Course Offerings

Sample Creative Writing Courses

Introduces the profession of writing and publishing, focusing on craft fundamentals (grammar and mechanics), publishing and copy editing, resources for writers, literary analysis, and submission procedures. Students learn writing from the ground up, not just re-learning parts of speech and their utility, but also experiencing it through the eyes of a publisher, editor, and fact-checker when they complete a manuscript project (which is always done on an in-progress novel or collection). By the end of the semester, experts in writing, editing, or library sciences come in to talk about their job and what led them to their paths. It’s a great way to start the UE Writing experience and though it seems like the “math of writing,” it’s essential to know how to build solid simple sentences before becoming more playful in advanced courses.

Introduces basic experience and techniques of description, characterization, poetry, and narration. Each professor in the department teaches it differently, but all treasure the introduction because it is a chance to study the canon and the contemporary alongside each other. In-class exercises and some more formal creative assignments punctuate the coursework, and usually the balance between prose and poetry is well-kept; most professors have a third or fourth subject they introduce, which can be everything from journalism to script or playwriting.

Teaches basic forms and structures of poetry. Concentrates on techniques as well as content. Though not every school focuses on metrical poetry in early sections, learning the rules and the methods through which people have been writing poetry for centuries, students are able not just to understand how to write poetry, but more importantly, why to write poetry. Introduction also proves that forms exist for a reason (for example, in a sonnet, the last two lines usually deviate or put a new twist on the idea presented in the first twelve lines: this volta (turn) makes a sonnet the best form if you have an idea you are of two minds about). 

Prerequisite: Writing 205 or permission of instructor.

Teaches elements of short story writing. Concentrates on plot construction with attention to character, dialogue, and setting. Though each professor puts their own spin on it, this course usually focuses on smaller pieces and perfecting how to set up a story or a scene, making the blank page less intimidating. There are usually several longer stories as the semester goes on, but they are not often workshopped: this is a place to learn, to make mistakes, to get messy. It’s important to learn how to work with peer feedback, but it’s just as important to learn how to read good fiction— and how to, for lack of a better word, steal what is good about that fiction in your own work. Consider this “intro to thievery.”

Prerequisite: Writing 205 or permission of instructor.

Teaches elements of the personal essay and memoir. Concentrates on voice, structure, language, and forms. So much of what we consider nonfiction is memoir, and while that is an important part of what is studied in this course, it also talks about the lyric essay, the researched piece, and various other hybrids that permeate our contemporary landscape. As Creative Nonfiction is still a burgeoning field in some ways, it always focuses on what is good in forthcoming writing, as well, and places emphasis on students knowing where to look for good nonfiction, as well.

Prerequisite: WRTG 205 or permission of instructor.

Teaches techniques for creating characters and turning experiences into short stories. Perhaps most importantly, it explores how small building blocks— setting, character, dialogue, point-of-view— create something larger. World-building doesn’t necessarily only happen in fantasy, and this class invites a lot of construction of new spaces, even if they are based on real spaces in the world. We really break open the concept of “write what you know” both by expanding what you know and by teaching you how to broaden your understanding of what exactly it is that you know.

Prerequisite: Writing 207 or permission of instructor.

Teaches techniques of great poets. Provides opportunity for students to write poems with a workshop component. Sometimes students begin linked collections in this course, and often they are invited to try forms— or free-verse— poetry that they didn’t work on as much in their introduction to poetry. By writing poetry at a high level and reading more poetry, students challenge themselves to explore why the themes of poetry— often abstractions like love, death, hope, fear, regret— persist through image and building a moment into a world.

Prerequisite: Writing 206 or permission of instructor.

Teaches tropes and techniques of selected genre fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror. Provides opportunity for students to write short genre fiction. This class is fun and explores everything from classic genre pieces through contemporary work. The things that scare, excite, and world-build may have changed some over the last few centuries, but the enduring themes will help students long after they leave the classroom.

