English

In this introductory course, students will learn about the craft of writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. They will study contemporary published poems, essays, and stories written by international masters and use these texts as inspiration for their own creative work across genres. They will also read and respond to the work of their peers. Through an equally balanced studio/research approach, this course will develop students’ skills as literary critics and creative writers.
Students may not receive credit for both EN 1219 and EN 121X.

This introductory course gives students a basic understanding of theatrical productions and theatre vocabulary through an investigation of how a play moves from the page to the stage. By touching on the various sub-disciplines of theatre (including playwriting, design, performance, and more), this course explores the role of theatre and art in the world.
Students may not receive credit for EN 1221 & TH 1221.

This course is an introduction to Shakespeare, his theatre, and some important concepts of his world. Students will have the opportunity to sample representative Shakespearean tragedies, comedies, and histories. In addition to class discussions and scene work, students will be able to enhance their readings by analyzing video recordings of the plays.

This course surveys the poems of our language. From the Anglo-Saxon poems to the popular verse of Tennyson, the songs and the poets are legion: Chaucer, Raleigh, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herrick, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Hopkins. The England that nourished these writers will be viewed through their ballads, lyrics, sonnets, epigrams, and epics. “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

This course introduces the student to a variety of critical perspectives necessary to an understanding and appreciation of the major forms, or genres, of literary expression (e.g., novel, short story, poetry, drama, and essay). Writing and class discussion will be integral parts of this course.

This course examines the formation and history of the African American literary tradition from slave narratives to contemporary forms in black popular culture. The course will explore some genres of African American writing and their relation to American literature and to black cultural expression. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

This course examines literary works of multiple genres produced by Chicana/o writers from WWII to today,  with particular emphasis on the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the contemporary relevance of issues such as land and education rights for immigrants. Writers studied may include the novelist Sandra Cisneros, the cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa, the memoirist JP Brammer, and the short-story writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This course will emphasize civic involvement and will offer students the opportunity to engage with political activists and other public groups involved with immigration in America. Students cannot receive credit for both this class (EN 1259) and EN125x, Intro to Contemporary Chicana/o Literature. This course will be first offered in 2024-2025 and alternate years  thereafter.

This writing workshop aims to help students develop or improve the skills of written expression, emphasizing presentation and discussion of original work. Offerings may include themed courses covering multiple genres or specialized workshops in single genres of focus such as fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. This course may be repeated for different genres.

This course begins with selections from John Milton’s provocative version of Adam and Eve’s original sin in Paradise Lost. Focusing on Milton, John Donne and others, we will examine the theme of sin—political, religious, and sexual— in early modern literature. The events of the English Reformation profoundly influenced these writers, and their personal struggles against societal institutions have greatly influenced subsequent literary expressions of rage and rebellion. Students will also be reading texts by contemporary writers such as David Mamet which address the theme of sin in the modern city. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

With his many references to syphilis, Bubonic Plague, mental illness, and other serious afflictions, Shakespeare illuminates the harsh reality of living in 16th and 17th-century England. This course explores Shakespeare through the historical lens of early modern medical practice. Students will study plays such as Hamlet, Richard III, and The Winters Tale alongside accounts by surgeons, doctors, midwives, and others who diagnosed, dissected, and (sometimes) cured. We will also pay close attention to the superstitions, misinformation, and downright strange treatments included in some of these accounts. Through creative and expository writing, students will analyze the impact of disease on Shakespeare’s writing. This course is intended for students interested in any one of the following: drama, English literature, the history of medicine, biology, other fields of life sciences. This course will be offered in 2021-22, and in alternating years thereafter.

Selected works of fiction which appeared after World War I will be the focus of this course. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, or other authors of the early modern period will be studied, but significant attention will also be given to contemporary novelists, such as Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, and Toni Morrison. The cultural context and philosophical assumptions of the novels will be studied as well as their form and technique. This course will be offered in 2021-22, and in alternating years thereafter.

This course will examine the many ways in which dramatists, essayists, filmmakers, novelists, and poets have articulated ecological and environmental concerns. Topics to be discussed may include changing attitudes towards terms like ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’, the effects of technology on the environment, issues of conservation and sustainability, the dynamics of population growth, the treatment of animals, the production of food, and the presence of the spiritual in nature. Materials will include works by writers such as Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Winona LaDuke, Wangari Maathai, Thomas Malthus, Arne Naess, Nicolas Roeg, and Gary Snyder. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

Students in this course will have the opportunity to read two major masterpieces of English fiction the way they should be read: slowly, carefully, and with relish. Victorian novels are long and the term is short, but by reading novels in the way in which they were read by their original readers—serially—we can experience masterworks by Charles Dickens and George Eliot at comparative leisure, examining one serial installment in each hour of class.

A survey of major modern British authors. The works of many of these writers reflect the political, religious, and social issues of the twentieth century. New psychological insights run parallel with experiments in the use of myth, stream of consciousness, and symbolism. Authors studied may include Hardy, Conrad, Owen, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and Orwell. This course will be offered in 2021-22, and in alternating years thereafter.

