Literature Courses: Fall 2026
| Course | Course Description |
|---|---|
| ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis (Cooper-Rompato: In-person) |
This course will help you develop skills in analyzing literature verbally and in writing. Our theme this semester will be monsters! We’ll read fiction, poetry, and drama about monsters and explore the many ways that the monstrous can be interpreted. Texts include the award-winning play She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen, the middle-grade novel The Clackity by Lora Senf, and the poetry collection Monster Verse, which features a range of poetry from ancient cultures to contemporary verse. We’ll also watch the original Godzilla (1954) and test our analytical skills on film. By the end of the semester, you should be comfortable deep diving into texts and offering close readings that will amaze your family and friends! |
| ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis (Rice: In-person) |
In this course, we’ll develop foundational skills for analyzing literature while examining works of poetry, fiction, and drama that revel in fantasy and phantasmagoria. Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai, selected poems by John Keats, and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke each explore the unstable, shifting boundary between reality and unreality, and they can help us navigate our own hypermediated age of technology-powered spectacle. To better respond to these texts and other texts in the future, we’ll study the formal elements of basic literary genres, engage in close reading, and practice critical writing informed by research. |
| ENGL 2600: Literary Analysis (Graham: In-person) |
If you’re interested in taking this course, you probably already know that literature can be magic. But how does it work? What is the relationship between form and content—that is, between what is said and how it is said? This class will teach you to read and think more critically, to appreciate literature more deeply, and to write academic essays about literary texts. We will read a variety of poems, stories, and plays, and will focus especially on the poetry of Adrienne Rich, the fiction of Langston Hughes, and the drama of Lorraine Hansberry. Other texts (short stories, poems, essays, and plays) will be made available as PDFs on Canvas. |
| ENGL 3270: Funny Business (Straight: Virtual) |
Sometimes you just want (need) to laugh, and this course is all about the joy that comes from reading funny books. Lucky for us, universities are comical places—filled with characters, well-stocked with wit, and always a touch absurd—so if you’re searching for literature to make you laugh, the quad is a great place to start. In addition to the hilarious novels and essays we’ll read, we’ll write broadly across the best of the college genres, from applications to recommendations to job ads and resumes, all in pursuit of advanced degrees of amusement. |
| ENGL 3280: Graphic Novels (Rose-Dougherty: In-person) |
What does your voice look like? In ENGL 3280, Graphic Novels, we will read diverse sub-genres of graphic novels and narratives—comics, young adult fiction, memoir, and more—and discuss how the voices of our authors show up in graphica. Further, we will experiment with developing our own authorial voices as we story ourselves and our society through graphic composition. This course begins with an overview of how, historically, graphic literature became positioned as rigorous, substantial literature. Then, we will navigate sub-genres of graphic literature, exploring the discipline and medium-specific affordances of graphica on literacy events. Finally, students will try their hand at enacting the rhetorical strategies modeled by dynamic authors to speak their experiences and perspectives into visual existence. |
| ENGL 3300: Special Topics: Afrofuturism (Rivera-Dundas: In-person) |
In her novel written in 1998, Octavia Butler predicted an American president who, in the year 2025, would use “Make America Great Again” as his slogan. Often called prophetic, Octavia Butler instead insisted that she could anticipate the future by paying attention to her present. Butler is credited as an Afrofuturist writer—or a writer who imagines futures that center African American perspectives. This course will examine Afrofuturism in its many cultural expressions, including music, literature, film, and visual art. For this class’s final project, students will imagine their own future worlds and develop the aesthetic, technological, and literary rules of that world. |
| ENGL 3305: Medieval Literary History (Cooper-Rompato: In-person) |
Medieval people loved a great story, and this class is full of them! We will read some of the most famous medieval literature of the UK and Iceland: the Old English poem Beowulf, the Norse Prose Edda, the Anglo-French Lais of Marie de France, the Welsh Mabinogi, and the Middle English poems Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Along the way you’ll learn about medieval monsters (including dragons and werewolves), warriors and knights, medicine, and different religious practices. Expect to be surprised, enchanted, amazed, and challenged by the literature! All readings are in modern English—including some translations by the famous medievalist J.R.R. Tolkien. |
| ENGL 3365: 19C American Literary History (Rice: In-person) |
Nineteenth-century American authors were preoccupied with appearances and what they conceal, and their writing proliferates with masks, fakes, copies, and embellishments that exemplify the perils and possibilities of surface and seeming. This course will cover nine major writers from the nineteenth century: Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Piatt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and E. Pauline Hopkins explored themes of artificiality and authenticity while also responding to events and movements that shaped American culture during the period. |
| ENGL 3385: Postcolonial World Literature: South African Literature (Graham: In-person) |
South Africa is well known for apartheid, the violent system of legislated segregation and white supremacy that ruled from 1948–1994. But the country is also rightly famous for the heroes it has produced, including Nelson Mandela, Steven Biko, and Ruth First. South African literature has reckoned with this history of colonialism, oppression, resistance, and survival, and culture in the twenty-first century continues to be shaped by the legacy of apartheid. These texts convey pathos and mourning, but also humor, joy, and the African value of ubuntu or shared humanity. We will read stories, novels, poems, and essays from the early twentieth century to the present. Many of the written assignments and oral presentations will ask you to consider how the literature engages with important events and ideas in South African and world history. Participation in class discussions will be a very important factor in your grade. You will also write extensively in various forms: in-class freewrites, online annotations, and two essays, including a final research paper involving multiple works of literature and secondary sources. Most of the readings will come from PDFs posted to Canvas or from a required poetry anthology. There are also two required novels—JM Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Imraan Coovadia’s The Spy in Time—and a play, Athol Fugard’s Master Harold… and the Boys. |
