SPRING 2018 COURSES

100 Level Courses

200 Level Courses

  • ENGL 291: Introduction to Writing Creative Essays
  • ENGL 273: Introduction to Creative Writing–Poetry
    • This course is designed to introduce students to the art and craft of writing and reading poetry. We will be practicing close readings (and written critiques) of contemporary poems and learning the habits of poetic perception, drafting, and revising. Small workshop groups and private conferences are core components of this class. Be prepared to “live like a writer” and practice the consistent habits of a working artist.
  • ENGL 271: Introduction to Creative Writing–Fiction
  • ENGL 261: Black Literature–Twentieth Century
  • ENGL 250: Introduction to Shakespeare
  • ENGL 243: Currents in American Literature
    • Topic: Chasing The Great American Novel: The ambition to write the Great American Novel (GAN)—to write the novel that perfectly captures the nation in all its immensity—has haunted American writers for an astonishingly long time. Though the GAN ambition has been thoroughly ridiculed by scholars and novelists alike, it has nonetheless endured with peculiar force in the American imagination. We shall examine this cultural phenomenon by considering some of the most viable contenders for GAN status as well as the approaches taken in pursuing this elusive grail. Authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Toni Morrison.
  • ENGL 210: Introduction to Literature
    • Topic: In Search of the Sublime: As well as presenting ways to think, speak, and write about literature in the major genres and relate it to our own experience, this course will also attempt to define and trace the development of the sublime that elevated combination of the beautiful and the terrible in literature, through the centuries and up to our time, including works in fiction, poetry, and drama.
  • SPCH 210: Interpersonal Communication

300 Level Courses

  • ENGL 399: Introduction to Honors Project
  • ENGL 398: Journalism Internship
  • ENGL 393: Technical Communication
  • ENGL 392: Tutorial in Writing
  • ENGL 391: Advanced Exposition and Argumentation
  • ENGL 387: Web Design and Multimedia Authoring
    • Topic: Social Action and Digital Design: This course will introduce you to the production and analysis of digital texts. We will examine the theory and politics of digital media, the affordances of different media types and styles, and various tools for making and hosting digital texts. Our discussion topics and exemplar texts will focus on civic action and social activism in digital media. In addition to studying the methods and evaluating the effectiveness of particular movements or campaigns, we will consider issues of identity and access in digital spaces, including questions of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability.
  • ENGL 382: Feature Writing
  • ENGL 373: Creative Writing–Poetry
  • ENGL 371: Creative Writing–Fiction
  • ENGL 360: The Literature of Minorities
    • Topic: Afterlives of Slavery: This course explores slavery in the black literary imaginary. Drawing from nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century works by writers of African descent, we will explore representations of bondage, fugitivity, literacy, self-making, exile, and escape. Possible authors include Frederick Douglass, Gloria Naylor, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Baldwin.
  • ENGL 350: Major British and American Writers
    • Topic: William Blake: Described variously as a visionary, a mystic, a rebel, and even, by a contemporary, as “an unfortunate lunatic,” the Romantic-era poet and multimedia artist William Blake was in many ways the quintessential Romantic artist and revolutionary thinker, privileging the imagination over reason and declaring that “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” This class will study Blake’s poetry and images, focusing on the connections between his works and the turbulent period in which he lived.
  • ENGL 344: Topics in Textual Studies
    • Topic: Teaching Artist=Change Agent: This course is for English, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Media Studies, and Dance undergraduates as well as those interested in social entrepreneurship. This course explores civic engagement through arts integration with a focus on the role and career of teaching artists in Maryland’s PreK-12 communities. Young Audiences/Arts for Learning (YAMD) is a non-profit organization specializing in connecting teaching artists with during-school and after-school settings to help increase PreK-12 student engagement and raise student achievement. (Combined with ART 392)
  • ENGL 332: Contemporary American Literature
    • Topic: The Quest for Authentic Connection: One of the greatest paradoxes of our day is that, while we are increasingly better connected (through social media, phones, mass transport), more and more people report feelings of loneliness and depression. Many studies have shown us that these mediated forms of communication leave users feeling alienated, alone, FOMO-struck. This course examines many of the ways in which art has responded to this state of affairs, sometimes in order to fill the void that networking technologies have imparted. Beginning in the 1960s and advancing to the present, we will consider the moment when artists first began to reckon with the problem of authentic connection, and then contemplate some of the most compelling explorations of this condition in the ensuing decades.
  • ENGL 326: The Structure of English
  • ENGL 324: Theories of Communication and Technology
  • ENGL 323: Advanced Skills in Tutoring Writing
  • ENGL 320: Topics in Communication and Technology
    • Topic: Sonic Studies: This course challenges students to think through issues of culture, ideology, race, class, and gender through the lens of sonic studies. Students will be introduced to histories of sound reproduction, emerging sound technologies, music, and the presence of sound in various forms of media. In conjunction with covering a diverse array of current scholarship, this course will explore the intersection between communication, culture, and technology. More specifically, students will have the opportunity to build competencies in sound aesthetics as a historical and political object of inquiry and, most importantly, put those competencies into practice. Students will collect, create, and analyze sound in addition to images and texts.
  • ENGL 306: British Literature: Victorian and Modern
    • Topic: Literature and Social Change: In this course we will explore how authors, literary forms, and literary movements in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries responded to four major developments that impacted society: capitalism, Darwinism, feminism, and post-colonialism. We will explore how realism, modernism, and postmodernism each addressed these changes by experimenting with form and addressing the relationship between literature and society. Possible authors include Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, R.L. Stevenson, Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Jean Binta Breeze, and Ian McEwan.
  • ENGL 304: British Literature: Medieval and Renaissance
    • Topic: National/Transnational: From 800-1600 CE, English literature was deeply transnational. Beowulf nostalgically translates and interrogates Scandinavian legend after the Viking diaspora. Despite long-running French-English wars, English authors also embrace the “superior” French genres of chivalric romance and fabliau (tavern tale), including French contempt for the laboring classes. Yet English dramatists, during the age of exploration, nervously construct and demonize the Spanish, Moorish, or Scottish hero as Other. Authors/works include Beowulf, Marie de France, Chaucer’s Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Othello, The Jew of Malta, and Ben Jonson’s satire on the Scottish king, Eastward Hoe, which landed him in prison.
  • ENGL 303: Art of the Essay
    • The personal essay is highly versatile form of writing that traces its roots to ancient times and includes such celebrated practitioners as Montaigne, William Hazlitt, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, Charles Lamb, H.L. Mencken, Mary McCarthy, James Thurber, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion. The “Art of the Essay” includes a literature and a writing component. In addition to reading a selection of celebrated essays, students will be required to write a series of short personal essays on assigned topics.
  • ENGL 302: Literary Methodologies and Research
  • ENGL 301: Analysis of Literary Language
  • ENGL 300: Communication and Technology: Analysis of Texts and Contexts

