Course Offerings

Winter 2024▲

See complete information about these courses in the course offerings database. For more information about a specific course, including course type, schedule and location, click on its title.

Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 203 - Fuentes, Freddy O.

A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 203 - Oliver, Bill

A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 204 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

A course in the practice of writing poetry, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Nonfiction

ENGL 206 - Brodie, Laura F.

A course in the practice of writing nonfiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

ENGL214-01/ENV214-01 Environmental Poetry Workshop

ENGL 214 - Green, Leah N. (Leah Naomi)

A single-genre poetry course in the practice of writing environmental poetry, involving poetry workshops, the literary study of environmental poetry (historical and contemporary), and critical writing.

Poetry and Music

ENGL 230 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

An introduction to the study of poetry in English with an emphasis on music. Students then investigate a series of questions about poetry and music, including: What's the relationship between lyric poetry and song lyrics? What makes a poem musical? What kinds of music have most influenced poetry during the last hundred years, and in what ways?

ENGL233-01/FILM233-01 Introduction to Film

ENGL 233 - Adams, Edward A.

Same as ENGL 233. An introductory study of film taught in English and with a topical focus on texts from a variety of global film-making traditions. At its origins, film displayed boundary-crossing international ambitions, and this course attends to that important fact, but the course's individual variations emphasize one national film tradition (e.g., American, French, Indian, British, Italian, Chinese, etc.) and, within it, may focus on major representative texts or upon a subgenre or thematic approach. In all cases, the course introduces students to fundamental issues in the history, theory, and basic terminology of film.

Health, Care, and Compassion on Stage and Screen

ENGL 244 - Pickett, Holly C.

This course will analyze the dramatic portrayal of health and illness in drama, film, and television. We will think about the depiction of the body-­mind on stage and screen, across various time periods. Can the core emotions of pity and fear, which Aristotle argues are vital to the work of drama, help us develop greater empathy for those who are suffering from illness? Can dramatic depictions of both wellness and illness catalyze us to think about how to better care for ourselves and others? Using the WHO's definition of health as a "state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity," we will think not only about how works of art dramatize these concepts, but also what they mean in our own lives and in the lives of those in our community. Students will have their choice of an experiential learning component, either through a community-based learning volunteer placement or through researching and designing a wellness or self-care initiative for peers. 

Shakespeare

ENGL 252 - King, Emily L.

Same as MRST 252. A study of the major genres of Shakespeare's plays, employing analysis shaped by formal, historical, and performance-based questions. Emphasis is given to tracing how Shakespeare's work engages early modern cultural concerns, such as the nature of political rule, gender, religion, and sexuality. A variety of skills are developed in order to assist students with interpretation, which may include verse analysis, study of early modern dramatic forms, performance workshops, two medium-length papers, reviews of live play productions, and a final, student-directed performance of a selected play.

Literature and Film of the American West

ENGL 258 - Smout, Kary

The American West is a land of striking landscapes, beautiful places to visit such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, and stories that have had a huge impact on the USA and the world, such as Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. This course studies some of these Western places, stories, art works, and movies. What has made them so appealing? How have they been used? We study works by authors such as John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Cormac McCarthy, plus movies such as Shane; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Searchers; and Dances With Wolves to see how Western stories have played out and what is happening now in these contested spaces.

Literary Approaches to Poverty

ENGL 260 - Chowdhury, Lubabah

Examines literary responses to the experience of poverty, imaginative representations of human life in straitened circumstances, and arguments about the causes and consequences of poverty that appear in literature. Critical consideration of dominant paradigms (the country and the city," "the deserving poor," "the two nations," "from rags to riches," "the fallen woman," "the abyss") augments reading based in cultural contexts. Historical focus will vary according to professor's areas of interest and expertise.

Having it All: Life, Literature and Career

ENGL 290 - Gertz, Genelle C.

Are you considering an English (or Arts and Humanities) major but unsure of how it will help you find a job? Are you intrigued by how contemporary authors write about becoming adults, finding happiness, or growing up in a certain time, place or body? Are you hoping to pursue what you love as opposed (or in addition) to what will lead to a high salary? Through memoirs, personal essays and coming of age novels, along with studies of the value of the liberal arts, this class explores ways in which college students can have it all. We look at literature to understand how authors make sense of personal experience and fulfillment, and we apply the findings of happiness studies to career design and exploration. Self-reflective exercises and brainstorming build students' sense of what they enjoy spending time on, and this guides their investigation of potential career paths. Along with introducing students to alumni working in a variety of industries, this class teaches practical skills for job searches: resume design, online profiles, networking, interviewing, searching and applying for positions, or pursuing post-graduate opportunities.