Introduces students to the publication processes involved in producing a literary journal from start to finish.

Teaches advanced techniques of creative nonfiction. Provides opportunity for students to work on rhetorically complex and experimental CNF projects. As the field stretches and widens to accept more and more types of stories, we want our students to understand that telling “one true thing” can be done in limitless ways— and though Hemingway was referring to what makes fiction resonate, we really want students to explore what truth and nonfiction means to them so that they can find the right form— or invent the right form— for the stories that they are passionate about.

Prerequisite: WRTG 211 or permission of instructor.

Topics vary and may include young adult fiction, writing, advanced copy editing, literary translation, technical writing, form and theory of poetry, form and theory of fiction, and how to write about music. These always vary not only by professorial interest, but by student interest. If you want to take one of these subjects, while nothing is promised semester to semester, you should go to your advisor and talk to them about the possibility. Often, the special topics wind up opening keyholes to worlds that students didn’t even know they were interested in exploring; one of the most important things about a creative writing major is staying curious and open, and these sections always allow for that.

Teaches the techniques of screenwriting. Allows students to initiate their own screenplays.

Prerequisite: Writing 207 or permission of instructor

Permits students to pursue an extended, independent writing project alongside close study of an element of craft or genre. To be taken senior year in the fall. The course changes depending on who is teaching it but always includes an element of professional preparation, presentation styles, and of course, writing.

Opportunity to write short stories, poems, essays, and plays with weekly discussion and criticism in a small group. May be taken three times.

Prerequisite: One course in creative writing at the 300 level or permission of instructor.

Opportunity for on-site experience in various settings for writing experience.

Sample English Courses

This course engages students in the analytic reading and writing that characterize the field of literary studies. Students will read intensively in multiple literary genres (e.g. poetry, short fiction, the essay, drama, memoir, and the novel), and will develop writing skills appropriate to the discipline. Thematically-based; course topics change with the instructor. Meets requirements for Enduring Foundations Outcome 2 and Writing Across the Curriculum.

In this course you will learn how to approach literary texts with imagination and authority. You will work to build up a writing skillset that will allow you both to argue imaginatively and effectively about poetry, drama, and fiction, and also to take those skills and communicate effectively in any context. In addition to building a critical vocabulary to talk about the formal components of literature, you will learn strategies for generating ideas, turning those ideas into arguable theses, organizing evidence and supporting arguments, and revising your drafts into convincing and provocative essays. The theme of this course is Arthurian legends; we will be reading poetry, drama, memoir, and fiction that use stories about King Arthur's Round Table to ask questions about social conventions and human nature. Field trips to Arthurian sites will also contribute to our understanding of how literature continues to shape and be shaped by a desire to explore actual locations

This course offers an introduction to the three main literary forms: drama, poetry, and prose. Students will gain knowledge of those forms through being introduced to influential examples of those forms. These examples will be drawn from the national literatures of many different countries and will engage with ideas that are central to our conception of modernity. The course will begin with drama. Students will engage with the father of modern theater, Henrik Ibsen, by reading one of his defining plays, The Wild Duck. The class will also reflect upon the bold theatrical experiments of Lorraine Hansberry by examining her landmark play A Raisin in the Sun. The focus of the course will then shift to poetry and students will consider works by William Blake and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). In the late eighteenth century, Blake's visionary poems helped to inaugurate the age of Romanticism. In the early twentieth century, H.D. created a radically new path for poetry through her modernist methods. The final section of the course will engage with prose. Students will consider how Katherine Mansfield reshaped the form of the short story to achieve her powerful effects. The last work on the course is Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Our discussions will explore how this novel, the defining literary exploration of terrorism, manages to maintain its relevance. In engaging with these works, students will develop as critical readers and analytical thinkers. This class also offers guidance in the field of formal writing. Students will enhance their understandings of how to research, plan, write, and revise an essay on a work of literature.

