Course Offerings
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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.
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.
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 - / 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.
Winter 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 - 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: Fiction
ENGL 203 - Oliver, Bill
A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving 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: Poetry
ENGL 204 - Gray, Khadeejah A. (K. Avvirin)
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.
Introduction to Film
ENGL 233 - Al-Ahmad, Jumana S.
Same as FILM 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.
Medieval and Early Modern British Literature
ENGL 250 - Kao, Wan-Chuan
This course is a survey of English literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. We read works in various genres--verse, drama, and prose--and understand their specific cultural and historical contexts. We also examine select modern film adaptations of canonical works as part of the evolving history of critical reception.
Shakespeare
ENGL 252 - Pickett, Holly C.
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.
Introduction to African American Literature
ENGL 266 - Millan, Diego A.
Same as AFCA 266. This course offers an introduction to African American literature from the 1700s to the present. We will ground our inquiry across these centuries by attending to the role writing has played in the fight for freedom, in different ways of thinking about Blackness, in redefining citizenship, in evolving stylistic conventions, in responding to the political needs of the moment, in (re)writing gender expectations, and in an ever-changing landscape of American literary history. Potential writers include: Phyllis Wheatley Peters, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, James McCune Smith, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Angelina Weld Grimke, Charles Chesnutt, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison.
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: Memoir as Activism
ENGL 293J - Womer, Brenna
Audre Lorde wrote that "reading and writing are not leisurely amusements or passive retreats from reality; they are integral to building and maintaining a free and equal society." In this class, we'll read and analyze a selection of contemporary memoirs by writers like Kiese Laymon and Chanel Miller, whose personal writing aims not only to engage readers but also to instigate systemic change.
Topics in American Literature: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction
ENGL 293K - Brodie, Laura F.
This class offers an immersion in contemporary American fiction by focusing on Pulitzer winners and finalists. We begin by studying the history of the prize and the selection process. Then we read past winners from various genres, including short story collections, novellas, novels-in-stories, and short lyric novels. Students individually survey past finalists by journaling about, and discussing, the first ten pages of twenty novels of their choice. For the final paper, the class plays the role of the Pulitzer committee and chooses a winner for 2012—the last year in which no prize for fiction was awarded. Some of the authors studied include Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and Paul Harding.
Topics in World Literature in English: Caribbean Women Responding to Racism
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 both 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, grief and love/desire, 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. Primary readings will be accompanied by excerpts from theoretical texts, such as Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings and Lauren Berlant’s Love/Desire.
Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction
ENGL 308 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)
A workshop in writing fiction, requiring regular writing and outside reading.
Gender, Love, and Marriage in the Middle Ages
ENGL 312 - Kao, Wan-Chuan
A study of the complex nexus of gender, love, and marriage in medieval legal, theological, political, and cultural discourses. Reading an eclectic range of texts--such as romance, hagiography, fabliau, (auto)biography, conduct literature, and drama--we consider questions of desire, masculinity, femininity, and agency, as well as the production and maintenance of gender roles and of emotional bonds within medieval conjugality. Authors include Chaucer, Chretien de Troyes, Heldris of Cornwall, Andreas Capellanus, Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pisan. Readings in Middle English or in translation.
17th-Century Poetry
ENGL 326 - Berlin, Michael
Readings of lyric and epic poetry spanning the long 16th century, and tracing the development of republican and cavalier literary modes. Genres include the metaphysical poetry of Donne, Herbert, Katherine Philips, and Henry Vaughan; erotic verse by Mary Wroth, Herrick, Thomas Carew, Marvell, Aphra Behn, and the Earl of Rochester; elegy by Jonson and Bradstreet; and epic by Milton.
Early African American Print Culture
ENGL 346 - Millan, Diego A.
Same as AFCA 346.
Contemporary North American Fiction
ENGL 370 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)
A study of 21st-century novels and short stories by North American authors. The course examines the recent movement of literary fiction into traditional pulp genres. Authors may include: Chabon, Atwood, Allende, Alexie, Butler, McCarthy, Diaz, Whitehead, Link, Fowler, and Grossman.
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 in Literature in English from 1700-1900: Romantic and Victorian Poetry
ENGL 393B - Adams, Edward A.
The British Romantics are widely regarded as among the most original, revolutionary, and imaginative poets in English and even World Literature, while the Victorians who followed in their wake in the later nineteenth century represent a fascinating development and boast the most distinguished Poet Laureate. This course will not attempt to survey all the great poets from these two linked periods but will focus upon four representative figures selected from Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats through Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, and Hardy. In addition, the course will frame these nineteenth-century figures with Thomas Gray, the leading lyric poet from the eighteenth century, and Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most brilliant twentieth-century poets. Finally, the course will contextualize this poetry with careful attention to the development of theoretical approaches for studying literature from the Neoclassical formalism of the eighteenth century, through the biographical and historicist emphases of the nineteenth-century, and thence to the New Criticism of the twentieth.
Directed Individual Study
ENGL 403 - Gavaler, Christopher P. (Chris)
A course designed for special students who wish to continue a line of study begun in an earlier advanced course. Their applications approved by the department and accepted by their proposed directors, the students may embark upon directed independent study which must culminate in acceptable papers.
Directed Individual Study: Shakespeare
ENGL 403A - Pickett, Holly C.
A course designed for special students who wish to continue a line of study begun in an earlier advanced course. Their applications approved by the department and accepted by their proposed directors, the students may embark upon directed independent study which must culminate in acceptable papers.
Directed Individual Study: Children's Literature
ENGL 403B - Harrington, Jane F.
A course designed for special students who wish to continue a line of study begun in an earlier advanced course. Their applications approved by the department and accepted by their proposed directors, the students may embark upon directed independent study which must culminate in acceptable papers.
Directed Individual Study: Writing the Historical Novel: Daughters of the King
ENGL 403C - Staples, Beth A.
A course designed for special students who wish to continue a line of study begun in an earlier advanced course. Their applications approved by the department and accepted by their proposed directors, the students may embark upon directed independent study which must culminate in acceptable papers.
Senior Research and Writing
ENGL 413 - Adams, Edward 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.
Senior Research and Writing
ENGL 413 - Wheeler, Lesley M.
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.
Master Class in Creative Writing: Nonfiction
ENGL 431B - Wheeler, Lesley M.
Internship in Literary Editing with Shenandoah
ENGL 453 - Womer, Brenna
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 - Adams, Edward A.
Honors Thesis
ENGL 493 - Pickett, Holly C.
Honors Thesis
ENGL 493 - Millan, Diego A.