Topics in American Literature: Introduction to Graphic Novels

ENGL 293M - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

The course will focus on 21st-century publications from a range of presses outside of U.S. mainstream comics. Students will also read works of literary theory on the formal qualities of graphic novels, including definitions, visual style, layout, and image-text relationships, and apply those theories to the analysis of selected works. 

Topics in American Literature: Native American Visual Culture

ENGL 293N - Gray, Khadeejah A. (K. Avvirin)

Words and images employed in Native cultural productions interplay to create aesthetic texts that draw upon and create new visual languages. Paintings, sculpture, and other forms of visual art are texts that, according to author Dean Radar, are “fundamental products and processes of American Indian sovereignty” (1). The socio-political location of Native peoples in the U.S. informs Indigenous visual culture and marks it as unique from other aesthetics. In order to assess Indigenous aesthetics, one must account for the forms of Indigenous resistance, strategic accommodation and “survivance” (to use Gerald Vizenor’s term) that shape visual artworks by Native people. The location of Native and First Nations peoples within the settler states of the U.S. and Canada is a politically precarious position engendered by nation-to-nation treaty making and policies aimed to assimilate Native peoples as individual citizens and erase Native nations as political and cultural entities. In the wake of this complex history, many Indigenous artists, filmmakers, poets, and musicians create their work with the political and cultural goals of survivance in mind. With texts such as Gerald Vizenor’s Fugitive Poses, Dean Rader’s Engaged Resistance, and Michele Raheja’s Reservation Reelism as our guides, we will learn foundational terms from visual theory such as encoding/decoding, semiotics and bricolage and deploy them to assess fine art, photography and films by Native artists. 

Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 308 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

A workshop in writing fiction, requiring regular writing and outside reading.

Arthurian Bodies, Desires, and Affects

ENGL 315 - Kao, Wan-Chuan

During the medieval and early modern periods, King Arthur and his court served as the foundational models of courtly love, chivalry, and political discourse in the West. Yet artists have rendered Arthurian personae as bodies that feel deeply and follow the pull of desires, and in so doing, produce counter subjectivities. This course surveys the premodern Arthurian literary traditions through theoretical lenses grounded in women's, queer, and trans studies. We examine the myths of Arthur's heroic masculinity and Camelot, the adulterous love triangle at the heart of courtly love, the uncanny trans embodiment and queer sensibility of knighthood, the marriage plot, the uneven gendering of negative affects, the trans-species borders of the animal and the human, and alternate forms of sociality. 

Poetry and Authenticity

ENGL 364 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

Readings from the middle generation of 20th century U.S. poets with attention to the Beats, the New York School, Black Arts, and many other movements. Writers may include Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, and others.

African-American Literature

ENGL 366 - Millan, Diego A.

A focused engagement with the African-American literary tradition, from its beginnings in the late 18th century through its powerful assertions in the 21st. The focus of each term's offering may vary; different versions of the course might emphasize a genre, author, or period such as poetry, Ralph Ellison, or the Harlem Renaissance.

Topics in Literature in English from 1700-1900:George Eliot, Middlemarch, and the Devoted Reader

ENGL 393D - Adams, Edward A.

Prerequisite: Completion of an English course numbered between 201 and 295 and another English course numbered between 222 and 299. This seminar begins with and centers upon a careful, critical reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel often regarded as one of the greatest and most ambitious produced in the era of the novel’s securest cultural dominance and famously described by Virginia Woolf as one of the “few English novels written for grown-up people.”  We will, furthermore, energize and problematize this reading by setting it in light of Rebecca’s Mead’s critically-acclaimed My Life in Middlemarch, a memoir of her devoted lifelong reading and reading of this novel—not just for pleasure for its profound wisdom and insight.  The question of such intense admiration verging on fandom is one that has recently received increasing scholarly attention, particularly in relation to the so-called Janeite phenomenon, that is, the love of Jane Austen fans for her novels, but reaches to numerous other novelists, poets, playwrights, film-makers, and their fans.  The focus on Eliot's entertaining but demanding novel will occupy over half of the course's time, but we will begin with some shorter and more accessible novels by Eliot to set-up the ambition of her masterpiece—and conclude with examples of texts that have inspired similarly devoted reading.  (HL) Adams.