Middle grade literature might once have suffered the lack of attention once attributed to “middle child syndrome,” but no more. Middle grade publishing these days has been described in Publisher's Weekly as being in a “golden age,” with 7 of the top 10 bestsellers of 2018 being middle grade books. At the same time, the study of books for middle grade readers has also grown tremendously as a field of literary study; in both cases, the increase in diverse voices, topics, and formats has contributed to the burgeoning interest. From Diary of a Wimpy Kid to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, middle grade books are bursting with humor, art, provocation, and great stories. They're also full of the memorable characters, human concerns, and powerful language that marks great literature. Yet this new popularity comes at an age when fewer readers than ever read for pleasure, making it all the more important that the books middle-graders encounter are strong ones. Author and children's literature scholar Gregory Maguire (Wicked) points out that the reading young people do before the age of 18 will provide “wallpaper and window to them for the rest of their lives. It is atmosphere and climate control for the rest of their lives. It is grammar and syntax for the moral conundrums they will face for the rest of their lives.” The books we study this semester engage culture, violence, coming of age, family, class, crossing boundaries, and complex ideas of identity. This semester, we'll join the scholars who consider the importance of middle grade books, exploring their diverse forms (graphic novels, verse novels, poetry), diverse genres (memoir, historical fiction), and diverse voices.

This course examines the power of stories to change minds, to offer a perspective not one's own, and even to transform the reader or listener. We especially consider how stories challenge accepted hierarchies among the sexes, classes, and cultures. We start with Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of Homer's The Odyssey, follow with the 6th century poet Sappho, move into 10th century Germany with the first Western female playwright Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, read Marie de France's 12th-century fantasy verse Lais, and conclude in the 17th century with the oldest biography of an African woman, The Life of Walatta-Petros. Many of the textbooks contain the original language opposite the English translation, so we make linguistic connections and engage heavily with each translator's “Notes on Translation” and established translation theory.

In this course we read, reflect on, discuss, and write about literature from the 8th to the 18th This thousand-year period was a time of linguistic, cultural, and literary change and we explore how each of those strands are at times woven together—and at other times at odds with one another. The readings encompass a wide range of texts in a variety of languages and genres. We begin with Maria Dahvana Headley's scintillating modern translation of Beowulf, continue with Middle English poetry, including selected Canterbury Tales, follow with Elizabethan poetry and excerpts from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, read and perform a little of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and conclude with John Milton's Paradise Lost and Aphra Behn's poems. Though the readings may seem foreign to us at times, we engage with how these texts shaped and reflected concepts that continue to be relevant today: gender identities, political bodies, power structures, imaginative innovation, racial tensions, devotional practices, and social relationships.

This course offers a survey of British literature from 1780 to 1945. Students will be introduced to the key texts of this period and the cultural backgrounds to those texts. The course will begin in the Romantic era with the poem to which William Wordsworth devoted much of his life, The Prelude. We will explore how this spiritual autobiography portrays the development of Wordsworth's art. The course will then move on to examine the evolution of drama over the course of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. We will read three plays: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. The course will conclude with two novels that embody very different aspects of the twentieth-century novelistic tradition. The unflinching realism of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers stands in marked contrast to the boldly experimental form of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

This course offers a survey of British literature from 1945 to the present. Students will be introduced to several of the key texts of this period and the cultural backgrounds to those texts. The course will begin by examining the evolution of post-World War Two British drama. We will read three plays: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. In examining those plays, we will consider how and why they deviate from the conventions of realism. The course will then go on to engage with the works of two of the most important British poets of the last sixty years. We will explore selected poems from Ted Hughes's controversial final collection, Birthday Letters. We will also survey the career of Britain's recent poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, by looking at a number of her key works. The course will conclude with two novels. The first, Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, offers a troubling exploration of memory and loss. The second, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, examines how Britain's colonial history has been portrayed within its literature.

