Course Offerings

Fall 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.

Introduction to Creative Writing

ENGL 201 - Pickett, Holly C.

A course in the practice of creative writing, with attention to two or more genres. Pairings vary by instructor but examples might include narrative fiction and nonfiction; poetry and the lyric essay; and flash and hybrid forms. This course involves workshops, literary study, and critical writing.

Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 203 - Harrington, Jane F.

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: Nonfiction

ENGL 206 - Ramirez, Alexander

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.

ENGL233-01/FILM233-01 Introduction to Film

ENGL 233 - Cano, Mayra 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.

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.

ENGL233-03/FILM233-03 Introduction to Film

ENGL 233 - Perez, Nich 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.

ENGL252-01/MRST252-01 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 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.

Topics in American Literature: African American Literature and Visual Culture

ENGL 293B - Hill, Lena M.

This course examines African American literature ranging from eighteenth century poetry to a late twentieth century novel. As we read texts published across this 200-year period, we will study the ways writers engage visual art to portray black identity. By examining literature by Wheatley, Douglass, Jacobs, Washington, DuBois, Grimké, Larsen, Hurston, and Ellison alongside the evolving photographic, high art, and popular visual forms of their respective historical periods, we will assess how visual culture and visuality impacted the formation of the African American literary tradition. 

Topics in American Literature: Resist and Revolt: Understanding Critical Theory through Film

ENGL 293P - King, Emily L.

This course introduces students to critical theory through contemporary film and focuses on matters of resistance, revolution, and social transformation. Examining canonical texts from the fields of structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, postmodernism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and gender theory, we will engage with the following questions: How might critical theory and the ways in which we read it constitute a revolution? And how might critical theory simultaneously reveal the limits of that revolution?Specifically, we will engage with the work of Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Edward Said, Ferdinand de Saussure, Christina Sharpe, Michael Warner, and more. Our films will include popular favorites such as Fight Club, Get Out, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Matrix, Moonlight, and Mulholland Drive. Though this is not a film course per se, we will use film as a way of accessing and, perhaps, extending the philosophical ideas we will explore in the discourses of critical theory. 

Topics in World Literature in English: Contemporary Middle Eastern Literature

ENGL 294F - Chowdhury, Lubabah

American politicians, pundits and newspapers paint a dire portrait of the Middle East. Phrases like “war-torn,” “impoverished” and “extremist” litter American descriptions of countries as disparate as Lebanon and Algeria. This course explores important but increasingly marginalized questions: how do people from the Middle East and of Middle Eastern descent represent themselves? How do artists from the region portray their politics, customs and personhood? We will focus our study on poems, short stories, films and novels produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from the Levantine region. All Arabic-language texts will be available in English translation. The writers we will study together include Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmood Darwish, Susan Abulhawa and Isabella Hammad; secondary critical texts include essays and book chapters by Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erekat and Mezna Qato.

Topics in World Literature in English: Introduction to Fairy Tale

ENGL 294G - Harrington, Jane F.

This course is an adventure into our treasured cultural commons, the fairy tale. We will examine this enduring genre from its oral origins to modern multiforms, with special attention to literary tales of Europe. Students should expect to work in peer discussion groups, design and deliver presentations, and write analytical responses and essays that thoughtfully engage with the material. 

Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 306 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

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

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

ENGL 313 - Kao, Wan-Chuan

This course considers the primary work on which Chaucer's reputation rests: The Canterbury Tales. We pay sustained attention to Chaucer's Middle English at the beginning of the semester to ease the reading process. Then we travel alongside the Canterbury pilgrims as they tell their tales under the guise of a friendly competition. The Canterbury Tales is frequently read as a commentary on the social divisions in late medieval England, such as the traditional estates, religious professionals and laity, and gender hierarchies. But despite the Tales' professed inclusiveness of the whole of English society, Chaucer nonetheless focuses inordinately on those individuals from the emerging middle classes. Our aim is to approach the Tales from the practices of historicization and theorization; that is, we both examine Chaucer's cultural and historical contexts and consider issues of religion, gender, sexuality, marriage, conduct, class, chivalry, courtly love, community, geography, history, power, spirituality, secularism, traditional authority, and individual experience. Of particular importance are questions of voicing and writing, authorship and readership. Lastly, we think through Chaucer's famous Retraction at the end" of The Canterbury Tales, as well as Donald R. Howard's trenchant observation that the Tale is "unfinished but complete." What does it mean for the father of literary "Englishness" to end his life's work on the poetic principle of unfulfilled closure and on the image of a society on the move?"