Topics in Lit in English since 1900: Environmental Persuasion

ENGL 394E - Smout, Kary

How do we resolve major environmental problems?  How do we balance the science, economics, public policy, political, ethical, cultural, and other dimensions to create real solutions?  Why is this so hard?  This course studies strategies of persuasion used by participants in environmental debates to teach students how to enter and win these debates.  We study some of the great environmental writers in many genres, look at key historical documents and multimedia works (documentaries, ads, movies, websites), and do some activities involving local leaders and issues. Students write short analytical papers and work on a big project that studies an important environmental debate historically, analyzing who won and why. How do we persuade others to join us in making the changes we want to make?. 

Senior Research and Writing: Poetics of Progress

ENGL 413E - Gray, Khadeejah A. (K. Avvirin)

In "The Poetics of Progress," we will consider, from a critical perspective, the evolution of the idea of progress in the American national narrative, via the work of inaugural poets (such as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou) as well as select poet laureates (such as Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith) and America’s self-declared national bard, Walt Whitman. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s eulogy for President Lincoln written in the wake of the civil war, marks the poet’s efforts to give voice to the “greatest poem” that he believed animated American land. We will appraise this and other Whitman poems as part of an effort to suture settlers to Native land in the name of progress. In found poems on the American civil war from Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water, we will hear the cacophonous voices of the U.S. nation’s fractured national past. In select secondary readings by historians such as Tera Hunter and sociologists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, we will contextualize these voices within the historical upheavals of the period. As we will read poets and historians alike in this course, students will be asked to respond to readings in critical as well as creative assignments.  

Internship in Literary Editing: Shenandoah

ENGL 453A - Staples, Beth A.

An apprenticeship in editing with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee's literarymagazine. Students are instructed in and assist in these facets of the editor's work: evaluation of manuscripts of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, comics, and translations; substantive editing of manuscripts, copyediting; communicating with writers; social media; website maintenance;the design of promotional material. May be applied once to the English major or Creative Writingminor and repeated for a maximum of six additional elective credits, as long as the specific projectsundertaken are different.

Honors Thesis

ENGL 493 - Staples, Beth A.

A summary of prerequisites and requirements may be obtained at the English Department website (https://my.wlu.edu/english-department).

Fall 2023▲

See complete information about these courses in the course offerings database. For more information about a specific course, including course type, schedule and location, click on its title.

Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 203 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 203 - Fuentes, Freddy O.

A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 203 - Staples, Beth A.

A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 204 - Gray, Khadeejah A. (K. Avvirin)

A course in the practice of writing poetry, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

ENGL233-01/FILM233-01 Introduction to Film

ENGL 233 - Al-Ahmad, Jumana S.

Same as ENGL 233. An introductory study of film taught in English and with a topical focus on texts from a variety of global film-making traditions. At its origins, film displayed boundary-crossing international ambitions, and this course attends to that important fact, but the course's individual variations emphasize one national film tradition (e.g., American, French, Indian, British, Italian, Chinese, etc.) and, within it, may focus on major representative texts or upon a subgenre or thematic approach. In all cases, the course introduces students to fundamental issues in the history, theory, and basic terminology of film.

ENGL233-02/FILM233-02 Introduction to Film

ENGL 233 - Sandberg, Stephanie L.

Same as ENGL 233. An introductory study of film taught in English and with a topical focus on texts from a variety of global film-making traditions. At its origins, film displayed boundary-crossing international ambitions, and this course attends to that important fact, but the course's individual variations emphasize one national film tradition (e.g., American, French, Indian, British, Italian, Chinese, etc.) and, within it, may focus on major representative texts or upon a subgenre or thematic approach. In all cases, the course introduces students to fundamental issues in the history, theory, and basic terminology of film.

Children's Literature

ENGL 234 - Harrington, Jane F.

A study of works written in English for children. The course treats major writers, thematic and generic groupings of texts, and children's literature in historical context. Readings may include poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction, and illustrated books, including picture books that dispense with text.