Participants in this course will examine outstanding works of 19th-century English poetry and fiction, and consider questions of identity, beauty, judgment, and social responsibility. Writers covered may include such figures as Jane Austen, John Keats, Charles Dickens, and Robert Browning.
This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

This course focuses on the problem of how to live in the modern world. Emphasis will be placed on the way moral issues evolve within the complications of individual lives, as depicted in fiction. Such authors as Conrad, Kesey, Camus and Ellison show characters struggling with the questions of moral responsibility raised by love, religion, death, money, conformity.

This course surveys the ways in which modern literature has represented science and scientists. Beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the origin of what Isaac Asimov calls the “damned Frankenstein complex” is examined. More complex presentations of science and scientists occur in twentieth-century works like Brecht’s Galileo, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The course covers major modern works of fiction and drama, including such literary forms as the play, the novel of ideas, and the utopian novel. Attention is focused on the themes (ideas) in, and the structure of, these works.

An investigation into one or more major movements or periods in American literature, focusing on aesthetic formations such as sentimentalism, realism, modernism, or postmodernism, on cultural formations from Transcendentalism and Regionalism through the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Generation and the Native American Renaissance, or delivered through chronological engagements by century, by decade, or by other suitable framings attending to specific communities or sets of writers. This course may be repeated for different topics.

This course will examine literary works from two or more languages, modes, and/or traditions, often connecting these works to other works of expressive culture in the visual and performing arts. Some iterations may turn on a broader survey, others on more particular engagements with wider inflections. Material introduced beyond English will rely on translations but may also include attention to work in the original language. Attention to drama, poetry, and prose from various periods and places will encourage students to connect themes across cultural, formal, and historical divides, utilizing interdisciplinary and theoretical methods in the process of their reading and writing. Students who have previously taken EN 230X cannot take this course for credit. This course may be repeatable for different topics.

This course introduces students to a variety of technical theatre disciplines, including scenery, lighting, sound, props, and costumes. Students will explore each technical element through a combination of lectures, demonstrations, and workshops, and will demonstrate their learning through group projects and other hands-on activities. 
Students may not receive credit for TH 2500 and either EN 2222 or TH 2222.

This advanced workshop in creative writing allows for sustained attention to the writing of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or multiple genres. Investigation will also focus on the reading and discussion of exemplary literary works, with an emphasis on contemporary practice. Regular writing exercises and class visits from established authors will help to create a community of writers grounded in diverse methods. This course may be repeated for different genres.

This course examines the concept of “strange” and the figure of the “stranger” in a wide range of written and visual texts, from Shakespeare to Albert Camus to the 2017 horror/comedy film Get Out. We will focus on depictions of religious, racial, gendered, and other forms of alienation and otherness, from both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

Take a vacation from the rational, quantifiable, and verifiable, and dip your toes into the ineffable. Unbridled, boundary-bending, and binary-busting, supernatural literature makes space for lived (and undead) experiences outside the mainstream. This course will examine the following questions: How are supernatural stories culturally situated? How is language used in supernatural texts, and when and why does it break down? What can we learn about the “real” through studying the fantastic? Course content will vary with each offering. Potential areas of focus might include magical realism, the supernatural and folklore, the gothic and gender, the gothic and race, the contemporary ghost story worldwide, and monstrosity and the grotesque. This course may be repeated for different topics. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

This course examines the poetries and poetics of various modern and contemporary American traditions, focusing on schools and styles from the Modernists and Objectivists through the Black Arts Movement, Confessional Poetry, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Attention will also be given to recent innovations in digital poetry, multiethnic poetry, and performance poetry. The course will include poets such as Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Joy Harjo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Myung Mi Kim, and Saul Williams. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.

EN faculty with expertise in American literature will select one or more authors to focus on in this course. Examples of such authors are James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, William Faulkner, Anne Sexton, and August Wilson. These authors often criticize the political and social status quo, addressing inequities in matters of class, gender, race, and sexuality. The intention is for students to focus on such authors in depth, in preparation for their final seminar or practicum. Faculty offering the course will indicate which authors they intend to present on the HUA website well before student signups, to permit efficient program planning. This course will be offered in 2022- 23, and in alternating years thereafter. This course may be repeated for different topics.

Participants in this seminar will examine the English novel from its origins in the eighteenth century to its twentieth-century forms, exploring the rich variety of ways a writer may communicate a personal and social vision. The novels treat love, travel, humor, work, adventure, madness, and self-discovery; the novelists may include Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Wodehouse, and Woolf.

This course investigates American literature as it relates to a specific theme, issue, controversy, or question. Attention might center upon topics from childhood and friendship to captivity and freedom, and from immigration and labor to law and war, drawing on or even focusing more decidedly upon aspects of identity including but not limited to class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality Authors might extend from nineteenth century exemplars including Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman to twentieth and twenty-first century figures such as Philip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Richard Wright. This course may be repeated for different topics.

Feature films are at the heart of a motion picture industry that requires a partnership of multiple disciplines working in unison: acting, directing, filming, and producing. But none of this can happen without the first step—screenwriting. In this course, students will learn to write for mainstream feature and short films, from ideation to synopses and beat sheets to the pages of an original screenplay. While this course will focus on short and feature film screenplays, the knowledge can also apply to other screenwriting forms such as documentaries and web series. Students will combine the creative with the technical, not only studying storytelling through film but also applying the structured authoring required by film producers and screenplay competitions for a feature or short film script. This course will be offered in 2024-25, and in alternating years thereafter. Students may not receive credit for both EN/WR 2410 and EN/WR 241X.