Fall 2022 Undergraduate Courses

ENGL 1000 English at Northeastern

Instructor: Professor Neal Lerner
Sequence:  W 11:45-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Foundational

Intended for first-year students in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Introduces first-year students to the liberal arts in general; familiarizes them with their major; helps them develop the academic skills necessary to succeed (analytical ability and critical thinking); provides grounding in the culture and values of the University community; and helps them develop interpersonal skills—in short, familiarizes students with all skills needed to become a successful university student.

ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric

Instructor: Professor Beth Britt
Sequence: 4- MWR 1:35-2:40 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Foundational or Theories and Methods
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC), Understanding Societies and Institutions (SI)

How do we influence others, and how do others influence us? How do we come to beliefs about ourselves, each other, and the world around us? How do verbal and nonverbal symbols—such as images, architecture, clothing, music, and bodies themselves—influence our beliefs and actions? These are questions about rhetoric, which George Kennedy defines as “the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their thought and action.” Because one of the best ways to learn about rhetoric is to use the tools of rhetoric to analyze the world around you, rhetorical analysis is the foundation of this class. Rhetoric is inherently contextual; analyzing rhetoric means understanding its context. In the first part of the course, we’ll immerse ourselves in the current context, analyzing written and verbal rhetorics drawn from contemporary issues. In the second part of the course, we’ll extend our reach to other kinds of rhetorics: visual, material, and nonhuman. For your projects throughout the course, you can work on topics of your own choosing. Assignments include two formal papers, peer reviews, and a group project.

ENGL 1400 Introduction to Literary Studies

Section 1
Instructor: Professor Eunsong Kim
Sequence: D – TF 9:50-11:30 AM

Section 2
Instructor: Professor Mary Loeffelholz
Sequence: G – 3:25-5:05 PM

Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Foundational
• NUPath Writing-Intensive in the Major (WI)

Offers an introduction to the diverse fields that comprise literary studies for English majors and minors. Surveys the methods and topics of English literary and textual studies, including a wide range of media (e.g., images, film, and graphic narrative). Explores strategies for reading, interpreting, and theorizing about texts, including how race, gender, sexuality, class, and colonialism are represented in literary texts, other media, and scholarship. Focuses on developing skills in thinking analytically, writing clearly about complex ideas, and conducting research. In or version of the course, we will read a number of poems, short stories, critical articles, non-print materials, film, and video that will allow us to engage with the above goals in a variety of ways, both informal and formal. Much of the material that I have chosen are deliberately non-mainstream and non-canonical so that we can concentrate on the act and art of reading—of texts and of films and other media as well.

ENGL 1700 Global Literatures 1

Instructor: Professor Isabel Sobral Campos
Sequence: D – TF 9:50-11:30 AM

Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Foundational
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC), Engaging Difference and Diversity (DD)

Introduces students to global works from the earliest literatures to 1500. May include texts from Africa (Sunjara); the Americas; Asia (Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji from Japan and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching from China); Europe (Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy from Italy, the Song of Roland from France, Homer’s Iliad from Greece); and the Middle East (The Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia and One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic, Indian, and Persian sources). Works in translation where necessary.

[CANCELLED] ENGL 1600 Introduction to Shakespeare

Instructor: Professor Erika Boeckeler
Sequence: 3 – MWR 10:30-11:35 AM

Note: This course has been cancelled as of 3/29/22.

ENGL 3101 Early Literatures: Medieval Romance & Modern Love

Instructor: Professor Kathleen Kelly
Sequence: B – MW 2:50-4:30 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Early Literatures
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC)

The idea and ideals of love and romance in contemporary American (and English) culture have been shaped by a number of literary texts from the medieval period: the story of King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot is the best known. Medieval readers loved reading about unrequited love and romantic triangles—and apparently, so do we. In fact, in “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco argues that the history of the notion of love as “a devastating unhappy happiness” is rooted in the Middle Ages—this notion still has traction today, as John Cusack’s hapless character in High Fidelity (2000), Rob Gordon, demonstrates when he says:

What came first? The music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of cultural violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands of songs, literally thousands of songs, about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Thus Rob riffs on Oscar Wilde’s famous statement, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” We shall discuss! We’ll read a number of medieval romances and pair them with modern written retellings and films set in the Middle Ages. We’ll explore representations of love, romance, and sexual desire, and study how romances construct masculinity and femininity and attempt to confirm heteronormativity as the ideal—and also how romances, medieval and modern, also have the power to destabilize the binaries of masculine and feminine as well as disrupt the heteronormative. Requirements: a Reading Journal and two papers, one due at midpoint and one at the end of class.