Literature of the American South

ENGL 253 - Smout, Kary

A study of selected fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction by Southern writers in their historical and literary contexts. We practice multiple approaches to critical reading, and students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers.

Enslavement and Abolition in British Literature 1688-1831

ENGL 259 - Berlin, Michael

This course considers representations of and responses to enslavement and the slave trade in British literature from 1688 to 1831. We read a wide variety of texts, including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, The Woman of Color (anonymous), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, alongside Parliamentary debates, abolitionist tracts, and other contemporary accounts. Other topics may include emerging racial theories in the eighteenth century, British colonialism in the Caribbean, twenty-first-century approaches to the archive, and the legacy of these conversations in more recent literature, such as Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. 

ENGL263-01/ENV263-01 Nature as Self: Environmental Literature in the Anthropocene

ENGL 263 - Green, Leah N. (Leah Naomi)

This course will study American fascinations with ideas of "Nature" and "Self" as they manifest in contemporary literature and thought. We will discuss the implications of these categories for humans as members of ecosystems as well as of "advanced societies." We will read essays, novels, and poetry at the cutting edge of American environmental writing, as well as those who contribute to its historical path. We will test our own understandings of human roles in relation to the greater-than-human world and will consider implications that these understandings may carry for the individual life as well as for a globalized world in which ecological issues are of great concern.

ENGL264-01/WGSS264-01 The Body Electric: Queer Theory, Film, and Text

ENGL 264 - Kao, Wan-Chuan

Queerness is inextricable from visual and textual representation as production and as reception. Thiscourse is an introduction to the nexus of queer theory, film, and text. We will analyze and interpret select films, as well as literary works that serve as inspirations behind cinematic adaptations, through methodologies grounded in LGBTQI2+ studies. We will also situate films, texts, and theories in history and queer the visual and textual archives. Our itinerary is organized around a set of critical keywords: closet, innocence, friendship, villain, tragedian, nature, body, horror, identity, history, camp, filth, nurture, Orient, fetish, desire, wound, death, love, sex, family, meet cute, and futurity.

Topics in American Literature: The "Great American Novel"

ENGL 293L - Adams, Edward A.

Following the North’s victory in the Civil War when hopes for the United States of America’s greatness (and even goodness) reached one of their peaks, the literary ideal of the Great American Novel emerged as its literary manifestation.  Since then this cultural and authorial ambition has waxed and waned, been championed by Edith Wharton in the 1920s and W&L’s own Tom Wolfe in the 1970s—and criticized as a dangerous even nonsensical literary delusion by others.  This course explores major examples of these defenders and opponents, but its main goal is to experience this phenomenon through reading major contenders to “Great American Novel” by such canonical authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, De Lillo, and Wolfe along with more diverse voices from Wharton, Loos, and Cather to Morrison, Baldwin, Erdrich, Alice Walker, and Jeanine Cummins. 

Topics in World Literature in English: Caribbean Women Writers

ENGL 294C - Chowdhury, Lubabah

In her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Black feminist scholar and poet Audre Lorde writes: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” Lorde’s anger at racist, sexist injustices is not just an emotional response but is also an intellectual and physical one: intellectual in that it grants her information, and physical in that it imbues her with energy. In this class, we will read Creole, Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean women’s writing from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica and the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, with particular attention to representations of emotions such as anger, love/desire and disgust, and of physical feelings such as hunger and freedom. We will interrogate the uses of feeling in these texts, discuss what intellectual and sensorial information these feelings provide and reflect on to what extent these feelings can propel anti-racist and feminist consciousness and action.

Topics in World Literature in English: Magic Realism

ENGL 294E - Chowdhury, Lubabah

Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR-FW requirement. A young girl born in Chile can tell the future. A house in nineteenth-century Ohio is haunted by a “spiteful” ghost. A boy born on the cusp of India’s independence from Britain is psychically connected to a “conference” of midnight’s children. Why do authors include these magical elements in novels and short stories that have an otherwise ordinary, real-world setting? How does the inclusion of magic in novels about the postcolonial and post-Emancipation period comment on the inequitable social realities of the world? Does magic provide a reprieve from social injustice, or does it merely highlight how far we have yet to go? Together, we will read and discuss various texts from the magical realist tradition, as well as short readings about the foundations of this literary movement, in order to understand where we can find magic in the everyday. Authors include Isabelle Allende, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Rita Indiana and Nalo Hopkinson.

Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 306 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

A workshop in writing poems, requiring regular writing and outside reading.

The Tudors

ENGL 316 - Gertz, Genelle C.

Famous for his mistresses and marriages, his fickle treatment of courtiers, and his vaunting ambition, Henry VIII did more to change English society and religion than any other king. No one understood Henry's power more carefully than his daughter Elizabeth, who oversaw England's first spy network and jealously guarded her throne from rebel contenders. This course studies the writers who worked for the legendary Tudors, focusing on the love poetry of courtiers, trials, and persecution of religious dissidents, plays, and accounts of exploration to the new world. We trace how the ambitions of the monarch, along with religious revolution and colonial expansion, figure in the work of writers like Wyatt, Surrey, and Anne Askew; Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Southwell; and Thomas More and Walter Ralegh.

Native American Literatures

ENGL 361 - Gray, Khadeejah A. (K. Avvirin)

A study of American Indian literature, primarily from the 20th century but including some historical and prehistorical foundations (oral storytelling, early orations and essays). Texts and topics may vary, but this course poses questions about nation, identity, indigenous sovereignty, mythology and history, and the powers of story as both resistance and regeneration. Readings in poetry, fiction, memoir, and nonfiction prose. Authors may include Alexie, Harjo, Hogan, Erdrich, Silko, Chrystos, Ortiz, LeAnne Howe and Paula Gunn Allen.

Topics in Literature in English from 1700-1900: The Nineteenth Century and its Shadow

ENGL 393C - Millan, Diego A.

Pre-modern people cared deeply about the supernatural. How has the nineteenth century echoed through the subsequent twentieth and early twentieth centuries? For instance, how have writers/artists/museums responded to the challenges of representing the institution and the afterlives of slavery? Indigenous genocide? Chinese exclusion? More broadly, how have ideas of race been explored through the canon of American literature, and how has literature participated in creating, challenging, or maintaining such ideas? In this course, students will read and juxtapose canonical works from the nineteenth century with a smaller selection of contemporary works that call upon central conflicts from the 19th century as a site for exploring their echoes and impact. Students will have an opportunity to explore additional material independently. Potential authors and topics include: James Fenimore Cooper; Frederick Douglass; Harriet Jacobs; Herman Melville; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Octavia Butler; approaches to adaptation; as well as museum and/or plantation tours.  

Topics in Literature in English since 1900: Hitchcock, Freud, and Their Discontents

ENGL 394C - Adams, Edward A.

Alfred Hitchcock stands as the most famous, popular, and acclaimed twentieth-century director with more films ranked in the top 100, more critical studies, and more college courses. Sigmund Freud long enjoyed similar prestige among twentieth-century students of psychology, and Freudian concepts run throughout Hitchcock’s films, determining their portrayals of human psychology and shaping their dreamlike mystery plots. At the same time, Hitchcock’s films have been faulted for their misogyny or, more simply, for how they rely upon violence against women to construct their suspenseful stories. In teaching Hitchcock over the years, I have always attended closely to this “dark thesis,” one variously argued by his best biographer Donald Spoto and most insightful theoretical critic Laura Mulvey. This new course, however, goes beyond acknowledging the problems with Hitchcock. It juxtaposes his best films (we'll study about eight) with an equal number of films by leading women directors (Agnes Varda, Jane Campion, and Chantal Akerman among others) who crafted their films in opposition to Hitchcock—and, at the same time, questioned the Freudian psychology that enabled his brilliant but disturbing fantasies. 

Topics in Literature in English since 1900: Beyond Superman: Literary Comics

ENGL 394D - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

The course will focus on 21st century publications from a range of presses outside of U.S. mainstream comics. Students will also read a range of literary theory on the formal qualities of graphic novels, including style, word and image relationships, layout, closure, braiding, visual narrative, and apply those theories to the analysis of selected works.

Senior Research and Writing

ENGL 413 - Pickett, Holly C.

A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members' areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. Possible topics include ecocriticism, literature and psychology, material conditions of authorship, and documentary poetics.

Internship in Literary Editing with Shenandoah

ENGL 453 - Staples, Beth A.

An apprenticeship in editing with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee's literary magazine. Students are instructed in and assist in these facets of the editor's work: evaluation of manuscripts of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, comics, and translations; substantive editing of manuscripts, copyediting; communicating with writers; social media; website maintenance; the design of promotional material.