Postcolonial Literature and Theory

ENGL 376 - Chowdhury, Lubabah

This course is an introduction to some of the key concepts and debates in postcolonial theory, with an emphasis on Caribbean literature and anti-colonial thought. We will grapple with three main questions that have shaped the field as we know it: 1. When and where is the “postcolonial”? 2. How does the legacy of colonialism shape modern day understandings of race, ethnicity and culture? And 3. What does the legacy of colonialism mean for the environmental crises we face today? These broad concepts (temporality, racial formations and ecological challenges) are grounded in the study of key theoretical texts, including the works of Frantz Fanon, and in novels and poems, including those by W.E.B. Du Bois, Michelle Cliff and Suzanne Césaire.

Topics: Pride and Paradise

ENGL 392C - Gertz, Genelle C.

Perfect society set in a beautiful place has long been a trope of literature. Gardens and appealing landscapes embody a paradise that harbors personal and social perfection. Yet stories of perfection usually include some rouge element of the ugly, and of the ruinous forces that mar both the perfect land and society. This course focuses on some of the formative stories of paradise in literary history. We start with John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, to consider how Milton frames paradise, and how this epic poem relates questions of pride (not, in the seventeenth century, confidence, but rather, overreaching of position or placement of personal desires over those of others) to the development of moral reasoning. We move to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to examine how the romance plot encompasses notions of pride and paradise, recasting pride as haughtiness and elitism based in class, and paradise as (sometimes) marriage along with financial ease. We then take up Toni Morrison’s Paradise, a novel that imagines an all-Black town in Oklahoma, near a convent. The convent houses an all-female community, and raises the ire of local men. Morrison’s story of race, isolation, female community and colorism places both pride and paradise in the context of American history and racism, as well as notions of marriage and gender. If there’s time, we’ll consider the utopian novel, Matrix, Lauren Groff’s recent story of a medieval convent whose heroic leader, the writer Marie de France, protects and expands her society of women, but jeopardizes their autonomy due to her pride. 

Topics in Literature in English from 1700-1900: Genres of the Atlantic

ENGL 393E - Berlin, Michael

Directed Individual Study: Novel Composition/Creative Capstone

ENGL 403E - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

Senior Research and Writing

ENGL 413 - Millan, Diego A.

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 - Chowdhury, Lubabah

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

Honors Thesis

ENGL 493 - Millan, Diego A.

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

Honors Thesis

ENGL 493 - Pickett, Holly C.

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

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).

Honors Thesis

ENGL 493 - Wheeler, Lesley M.

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

Spring 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: Playwriting

ENGL 202 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

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

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. 

ENGL241-01/FILM241-01 Cinema Arthuriana

ENGL 241 - Kao, Wan-Chuan

This course is a survey of Arthurian films and an introduction to film studies. We will read select premodern and modern texts and examine a variety of films across the twentieth• and the twenty-first centuries. The course begins with Arthur the messianic hero, then proceeds to the romance of the Holy Grail, the tribulations of Gawain, and finally the American repurposing of matters of Arthur. H film is an escapist medium, it is first and foremost a mirror to society that reflects its cultural fantasies and structural imaginaries. We will consider forms of medievalism and forces of ideology and periodization that these films embody and project, as well as reception theories and on our own historical contingencies.

Business in American Literature and Film

ENGL 257 - Smout, Kary

In his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith tells a powerful story of the free market as a way to organize our political and economic lives, a story that has governed much of the world ever since. This course studies that story, considers alternate stories of human economic organization, such as those of American Indian tribes, and sees how these stories have been acted out in American business and society, including for some African-American writers. We study novels, films, short stories, non-fiction essays, poems, advertisements, websites, some big corporations, and some local businesses. Our goal is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of American business so we can make the best choices about how to live and work in a free market society.

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.

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: Altered States

ENGL 295B - King, Emily L.

To access altered states of consciousness, humans have relied on activities that run the gamut from romantic love to long-distance running and from the rites of religious mysticism to the use of specific substances, which include that daily dose of caffeine. This course examines depictions of these altered states and the guidance they might provide in film and writing—poetry, personal essay, drama, and novels—that include the work of Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Aldous Huxley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michal Pollan, William Shakespeare, and Esmé Weijun Wang. During our time together, we’ll explore these questions and more: How do we translate numinous experiences into language? What representational strategies are used in art to convey these altered states, and how have they evolved over time and space? How might such experiences productively revise our sense of self as well as our relationships with our local communities, our Earth, and even the cosmos?

