of individual research project from portfolio of prior course assignments. English majors only.