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2024-2025 Academic Year

Fall 2024

ENGL 220 Intro to Literary Studies
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.

WGSS 301 Plague Years
Cross-listed with ENGL 321-01. This course studies British, Irish, and US literature and culture of two public health crises: the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the polio epidemics that began in the late nineteenth century. How were the flu and polio represented in literary and popular culture? What forms did a range of texts—innovative novels, women’s magazines, poems, African American newspapers, films—adopt to consolidate or challenge the stories that states preferred to tell themselves about the ravages of the influenza pandemic or the vaccine “victory” over polio? How can the contested literary, political, and cultural legacies of the flu and polio help us to think about both public discourse around COVID-19 and the inequities laid bare by the pandemic? As it pursues these questions, “Plague Years” introduces students to the interdisciplinary fields of the health humanities and disability studies. The course pursues illuminating readings of literary works by James Baldwin, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others, and concludes with two signal works of the coronavirus pandemic: Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020).

ENGL 321 Plague Years
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-02. This course studies British, Irish, and US literature and culture of two public health crises: the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the polio epidemics that began in the late nineteenth century. How were the flu and polio represented in literary and popular culture? What forms did a range of texts—innovative novels, women’s magazines, poems, African American newspapers, films—adopt to consolidate or challenge the stories that states preferred to tell themselves about the ravages of the influenza pandemic or the vaccine “victory” over polio? How can the contested literary, political, and cultural legacies of the flu and polio help us to think about both public discourse around COVID-19 and the inequities laid bare by the pandemic? As it pursues these questions, “Plague Years” introduces students to the interdisciplinary fields of the health humanities and disability studies. The course pursues illuminating readings of literary works by James Baldwin, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others, and concludes with two signal works of the coronavirus pandemic: Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020).

ENGL 500 Independent Study

Spring 2025

ENGL 101 Women Write War
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-01. This course studies American women's war writing from the US Civil War through the "war on terror." We will ask: what literary forms have women writers adapted or developed to represent war, as well as the social, political, bodily, and emotional effects of armed conflict? How has women's war writing participated in debates about feminism, gender identity, citizenship, civil and human rights, and the American project? How have women's lived experiences and changing social roles impacted the diverse genre of war writing-and vice versa? Primary texts include works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography by writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Elyse Fenton, Frances E.W. Harper, Toni Morrison, Toyo Suyemoto, and Natasha Trethewey.

WGSS 101 Women Write War
Cross-listed with ENGL 101-03. This course studies American women's war writing from the US Civil War through the "war on terror." We will ask: what literary forms have women writers adapted or developed to represent war, as well as the social, political, bodily, and emotional effects of armed conflict? How has women's war writing participated in debates about feminism, gender identity, citizenship, civil and human rights, and the American project? How have women's lived experiences and changing social roles impacted the diverse genre of war writing-and vice versa? Primary texts include works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography by writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Elyse Fenton, Frances E.W. Harper, Toni Morrison, Toyo Suyemoto, and Natasha Trethewey.