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: 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). 

Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Currents of Romantic Revolution

ENGL 295F - Berlin, Michael

“Currents of Romantic Revolution” focuses on the relationship between poetics and politics in the hundred years that played out between the Corsican Revolution and the beginning of the border conflicts that presaged the American Civil War. Beginning with Pre-Romantic texts such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Corsica and James Thomson’s Liberty, this course demonstrates the decisive role that the emergent idea of revolution played in shaping the poetics of the period. This course also emphasizes the centrality of what Matt Sandler has called “Black Romanticism” to developing the language of Abolitionism that served as the ideological through line for the six canonical Romantic poets (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron). The objective of this course is to place canonical figures of Romanticism in dialogue with less widely-known figures such as Thomas Spence, Ottobah Cugoano, and Robert Wedderburn. By expanding the frame in which to read Romanticism, this course stresses its current relevance to questions of nationalism, political representation, and resistance. In addition to works from the Romantic period, we will read works of revolution by Hannah Arendt, C.L.R James, Julius S. Scott, and others. We will also watch films such as Danton, Peterloo, and Young Marx. We will also watch operas such as Nabucco and The Ghosts of Versailles. 

Topics in Literature in English before 1700: Shakespeare and Austen in Love

ENGL 392B - Pickett, Holly C.

This Spring term course will be designed around two plays being performed at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton: William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a dramatic adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. We will be comparing and contrasting the depiction of romantic love in the two iconic authors’ works and in adaptations of their works over time. The course includes two field trips to Staunton to see the plays in performance. 

Topics in Literature in English in Counter Traditions: Gender in Modern South Asia

ENGL 395E - Chowdhury, Lubabah

How does one of the oldest civilizations in the world—and a geographic area that 25% of the world’s population calls home—contend with present-day questions about the role of women, queer people and other marginalized groups in society? This course examines sociopolitical developments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh during the course of the twentieth century and their impacts on literary production. In particular, we will explore the contested place of women, queer people, trans people and other groups marginalized due to their gender in the anti-colonial movements that characterize this time period. Beginning with the Bengal Renaissance and the “woman question,” we will then explore the gendered violence that Partition and the 1971 Bangladeshi war of independence enabled, ending with the current occupation of Kashmir and its parallels with anti-LGBT legislation in India. Authors include Rabindranath Tagore, Sada’at Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, Tahmima Amam and Arundhati Roy. This course counts towards the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and the Middle East and South Asian Studies minor.  

Topics in Literature in English in Counter Traditions: Black Writers and the Allure of Paris

ENGL 395F - Hill, Lena M. / Hill, Michael D.

During two weeks on campus and two in Paris, students are immersed in the literary works of African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance through the mid-20th century, reading work by writers like Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes. In preparation for traveling to Paris, the site that represented new and promising possibilities for cultural exploration and artistic inspiration, we study how these literary texts examine the modern reality of racial identity. We also assess the significance of Paris as a site of cultural production and as a site of representation for early- to mid-20th century African American writers.

Directed Individual Study: Advanced Playwriting

ENGL 403D - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)

ENGL 403 will serve as the equivalent of an advanced playwriting course, building on the foundation of ENGL 202 Playwriting. Where ENGL 202 requires students to draft and revise two one-act plays before finalizing one of them, the independent study will require the drafting, revising, and finalizing of one full-length two-act play.

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. 

Topics in American Literature: Environmental Persuasion

ENGL 293O - 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?

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.

Directed Study: Booker Prize Books

ENGL 402A - Pickett, Holly C.

The Booker Prize is the world’s leading literary award for a single work of fiction. Founded in the UK in 1969, the Booker Prize initially rewarded Commonwealth writers and now spans the globe. In this 2-credit directed individual study, all of the books on our reading list will be drawn from the Booker Prize shortlist or list of winners since the year 2000. The reading pace will be approximately 150-200 pages (give or take) per week. Every week, participants will write a one-page response, which addresses both their own interests as well as starting to address the following question: What makes a Booker Prize winning book a Booker Prize winning book? Put differently, what characteristics do the books considered to be the “pinnacle” of literary fiction in the twenty-first century have in common? The final project will be to nominate your choice for the “Booker of Bookers.”

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).