In a 1775 letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams praised Benjamin Franklin for exhibiting “a Disposition entirely American.” His language begs the question: what makes an “American” character? For our purposes in this course, a similar question arises: what characterizes an “American” literature? What is its relation to other, earlier traditions? What ought to be its subject? Its form? What does human experience look like in the particulars of American life, and how can literature re-create and understand that experience? Writers have undertaken these questions as they have created a unique tradition of literature, bound to place and history, experience and myth. In this course, which explores major ideas associated with colonial, enlightenment, and romantic writing in the U.S., we will look at some of the enduring—sometimes competing— voices that comprise what we call “American” literature.

Covers major American works from the U.S. Civil War to World War II. The course emphasizes writers such as Frost, Eliot, Faulkner, Cather, Hughes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck.

Covers important American works published since World War II. The course may include writers such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, Tim O'Brien, Allen Ginsberg, JD Salinger, Bob Dylan, and Sylvia Plath.

This course provides students with an intensive exploration of the works of William Shakespeare, as well as the cultural and historical contexts from which his works emerged. Shakespeare's plays will be examined for both their poetic and their dramatic qualities. The course will begin with three comedies: Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and The Tempest. In examining these works, we will consider how Shakespeare defined and then transcended the comedic genre. The focus of the course will then shift to the history plays. Students will read Richard III and Richard II. Our discussions of these works will consider how Shakespeare reworked English history to suit his dramatic purposes. The course will conclude with two tragedies: Othello and King Lear. In studying these two plays, students will investigate how Shakespeare challenged the myriad conventions of the tragedy.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Chivalry, courtly love, quests, tests, damsels in distress, and knights in shining armor—where did these tropes come from? This course explores one of the most popular and influential genres of the Middle Ages, a genre that anticipates the modern novel in its exploration of interiority and of the tensions between private and public life: the romance. We begin with the 10th century Old English Apollonius of Tyre, followed by short Middle English lays and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and end with the 15th century Middle English retelling of King Arthur's Round Table. Using critical approaches like queer studies to new formalism, we'll explore themes such as politics, patriotism, gender roles, brother- and sisterhood, and justice- both poetic and literal. Through our examination of the most tantalizing premodern genre, we'll learn about cross-cultural influences on literary traditions, as well as the construction of modern concepts we take for granted—like honor and romantic love.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Covers English literature from Wyatt and Surrey through Milton.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

This course offers a survey of Irish literature from 1900 to the present. Students will examine the major works of drama, poetry and prose of the period. In engaging with those works students will learn of the historical and cultural contexts that inform them. The course will begin with three plays: O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, Friel's Translations, and Carr's By the Bog of Cats. Students will explore how these dramas reflect the shifting boundaries of modern Irish identity. The focus of the course will then turn to poetry and students will read works by Kavanagh, Heaney and Boland. Our discussions will consider how those poets portrayed the social struggles of the Irish twentieth century. The course will end with two prose works that sit at either end of the time period covered by this course. Joyce's short-story collection Dubliners was first published in 1914 and it has exerted a huge influence on Irish prose ever since. Burns' Milkman is, by contrast, a recent novel that only appeared in 2018. Since its publication, however, Milkman has caused a reexamination of the means by which the Troubles can be represented in literature.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Special Topics in Literature.

What did drama, and humor, look like before Shakespeare? This course examines lyric, narrative, and dramatic tradition before the sixteenth century. From puns to bawdy narratives to cycle drama we will dig deep into English senses of humor, gaining an understanding of early English culture and the tensions that made certain topics taboo and others comedic.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

We will consider diverse genres of children's literature, including fairy tales, picture books, adventure tales, fantasy tales, domestic novels, and animal stories. At the same time, we will consider the way these texts envision children as agents of change, the way they articulate concerns of empire and nationalism, and the way they undertake or resist didactic purpose.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Focuses on women writers in a variety of genres and contexts. Repeatable up to 3 times with title change. Topics have included: 20th Century American Women Novelists, Modernism in Women's Literature, and The Works of Jane Austen.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

