Literature Courses: Spring 2026

Course	Course Description
ENGL 2140: Introduction to LGBTQ+ Literature - BHU (Wheaton: In-person)	This course examines literature that represents and considers the experiences (historical, cultural and discursive) of individuals within LGBTQ+ community. We will engage novels, graphic narratives, protest writing, essays, film, and more. Together, we will especially focus on texts that invite and illustrate critical self-expression, community solidarity, and resistant counter-storying. Texts include but are not limited to Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, Kushner’s Angels in America, Bechdel’s Fun Home, and The Stonewall Reader.
ENGL 2150: Introduction to Science Fiction: Contact, Conflict, Cooperation (Graham: In-Person)	When humanity encounters creatures from another world, do we meet them with aggression and hostility, or with communication and hospitality? Do we try to conquer them, or they us? Is peaceful co-existence with the Other even possible? Does the human history of conquest and colonialism provide an inescapable blueprint for our interactions with other species, or does contact with an alien other provide an opportunity for humanity to chart a new course? This course will focus on these questions, which are some of the oldest, the most frequently explored, and the most profound questions in science fiction. Our reading list will include H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and Octavia Butler’s Dawn. We will read “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang and then watch its film adaptation Arrival. And we will read a handful of short stories by writers from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Your grade will derive from in-class participation, a half-dozen online activities, two in-class written exams, and two essays of 3-5 pages.
ENGL 2240: Introduction to Poetry (Rice: In-Person)	In this course, we will study how poets use a range of techniques involving sound, measure, form, and figure to make space, cross space, belong to place, and reckon with displacement. More broadly, we’ll learn how to talk about what a poem is, how it works, what it can do, and how its functions have changed over time. Course readings will provide a wide-ranging historical framework for exploring what poetry can do for you and your communities in the here and now.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis (Martinez Abbud: In-Person)	What is literature? In this course, we will consider the different shapes literature can take. Films, music, performance art, and tarot cards might all be considered “texts.” We will learn the vocabulary needed to analyze each kind of text, identifying tone, form, symbolism, and genre. Students will develop active reading and critical literacy skills by 1) learning how to ask questions about a literary text, and 2) participating in group discussions, peer reviews, and other collaborative learning activities. They will also gain practice with different kinds of writing, from personal reflections to album reviews to research papers.
ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis (Franks: In-Person)	Learn and develop the foundational skills of literary analysis while reading some of the greatest stories ever written by America’s diverse array of storytellers. Texts include Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, and Tracey Letts’s August: Osage County. Poetry, Drama, Fiction, and Non-Fiction from Susan Glaspell, Stephen Crane, Toni Morrison and more!
ENGL 3300: Special Topics in Lit History: Native American Literary Renaissance (Franks: In-Person)	This course surveys one of the most dynamic periods in Native American art and literature, beginning in the turbulent late 1960s. These books brought Indigenous issues to a wide readership and won critical acclaim. Just as importantly, they profoundly influenced later generations of Indigenous writers and artists, from Louise Erdrich to Tommy Orange.
ENGL 3315: Early Modern British Literature: Gimme Gimme Gimme—Desire in English Renaissance Poetry (Filo: In-Person)	What do you want? An apparently simple question, what we want—what we really, truly want—says so much about our core instincts and values as humans. In this course, we will explore desire, in all its messy, pulsating glory, in poetry of the English Renaissance—desire for love and sex; for wealth and power; for God and knowledge; for friends and community; for fame and literary recognition. Reading a wide range of poets across this period, we will gain a deep understanding of a broad array of early modern literary and cultural production. We will also examine discourses of gender, sexuality, religion, politics, embodiment, race, “the human,” and more, engaging them in their own literary-historical moment and exploring their continued metamorphoses in our own social, cultural, and political worlds.
ENGL 3320: Resistance and Literature II (Graham: In-Person)	The twentieth century was in many ways the age of authoritarianism, with the rise of fascism and Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism, and the consolidation of colonial domination over much of the world. But it was also the age of brave resistance movements, which are both celebrated and complicated in the literature we will be reading in this course. We will begin with Aimé Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe, which uses the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s as a cautionary tale for revolutionary movements in his own age. And we will read Chinua Achebe’s classic novel about the colonization of Nigeria, Arrow of God, along with poems and short stories by Black American writers. We will then turn to Czechia under Soviet rule with the plays of Vaclav Havel. We will read Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel about the Iranian revolution of the 1970s, followed by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Your grade will derive from in-class participation, a half-dozen online activities, an in-class presentation, and two essays of 3-5 pages.
ENGL 3375: American Literature since 1900: African American Canon (Rivera-Dundas: In-Person)	Over the course of the semester, we will read texts by Black American writers from 1903 until 2020. The goal of this course is to construct a narrative of American history and the progression of the literary arts since 1900 through the lens of African American literature. This course will discuss race, gender, religion, family, queerness, and questions of national identity; students will engage with the readings through discussion, free-writing responses, creative and academic essays, and self-reflection. We will read short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and NK Jemisin; essays by Audre Lorde, Frances Beale, and Alice Walker; and poetry by fifteen writers including Claude McKay (1919) and Claudia Rankine (2014). In addition, we will read one play and one novella and watch two films; the two novels of the course will be Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
ENGL 3385: Postcolonial World Literature (Blackstock: Virtual)	The period of British control over South Asia was known as the Raj and produced some of the greatest works of 19th and 20th century literature written in English. The Oxford Companion to English Literature offers the following brief assessment of Anglo-Indian literature: “[A]lso referred to as Indian literature in English, produced both in India and across the vast Indian diaspora, Anglo‐Indian literature represents one of the most innovative and dynamic fields of world writing in English today.” In this class we will be examining the novels, short stories, and poems of British writers Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster along with works by writers of South Asian descent such as Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri.