Honors Thesis

ENGL 493 - Staples, Beth A.

A summary of prerequisites and requirements may be obtained at the English Department website (https://my.wlu.edu/english-department).

Spring 2023▲

See complete information about these courses in the course offerings database. For more information about a specific course, including course type, schedule and location, click on its title.

Creative Writing: Nonfiction

ENGL 206 - Womer, Brenna

A course in the practice of writing nonfiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Eco-Writing

ENGL 207 - Green, Leah N. (Leah Naomi)

An expeditionary, multi-genre course (fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry) in environmental creative writing. Readings focus on contemporary “EcoWriters”. We take weekly expeditions, including creative writing hikes, a creative writing visit to a Thai Forest Buddhist monastery, and a creative writing visit to the workshops of a landscape painter and bloomsmith. The course involves moderate to challenging hiking. We research the science and social science of the ecosystems explored, as well as the language of those ecosystems. The course has two primary aspects: (1) reading and literary analysis of multi-genre eco-literature and (2) developing skill and craft in creating EcoWriting through the act of writing in these genres and through participation in "writing workshop."

Topics in Creative Writing: Writing for Children

ENGL 210A - Harrington, Jane F.

In this course, students will read a variety of children’s stories, analyzing each through a craft lens; become familiar with contemporary authors and industry trends via interviews and articles; write analytical and creative prose pieces from prompts; engage in open readings and peer critique sessions; and through a revision process produce a varied portfolio of creative works for children. 

Creating Comics

ENGL 215 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris) / Beavers, Leigh A.

Same as ARTS 215. A course which is both a creative-writing and a studio-art course. Students study graphic narratives as an art form that combines image-making and storytelling, producing their own multi-page narratives through the writing of images. The course includes a theoretical overview of the comics form, using a range of works as practical models.

Magical Education

ENGL 239 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

In fantasy fiction, power and potential are sometimes represented by magic-but authors imagine magic's sources differently, with implications for how it should be developed. Students in this course will read fiction about schools of magic, analyzing their curricula and missions. In addition to writing analytically, students will co-create a web site for a fictional liberal arts college of magic.

Individual Shakespeare Play

ENGL 242 - Pickett, Holly C.

A detailed study of a single Shakespearean play, including its sources, textual variants, performance history, film adaptations and literary and cultural legacy. The course includes both performance-based and analytical assignments.

Literary Book Publishing

ENGL 289 - Staples, Beth A.

This course is an introduction to the publishing industry, its culture and commerce. We examine the history of the industry and how it operates today, with an emphasis on active learning and practice. This class consists, in part, of active discussions with industry professionals, studying the life of a single book: its author, its agent, its editor, its book designer, its publisher. It gives you an overview of how the publishing industry works through the eyes of the people who work in it. It also gives you a chance to put what you learn into practice. Using a book you're working on (or a theoretical book you may someday write), you compose a query letter, design a book jacket, and create marketing material in support of your project. The term culminates with a book auction where students form publishing teams and bid on the books they would most like to publish.

Topics in British Literature: Tolkien Page and Screen

ENGL 292D - Adams, Edward A.

J.R.R. Tolkien has been praised as the "Author of the Century" (the Twentieth Century) on the basis of the remarkable artistic, cultural, and financial success of The Lord of the Rings--along with ancillary texts such as The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. Peter Jackson's ground-breaking, turn-of-the-millennium film adaptation greatly enhanced and extended such claims into the Twenty-First.  This course focuses upon both the original and the films in the context of wide-ranging literary historical questions such as Tolkien's renewal of medieval romance, his contributions to the development of the modern fantasy novel, definitions and redefinitions of epic, debates regarding the problematic status of escapism and spectacle, and major film theories. 

Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Funny Women

ENGL 295A - Millan, Diego A.