400 Level Courses

  • ENGL 499: Senior Honors Project
  • ENGL 495: Internship
  • ENGL 493: Seminar in Communication and Technology
    • Topic: Baltimore–Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: What does The Negro Motorist’s Green Book, a travel guide published during the Jim Crow era, have to do with the 2015 Baltimore uprising? Why do some in Baltimore have a life expectancy that is 14 years shorter than others in different areas of the city? How does spatial mobility affect the economic lives of those living in Baltimore? Questions like these will motivate this course. We will take a historical perspective that aims to unravel the complex intersections among rhetoric, race, and technology in the United States, so that we can better understand Baltimore today. Consequently, we will examine how race was constructed rhetorically and technologically from the abolition of slavery through the digital era with apps like Twitter and YouTube. (Combined with ENGL 631)
    • Topic: Theories of Creativity and Play: Albert Rouzie argues that “the deeply entrenched divisions between work and play, seriousness and frivolity, and order and chaos. . . ultimately impoverished our culture’s approach to literacy” (27). This course examines how these divisions came about and explores how recent attempts to anneal the work/play split (i.e., to take play seriously and recognize its connections to critical engagement), facilitate our abilities to make and negotiate meaning in a rapidly-changing world. The course will also focus on myths about, and approaches to, creativity. Throughout the semester we will be exploring ways that theories of play might inform and transform creative-critical practice. (Combined with ENGL 625)
  • ENGL 469: Studies in Race and Ethnicity
    • Topic: Mixed-Race Fiction: Fiction written by and centering on people of mixed black and white descent have perennially been assimilated into the African American canon, much in the same way that biracial individuals have historically been classified as black in the U.S. Against this tendency, this course will examine some of the many fictions published by and about biracial people, taking seriously the particular racial perspective that they explore. We will pay close attention to this literature’s historical context, considering it in relation to such developments as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, shifts in gender ideology, and court cases.
  • ENGL 464: Studies in Women and Literature
    • Topic: Victorian Women’s Writing: This course explores how Victorian women writers interrogated Victorian constructions of femininity, addressed female agency, voice, and subjectivity, and investigated intersectionality, by dramatizing the interplay of multiple identities produced by class, ethnicity, gender, and dis/ability. We will examine Victorian literary feminism’s beginnings in the fiction of Charlotte Bronte, its mid-Victorian manifestations in George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Muloch Craik, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and the emergence of the New Woman in late Victorian writing by George Egerton, and Amy Levy. We will read prose by Victorian feminists, and place these writings in conversation with contemporary feminism. (Combined with ENGL 664)
  • ENGL 413: Advanced Topics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
    • Topic: Shakespearean Appropriation: This course will discuss adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare plays as they appear on film, stage, and printed page. To “appropriate” is to make something your own; that process tells us as much about the work of art being appropriated as it does about those responsible for it. We’ll engage that dynamic by examining a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in all their complexity and by thinking through the practices of adaptation and appropriation in recent decades. We will discuss issues of authorship and intertextuality, social contexts and cultural legacy. We will ask when Shakespeare stops being Shakespeare and becomes something new. (Combined with ENGL 604)
  • ENGL 410: Seminar in Genre Studies
    • Topic: Versions of Pastor 1500-1699: Versions of the pastoral genre permeate Renaissance literature. Originally a lyric form, pastoral developed to include prose romance, drama, and even epic. The genre provided a coded means to reflect on contemporary politics, culture, class, and mores. This course breaks the pastoral code, analyzing the artificiality of the genre–shepherds, rustics, idealized pastures, magical forests–in the context of literary and historical changes. The class concentrates on English authors such as Christopher Marlowe, Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Milton, and Andrew Marvell. Graduate students will explore the background in Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Sannazaro, and Montemayor. (Combined with ENGL 610)
  • ENGL 407: Language in Society
  • ENGL 400: Special Projects in English