ENGL 4310: American Writers: Melville and Dickinson (Rice: In-Person)	Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson are two of the most important American authors to come out of the nineteenth century, but they both wrote in obscurity during their lives, producing work prized today for its cracked, eccentric beauty. A deep dive into their prose, poetry, and critical reception will reveal how literary values have changed over the last 150 years. Come read Moby-Dick and generous selections from Dickinson’s poetry!
ENGL 4300: Shakespeare, Racial Formation, and National Myth-Making (Filo: In-Person)	For centuries, “Shakespeare” has been a metonym for “English.” Represented as not only the pinnacle of literary and linguistic achievement but also the height of culture, it is no accident that Shakespeare’s legacy has been inextricable from the construction of white Anglo identity. While much of this has to do with Shakespeare’s racial and colonial afterlives in both US American and British contexts, concerns about race, ethnicity, colonialism, power, nation, Blackness, religion, and whiteness are omnipresent in his plays, if only we choose to look. In this class, we will look at questions of race and power in Shakespeare, considering how they intersect with gender and sexuality; colonialism and government; and nation formation and myth-making. Through this class, that is, we will dissect the complex and crucial racial dynamics lying at the heart of English—and white—literary and cultural traditions themselves.
ENGL 4330: World Writers: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Blackstock: Virtual)	Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy profoundly influenced the thought of the age in which they lived and of the ages to follow, not only in Russia but throughout the world, both philosophically and politically. This course will examine the lives, times, and works of these two literary giants, along with the contemporary writers who influenced them and who were influenced by them. Representative poems, stories, and novels of these authors will be studied in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
ENGL 4340: Studies in Fiction: Vampire Fiction (Cooper-Rompato: In-Person)	This course examines the vampire in literature, focusing on its nineteenth-century incarnations (the short story “The Vampyre” by John William Polidori, excerpts from the penny dreadful publication of Varney and the Vampire, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Braham Stoker’s Dracula) paired with several famous modern/contemporary forms, including Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (Book 1), Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and vampire films including Dracula (1931), Let the Right One In (2008), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), and Sinners (2025). We will look at the phenomenon of the vampire through the lens of monster theory to find out why these blood sucking fiends are so popular—and so useful for us to explore how they “police the borders of our societal norms” (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture”). We’ll explore why the vampire genre is said to be inherently queer, and students will have the opportunity to sharpen their own analytical skills from a variety of perspectives. Students should expect to read, watch films, keep a reading/film journal, engage in a group critical presentation that can be presented at the spring research symposium (if so desired), and a final project (creative or analytical).
ENGL 4375: US Latinx Literature: Migration, Markets, and Marketability (Martinez Abbud: In-Person	Why do Latinx artists get so much attention nowadays? This course will help us think through one possible answer: marketability. Designed as a multimodal course, students will engage with a variety of cultural productions, from 1920s Hollywood films about the Mexican Revolution to Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl in 2026. Literary readings include a variety of forms (e.g. novels, poetry, performance art) and genres (e.g. coming-of-age, surrealism, historical fiction) by some of the most well-known writers, as well as emerging voices in the Latinx literary scene. Pairing scholarly research, literature, and the contemporary landscape, the goal is to understand why US Latinx cultural productions have become so marketable, and to explore how these narratives shape current notions of what it means to be a “good” immigrant.
ENGL 4610: Western American Literature (Straight: Virtual)	To borrow an apt old phrase, if you want to complicate U.S. literary history (and make it much more interesting), “Go West, young [scholar]!”This literary journey through western landscapes is all about the struggle to define who we are as a nation. Through graphic memoirs, historical fictions, and contemporary collections of poetry, we ask the questions of “who is in? who is out? and at what cost?”Our multi-directional study adds north, south, east—and the earth beneath—to the western impulse and enlivens the narrative with faces and lives too often overlooked.
ENGL 4630: Environmental Justice Literature (Straight: Virtual)	The places we inhabit often take hold of us in equal measure, but what happens when those places are threatened, or damaged, or sick? Environmental justice (EJ) approaches the relationships between human beings and the more-than-human world as complex exchanges where natural and social forces intersect, and in this course we will study EJ, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism through novels, short stories, and life-writing. Our two works of science fiction use climate change and biotech to explore the impacts of environmental degradation on Indigenous and borderlands communities, while our Southeastern texts—a Louisiana novel set against the looming backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, and a Georgia memoir of growing up junkyard-poor among the ghosts of pines—are deeply personal looks at history that move us to consider our collective futures.
ENGL 6330: American Literature & Culture: Black Feminism (Rivera Dundas: In-person)	This graduate-level course pairs works of Black feminist literature with Black feminist theory. We will pair Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved with a text of Black feminist theory called "Black Aliveness" that argues for a framework of "aliveness" instead of "death" when analyzing Black cultural production. We will read a work of prose poetry called The Map to the Door of No Return by a Canadian Black feminist named Dionne Brand alongside Black feminist theories of geology. We'll end the semester reading a "speculative archive" of Black feminist metaphysics that asks us what it means to make knowledge at all, alongside critiques of Western epistemology. Students will end the semester with a deeper knowledge of Black feminist literature and theory, practice applying theory to fictional texts, and the opportunity to engage with the theory in a final project that suits their research interests.