ENG 101: English as a Second Language Advanced
Professor Blumenthal
In this advanced ESL reading and writing course, students develop their study skills, vocabulary, and grammar through reading and writing assignments designed to prepare them for college writing. This course also provides support for international students as they acclimate to American university expectations and norms.
ENG 107: College Writing
Professor Brassard
This section of College Writing emphasizes reading, thinking, researching, and peer reviewing as essential components of a successful writing practice, with short essays in different modes (descriptive, narrative, analytical, persuasive) building toward a research project with the primary goal of investigating the impact of the climate crisis on various fields or professions. #climatechange #climatecrisis #research #revision #curiosity #analysis
ENG 107c: College Writing
Prof. Hannon
With the support of an encouraging writing community, this course is designed to help students become intrepid crafters of essays. By tapping into their experience, imagination, curiosity, and daring thinking, and by ‘lifting the hoods’ and exploring model essays by established essayists, students will learn to compose original essays that reflect a distinctive voice and appreciate how various rhetorical modes give essays their impetus, structure, and direction.
ENG 107d: College Writing
Prof. McDonald
Our course focus is contemporary culture and current controversies. Specific topics include: the influence of popular culture, on-line culture, gender in advertising, documentary films, and music. You will advance your writing skills and utilize the various steps involved in the writing process, including pre-writing, drafting, organization and style, revision, editing, and proofreading. My goal is for you to comprehend and work comfortably with the steps mentioned above, and with various modes and academic essay styles. Since this course is designed to advance your college writing skills, you will be researching and integrating sources into some of your work. Our class will be a mix of discussion, workshops, in-class writings, peer reviews, and conferences.
ENG 107e: College Writing
Dev. of writing skills with emphasis on instruction and practice in writing the college essay and the library research paper.
ENG 107f and g: College Writing
Prof. Ward
This course focuses on the essay, its form, its structure, its art. We’ll read essays on a multitude of topics in this course, and our discussions will be wide-ranging. We’ll think about what makes the essay such a compelling, durable form of communication, and we’ll write essays on topics of your choosing — ones you find interesting and want to explore. Learning to write a college-level researched argumentative essay is a skill that will serve you in the courses you take at UP. You’ll also write a work of creative non-fiction, which will allow the freedom to explore your own unique voice and expression. And you’ll analyze arguments in various group presentations, including an oral debate, which will allow you to practice argumentation in real time. #argumentation #rhetoric #criticalthinking #creativenonfiction
ENG 112a and b: Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Hiro
Why Read? This course will begin from the question of what reading books is good for beyond mere entertainment, and why you should even be required to take an English course in college. Readings (Kindred, Angels in America)invite us to consider what literature could have to say about contemporary crises such as systemic racism and the COVID pandemic. #whyread #whiteness #racism #Blacklivesmatter #COVID #slavery #AIDS #Writingwithstyle #illnessasmetaphor
ENG 112c and d: Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Larson
This section explores words and mobility in the world. We’ll explore such writers as Voltaire, August Wilson, Thi Bui, Mohsin Hamid, a handful of poets, and Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, in order to study the articulation and circulation of ideas across our lives and our planet.
ENG 112e: Thinking Through Literature
TBD
Intro. to literary genres and the tools of literary interpretation and criticism promoting reader understanding and enjoyment.
ENG 112f, g, and p Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Buck-Perry
What might stories tell us about the many ways we interpret our experiences? How might language and literature stretch our “perceptual systems” and serve as another means to help us “see” more and think through significant questions? Course readings will explore these questions and invite us to examine the complex process of “knowing” ourselves and the world around us.
ENG 112h and i: Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Warren
This course introduces literature as a space for exploring the rise of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic imagination over the last century. In contrast to the technological progress and comparatively long lives enjoyed and anticipated by millions of people living in the early 21st Century, there exists within our culture a determined strain of imaginative pessimism that envisions for humanity the bleakest future possible: A world devastated by environmental catastrophes, overpopulation, government collapse, and the consequent rise of authoritarianism and despotic regimes. Why, at a time of relative stability and prosperity in human history, are dystopian fictions and films so potent and popular?
ENG 112j and k: Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Sutter
For this course, we will conduct close study of the science fiction of Octavia Butler, the transformative justice work of adrienne marie brown, and the indigenous botanical wisdom of Robin Wall Kimmerer. These writers will provide a foundation from which we will explore apocalypse alongside visions for a post Covid-19 and climate change society. We’ll sit with critical questions: What loss must be grieved in these times? What changes can we imagine now that we are here? What will racial and ecological justice look like in the future? We will apply these lenses to our personal experiences and dreams in order to envision a most responsible path forward. #transformativejustice #writinganewfuture #emergentstrategy #godischange
ENG 112l and m: Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Rian
For this course, we will be reading fiction, plays, nonfiction, and poems by a wide variety of African American and Native American authors (Nottage, hooks, Silko, Coates, Momaday, and many others….) presenting different perspectives and world experiences. The exploration of identity in this discussion and participation-based “brave space” course continues on a deeper level through our conversations and by writing our way through the questions, thoughts, and impressions these readings and our class-time evoke. #intersectionality, #class, #white privilege, #inequality, #explore, #community
ENG 112n and o: Thinking Through Literature
Prof. Duncan
This course invites students to approach the practice of reading literature as a vehicle for thinking through life’s larger questions and to cultivate fundamental habits of critical thinking, dialogue, and expression. A writing-embedded course.