Is comedy gendered? How does what makes us laugh, and how we make other laugh, position us in the world? What does the intersection of comedy and performance have to show us about identity formation in relation to race, class, and gender? How have women, in particular, mobilized comedy to disrupt, to refuse, or to otherwise affect structures of power? In seeking answers to these questions and more, this spring term course examines a history of funny women and the many cultural expectations that surround them. We will expand our view to consider how other meanings of “funny” – as oddity or curiosity – to consider how labels and cultural associations simultaneously police women’s behavior and provide foundations for imagining resistance. Possible authors/genres include Fran Ross, Alison Bechdel, Tina Fey, Toni Cade Bambara, stand-up comedy, drama, memoir, graphic novel/comic strips. In addition to more traditional styles of writing (formal analysis, argument-driven essays), students will have an opportunity to generate their own comedic/creative projects. 

Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Writing and Art

ENGL 295C - Brodie, Laura F.

A lot of great poetry and prose has been written in response to paintings, sculptures and other works of art, from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to Anne Carson’s “Hopper: Confessions.” This is called ekphrastic writing, and our spring class will be an ekphrastic feast. We’ll read many famous examples from poets including Keats, de la Mare, Williams, Auden, Lowell, Sexton, and Kevin Young. W&L curators and art history professors will enrich our understanding of the art, while we study the writing. We’ll also encounter new writings commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. Over the past few years MoMA has invited writers to reflect upon several works in their collection. Our focus will be Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series--60 small paintings that tell the story of the Great Migration—which have inspired works by Rita Dove and W&L alumna Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, among other poets and writers of prose. We’ll also visit local galleries and private studios, and explore W&L’s art collection. Students will keep a journal of their own informal ekphrastic writings, graded pass/fail, and write several two-page close-readings to prepare for a final, analytical paper.  

Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Postmodernism

ENGL 295D - Berlin, Michael

Ruling on the nature of obscenity, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart declared of art and smut alike: “I know it when I see it.” The same can be said of the ways that critics have viewed the question of postmodernity. From Las Vegas Casinos to the National Book Awards, Postmodernism has been a phenomenon better experienced than explained. Academic attempts to define Postmodernism have ranged from the over-vague “skepticism towards metanarratives” (Lyotard) to the under-charitable culture of “depthlessness” (Jameson). This course will attempt to meet Postmodern texts on their own terms. In doing so, we will ask questions such as: how do literary movements form; why has Postmodernism seemed less relevant in recent years (or, has it?); how did reactions to Postmodernism reflect the diversification of cultural production in the 1970s and ‘80s; and, how far has the dichotomy between irony and sincerity gotten us in the end? While we will mostly read fiction, we will also examine scholarly articles and look at Postmodern art and film.  

Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Native American Film

ENGL 295E - Gray, Khadeejah A. (K. Avvirin)

Film scholars have long expressed a desire for cinema to function as a language system. They have settled, instead, for what cinema, as an art form and visual technology, offers by way of communicating: “large signifying units” (in film theorist Christian Metz’s terms) that approximate the sentence. For Native filmmakers, cinema offers itself as a locality where complex perceptions of the relationship between self and heritage can be articulated and reconciled. However, for many Native art and film critics who write and work in a political context whose aim is the full sovereignty of tribal nations, terms such as “identity” seem threateningly static and code as the cacophonous clatter of a form of politics to which artists of color have historically been pigeonholed and which, they insist, do not offer a coherent framework for Native national politics. With Michele Raheja’s Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty and Representations of Native Americans in Film as our primary text, we will watch Native American films, old and new. We may discuss “Imprint” (2007), the documentary “Hearing Radmilla” (2012) and “Smoke Signals” (1998). Especially with regard to Afro-Navajo singer Radmilla Cody’s story, we will consider how diegetic and non-diegetic music mediates the temporality of film. Are music and the cinematic “shot” equal partners? Grounded in the text Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes by Kyle Mays, we will also consider Afro/Native relations through the rap and hip hop soundscape of the television series “Reservation Dogs” (2021-present). 

18th-Century Novels

ENGL 335 - Walle, Taylor F.

A study of prose fiction up to about 1800, focusing on the 18th-century literary and social developments that have been called the rise of the novel. Authors likely include Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, and/or Austen.

Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Archival Methods & Lit Study

ENGL 395C - Chowdhury, Lubabah

In this course, we will learn about archives and their potential for enriching our understanding of literary texts. Besides familiarizing ourselves with the W&L Special Collections in Leyburn Library, we will be reading scholars who have used archival material and archival methods to enhance their understanding of literature and the human condition. Readings will include scholarly work by Marisa Fuentes and Ann Laura Stoler, and novels by Lakshmi Persaud and Zoe Wicomb.