| ENGL 3610: Multicultural U.S. Literature (Straight: Virtual) |
Hungry for culture? In this course you’ll tuck in to a loaded buffet of literature that explores our deep connections to food. From elemental explorations of the human history of cooking to deeply personal food memoirs, our readings will take us on a rich literary journey across the nation’s culinary landscape. |
| ENGL 4300: Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Green Worlds (Blackstock: Virtual) |
Many of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, are inhabited by what has been called a “green world,” a space outside the city where social hierarchies and cultural barriers are temporarily suspended. Literary critics have linked this suspension to “the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the wasteland” (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism), but the green world also appears in tragedies such as Titus Andronicus and King Lear, in which the wasteland triumphs over life and love. In this course we will examine how the green worlds in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies offer spaces for questioning conventional ideas about class, gender, race, and nature: human nature, the natural world, and the relationship between the two. |
| ENGL 4300: Shakespeare: Post-Truth Shakespeare (Filo: In-person) |
What is truth? How is it different from fact? Who decides what is true? How does power manipulate truth? How does truth turn into narrative? And what happens when the cracks in “truth” start to show? These questions are not new. Writers have long been aware of the ways that power works to create narratives, then seeks to force reality to conform to these fictions; they have also, crucially, been aware of the power and limitations of resistance. Given his interest in power, politics, and performance, as well as English national and racial identity, class, gender, and narrative, it should come as no surprise that Shakespeare’s works engage these questions at a profound level. In this class, we will explore the ways in which narrative, truth, power, and resistance collide in Shakespeare. Our conversations will explore how these ideas are further inflected by nation formation; race; colonialism; gender; and theater and performance. We will examine the means by which power and narrative combine to reconstruct “truth” in Shakespeare—how this happens—as well as the ends to which this alliance is put—why this happens—and its effects. We will also consider the means and efficacy of resistance to these narratives in Shakespeare. |
| ENGL 4320: British Authors: Charles Dickens (Blackstock: Virtual) |
Though set in a time period and society very different from our own, the novels of Charles Dickens continue to be some of the most popular ever written and have taken on a new life of their own in recent films and in popular culture. And though on the surface some of these novels seem to be concerned only with marriage and money, current criticism finds them deeply engaged with issues such as inequality, oppression, and the effects of industrialization and technology. In this course we will read three of Dickens’s most influential novels and consider their relationship to the social and historical contexts in which they were produced, as well as their continuing resonance today. |
| ENGL 4365: Studies in Film: Black American Cinema (Rivera-Dundas: In-person) |
This course will analyze movies by Black directors and writers of the 20th and 21st century. As a class, we will develop an understanding of film terminology and what it means to analyze film as a text as we dive into some cinematic masterpieces. We will use the films to discuss the historical and political contexts of the movies through an intersectional lens, paying close attention to the representation of race, class, gender, and environment. The class will focus on analysis and interpretation as well as some hands-on craft exercises to get practice and familiarity working in film. Movies may include Do the Right Thing (1989), Moonlight (2016), and Get Out (2017) as well as music videos and documentaries. |
| ENGL 4370: Native American Literature (Franks: In-person) |
This course focuses on recent literature by Ojibwe and Cherokee authors. Each Tribal Nation is represented by works of historical fiction (from Louise Erdrich and Margaret Verble), sci-fi (from Daniel H. Wilson) and mystery (Dennis E. Staples). David Treuer’s memoir Rez Life and Christopher Teuton’s community-focused collection Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club will provide first-person insight into the culture, history, and future of Ojibwe and Cherokee people. |
| ENGL 6340: British Literature & Culture: Renaissance Race-Making (Filo: In-person) |
(Note that this is a master’s-level graduate class; advanced undergraduates only allowed with permission of instructor.) Long believed to be before the advent of the concept of “race,” the early modern period was in fact pervaded by racial discourse. In the past decade, the field of premodern critical race studies has definitively shown how race—in forms both very different from and uncannily similar to its modern manifestations—affected the day-to-day social, political, and literary and cultural worlds of the early modern English as well as the ethnically and racially diverse peoples with whom they came into contact. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century see England expand its empire beyond the British Isles and begin to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, both of which indelibly shape English (and thus, eventually, American), race and racism to the present. Race is of course not a biological fact, though its consequences are often emphatically material; rather, race is produced through power. In this course, we will explore how early modern English literature makes race—that is, the power relations and the discursive as well as material exploitation and violence these texts produce and imply. Race is never an isolated phenomenon; we will also explore how it intersects with ideas of gender, sexuality, “the human,” ability, and class. We will examine not only drama, poetry, and fiction but also travel writing and natural philosophy to see how race is produced across a variety of domains. This will not add up to a coherent picture of “race”—indeed, race is always an internally contradictory fiction, adapting to the immediate demands of power. What we will see, though, is a variety of ways of understanding race and human difference, some of which will die out across the centuries and others of which will bear remarkable parallels to—and consequences for—what we see in our own social worlds. |