ENG 225: Intro to Literary Studies
Prof. McDonald
Students will be introduced to the history of literary criticism and theory and will be invited to read texts through various lenses, including, but not limited to New Criticism, Reader-Oriented Criticism, Feminism and Queer theory, Post Colonialism, and African-American Criticism. Students will engage in conversation with literary critics through the use of the academic library and of online literary resources as part of the research process.
ENG 303: Survey in American Literature
Prof. Hiro
Survey of representative authors and texts from the colonial days through the 19th century, with special attention to key historical, political, and cultural developments and their impact on literary production. (a forthcoming revision of this list will specify the topic.)
ENG 306: Writing Workshop: Poetry
Prof. Plante
In this creative writing workshop, we will explore the pleasures, anxieties, mysteries, and mechanics of writing poetry. We’ll wrestle with questions of craft, form, and genre (what is a poem, anyway?), and investigate the roles of knowing and not-knowing, order and disorder, control and recklessness, in our own work. The class will involve discussion (of creative and critical texts), workshop, and writing exercises, and will culminate in a Final Portfolio of polished writing.
ENG 311a Writing Workshop: Nonfiction Prof. McDonald
ENG 311b Writing Workshop: Nonfiction Prof. Hannon
Students will be exposed to various techniques and devices for writing in the non-fiction genre. Some of these include narrative essays, travel writing, profiles, braided or collage essays, topical essays, flash non-fiction, and more. The class is a workshop setting in which we read essayists, both published and non-published. Students will engage in various workshops and peer review groups.
ENG 317: Writing Theory & Practice
Prof. Weiger
(Training for nominated Writing Assistants) Study of relevant research and theory from composition, rhetoric, linguistics, and psychology applicable to practice. Required for new Writing Assistants. (Prerequisite: 3.0 in writing courses, including ENG 107, ENG 112, or equivalent.)
ENG 337: Modern/Contemporary Arabic Literature
Prof. McDonald
This course focuses on literature by Arab writers, spanning from 1962-2021. Many of these works are banned or censored throughout the Arab world. As students you will learn about the religions, histories, geographies, and politics of Arabic cultures, be exposed to the varied ethnic groups and their traditions and cultures, and focus on a variety of topics such as “al Nakba,” political incarceration, FGM, gender, marriage and family, and the Arab Spring (“al Rabia’ al Arabiyya”). Major texts include: Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (1962) by Ghassan Kanafani, Distant View of a Minaret (1983)byAlifa Rifaat, The Story of Zahra (1986) byHanan Al Shaykh, I’Jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (2007) bySimon Antoon, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) byAhmed Saadawi, and The Republic of False Truths (2021) by Alaa Al Aswany.
ENG 370 Studies in Women Writers Prof. Brassard MWF 1:35-2:30
ENG 370X: Studies in Women Writers
Prof. Brassard
This new version of Studies in Women Writers will engage with two Habits of UP’s new Core Curriculum, “Literacy, Dialogue, and Expression,” and “Global and Historical Consciousness” through reading novels by authors from three continents and researching the intersection of culture and history within and beyond the texts. Students will participate fully in the production of course knowledge through various assignments including a feminist context report, a historical research project, and preparing discussion questions. Authors and texts will include Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (Nigeria), Roy’s The God of Small Things (India), Shamsie’s Home Fire (UK/Pakistan), Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (UK), Szabo’s The Door (Hungary), and Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Poland). #gender #class #race #sexuality #nationalism #colonialism #oppression #feminism #intersectionality [Counts as an elective for Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies]
ENG 391a Reading and Writing Cultures of Food
Prof. Buck-Perry
ENG 391aX: Reading and Writing Cultures of Food
Prof. Buck-Perry
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” declared the famed French gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. This course will enthusiastically pursue Brillat-Savarin’s delicious approach to studying human nature. By examining the meals on our plates and those in literature, we’ll explore food as a means to learn more about the self and our ties to family, our society, our past, cultures around the globe, and to the natural world that sustains us. Through our exploration of a diverse assortment of texts and experiences, we’ll engage two habits of UP’s new Core Curriculum, “Literacy, Dialogue, and Expression,” and “Global and Historical Consciousness.” Authors and texts will include The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History by Michael W. Twitty, The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher, and the poetry of Li-Young Lee, Joy Harjo, and Gary Soto. Class sessions will incorporate regular gatherings around the table to share food and drink.
ENG 402: Seminar in American Literature
Prof. McDaneld
This course explores U.S. suffrage literature from its emergence in the first part of the nineteenth century through ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920 and beyond. Only recently recognized as a genre, suffrage literature has been dogged by twin questions: first, is it good literature? And second, is it good feminism? In this course we will develop responses to these questions as we explore the complexity of literature and activism considered simplistic, old-fashioned, or politically suspect. Course texts will include a wide range of genres (novels, short stories, poetry, speeches, cartoons, children’s literature) paired with anti-suffrage work, periodical print culture, and movement histories. Students will develop a research project early in the semester and read widely in critical debates related to literary value, canon formation, and the politics of recovery.Research and development of an extended argument informed by critical debates. (a forthcoming revision of this list will specify the topic.) May be repeated once for credit. English majors only or instructor permission.