How do we tell the story of American literature in the 19th century? Is it—as F.O. Matthiessen contended in 1941—the story of a few misunderstood geniuses, their works largely rejected by the literary marketplace of their day only to be embraced by the more discerning readers and critics of the twentieth century? Rare is the English major who has not read The Scarlet Letter. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman: along with Dickinson and Poe (who also fit the narrative) and Twain (who does not), these names are the names we know. Indeed, the real rarity among students of American literature is the reader who has even heard of, much less read, Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.  Published in 1850, just at the beginning of the five year period Matthiessen called “The American Renaissance,” Warner's novel was just the sort of book that provoked Hawthorne. Unabashedly sentimental, relentlessly Christian, bursting its margins with an endless array of domestic details, The Wide, Wide World was the most popular novel ever published in the United States—at least until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Yet most of us in this class will not have heard of it. Why not? What has made this novel—and others which were both popular and critically well-received—seem to lose credibility over time? Do such novels merit consideration in the literary academy of today? It's a question we'll be asking throughout the semester. What do the novels by “scribbling women” have to tell us about the culture and experience of 19th century Americans? What do these novels suggest about core ideals (American, Christian, human) and compelling action? What do they say about the differing experiences of men and women? More fundamentally, what does our consideration of these novels suggest about our own literary values and assumptions?

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

“You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life,” Jane Austen wrote to her niece in 1814. “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.”  This may seem a modest undertaking, and indeed, Austen tended to write modestly about her writing In a letter to her nephew, James Austen-Leigh, she famously (and not altogether seriously) described her writing as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.” Yet in the 200 years since her death, Jane Austen's “little effect” has taken on tremendous proportions. The Jane Austen Society of North America boasts thousands of members; Austen's novels have been adapted, re-adapted, and reinterpreted in film and fiction; biopics and websites investigate her life and work; academic conferences are devoted to her; she's even become a detective while her characters film video logs and fight off sea monsters.  2020 alone saw a new film adaptation of Emma as well as Masterpiece's eight-part imagining of Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon. These days, Austen's works command ever greater attention, ever greater affection. “Jane Austen wrote six novels, which are pillars of English literature in spite of being delightful, wise, warm and beloved” wrote Roger Ebert in his review of The Jane Austen Book Club . His tongue-in-cheek characterization of literary studies as dismissive of anything popular points to the different ways in which Austen's work has been interpreted and claimed. Grandmother of “chick lit?” Scathing social satirist? Literary innovator? Writer who ignored the major issues of her day? In this course, we will enter the fray.  (Sedately.)  We will read Austen's major novels, selections from her juvenile writing and letters, and watch several film adaptations of her work.  We will also look at both critical and historical contexts, and you will write two scholarly essays.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

This class centers on novels about or targeted for adolescents. Each might be seen as a "bildungsroman" or novel of education, though they represent a variety of traditions. Emphasis has been placed on diversity of voices and perspectives. From verse novels to historical fiction, dystopias to graphic novels, the works we read represent different centuries as well as protagonists with different abilities, genders, cultures, and social classes. They share first-person narrators and dilemmas about love and place and friendship and survival, about loss and school and parents and identity. They share gripping stories.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Surveys several landmark achievements in the American Novel. This course may include works by Melville, James, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Focuses on significant texts and major aesthetic achievements of the African-American tradition, as well as their historical contexts. Includes politically and socially significant drama, poetry, short stories, novels, and essays.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor

Spies, satirists, and holy cats: eighteenth-century literature is impossible to contain. Indeed, the dates of the century itself aren't adequate to its reach; scholars often refer to the “long” eighteenth century, which may be read to include literature from the Restoration to Romanticism. Its history includes the “Glorious Revolution,” the search for longitude, the fight for the abolition of slavery in English colonies. Its literary footprint includes the most influential English-language dictionary for nearly 200 years, the proliferation of theatre, the rise of the novel and the first slave narrative. Convinced that this world mattered, that the mind of God could be known by studying the physical world, and that human society could progress to the point of perfection, eighteenth-century authors wrote compellingly about everything from politics to poetics.  Their literature is full of optimism, full of humor, full of invention. At the same time, faced with undeniable social ills, writers and thinkers are scathing in their denunciation of ignorance, irresponsibility, and oppression. This semester, we'll read poetry, novels, travel narratives, philosophy, and plays. We'll read works by the well-to-do and the improvident, by the marginalized and the influential. Literature is wide open. We'll start with the cat.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

How does a time period of fewer than 50 years constitute its own categorization in literary history? We will find out in this class on a new age of poetry in the English language: the Romantic Movement, 1789-1837. This tenuous and revolutionary moment in poetic history looks both backward to the medieval and forward to a post-industrial and democratic ideal. We begin with William Blake and Robert Burns, and even prepare our own Burns Supper for a recitation in honor of the Scottish author. We follow with an annotated edition of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical Lyrical Ballads with comparisons across the four separate editions released between 1798 and 1805, a (free!) version of John Keats' original 1820 printing of his famous "Odes” and other poems, and an acclaimed biography and account of his relationship with William Wordsworth and other Romantic artists and historical figures. We end the course by reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy on the death of John Keats alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to investigate questions about the intersection of poetry, mortality, science, and the humanities.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

The Victorians changed the world because they were assured,” writes Owen Chadwick in his foundational study, The Victorian Church. “Untroubled by doubt… they saw vast opportunities open to energy and enterprise, and identified progress with the spread of English intelligence and English industry. . . . Part of their confidence was money, a people of increasing wealth and prosperity, an ocean of retreating horizons.  And part was of the soul.”  Much of Victorian literature—particularly in the early part of the century—reflects this kind of self-assurance. Yet the years we call ‘Victorian,' (1837-1901) saw tremendous changes in technology, economy, scholarship, social organization, and expressions of faith.  Increasingly, Victorian novelists, poets, and critics are preoccupied with the doubts and difficulties that marked their rapidly transforming world.  We, too, have inherited such a world, and Victorian literature is engaged with the same issues that engage us today: work and meaning, faith and finance; the human cost of technological advances; national identity, individual consciousness, social justice, and global responsibilities.  Although we will explore Victorian writing primarily within its own cultural context, we may also find that in many ways, these works speak to our own time as well.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

Focuses on various authors, genres, and literary movements in the twentieth century, depending on the emphasis chosen by the professor. Past topics have included American immigrant literature and European modernism. May be taken two times by permission of instructor.

Modernism: This course examines a number of the most celebrated and influential writers within the modernist movement. Students will be introduced to some of the key texts of modernism and the cultural backgrounds to those texts. The course will begin with three of the twentieth century's most important dramas. We will read Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. The course will then move on to examine the major work of T. S. Eliot's later years, Four Quartets. We will consider how the four poems that comprise that work attempt to unite theology, philosophy and aesthetics. The course will end with one of the defining novels of the twentieth century, James Joyce's epic masterpiece Ulysses. Students will explore how Joyce's novel works to challenge the limits of its form.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.

This course offers an introduction to critical theory. Critical theory is the field of literary studies that examines the theories that underpin different modes of critical reading. So, for example, critical theory explores feminism so as to be able to understand the nature of feminist readings. Students taking this course will be introduced to a wide range of the subfields within critical theory, including, to name only a few, structuralism, marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and queer theory. In examining the subfields of critical theory, students will also consider how those subfields relate to one another. Since critical theory often ventures into academic disciplines beyond that of literature, this course will engage with key ideas in such disciplines as philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. The texts on this course derive primarily from the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. They have been chosen to allow students to engage with the major figures of modern critical theory while also providing students with an opportunity to gain a sense of the present state of the field.

Prerequisite: Complete one ENGL course or permission of instructor.