ENGL/AFAM 2296 Early African-American Literature

Instructor: Professor Nicole Aljoe
Sequence: 3 – MWR 10:30-11:35 AM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s 17th-18th Century Literatures, Diversity
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC), Engaging Difference and Diversity (DD)

Surveys the development and range of black American writers, emphasizing poetry and prose from early colonial times to the Civil War. ENGL 2296 and AFAM 2296 are cross-listed.

ENGL 2330 The American Renaissance

Instructor: Professor Theo Davis
Sequence: D – TF 9:50-11:30 AM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s 19th-Century Literatures
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC), Engaging Difference and Diversity (DD)

Studies the nineteenth-century development of an American national literary tradition in the context of democratic and romantic attitudes toward experience, nation formation, and national crisis. Includes such writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, and Melville.

ENGL 3161 20th- and 21st-Century Literatures: Crime & Comedy in Irish Literature

Instructor: Professor Patrick Mullen
Sequence: A – MR 11:45 AM-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s 20th-21st Century Literatures

Crime and Comedy in Irish literature will look at these intertwining themes in modern Irish literature and culture. Starting with the great comic novel, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and ending with contemporary crime drama of Tara French, the course will explore the connections between the hilarious and the horrific, between the uncanny and the caper, between murder and the joke. Students will explore critical and philosophical interrogations of these themes and will also do creative writing assignments in which they try out these exciting genres. By exploring the funny and the frightening students will discover how the normative aspects of social discourse are both framed and challenged. Students will leave with a more nuanced appreciation of these genres and with a richer sense both as readers and creative writers themselves.

ENGL 2420 Contemporary Poetry

Instructor: Professor Eunsong Kim
Sequence: F – TF 1:35-3:15 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Comparative

Studies developments in British and (especially) American poetry since 1945. Includes such writers as Bishop, Lowell, Ginsberg, Ashbery, Walcott, Heaney, Kunitz, Jorie Graham, Frank Bidart, Rita Dove, and Kevin Young.

ENGL 2430 Contemporary Fiction

Instructor: Professor Hillary Chute
Sequence: A – MR 11:45 AM-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Comparative

Studies developments in British and (especially) American fiction in the twenty and twenty-first centuries.  Writers featured may include Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, Chris Ware, Thomas Pynchon, Jennifer Egan.

ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric

Instructor: Professor Beth Britt
Sequence: 4- MWR 1:35-2:40 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Foundational or Theories and Methods
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC), Understanding Societies and Institutions (SI)

How do we influence others, and how do others influence us? How do we come to beliefs about ourselves, each other, and the world around us? How do verbal and nonverbal symbols—such as images, architecture, clothing, music, and bodies themselves—influence our beliefs and actions? These are questions about rhetoric, which George Kennedy defines as “the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their thought and action.” Because one of the best ways to learn about rhetoric is to use the tools of rhetoric to analyze the world around you, rhetorical analysis is the foundation of this class. Rhetoric is inherently contextual; analyzing rhetoric means understanding its context. In the first part of the course, we’ll immerse ourselves in the current context, analyzing written and verbal rhetorics drawn from contemporary issues. In the second part of the course, we’ll extend our reach to other kinds of rhetorics: visual, material, and nonhuman. For your projects throughout the course, you can work on topics of your own choosing. Assignments include two formal papers, peer reviews, and a group project.

ENGL 3322 Topics in Rhetoric: Theory and Methods of Writing Cultures

Instructor: Professor Ellen Cushman
Sequence: B – MW 2:50-4:30 PM
Attributes: 

• Major Requirement/s Theories & Methods

In this class, we will study and apply qualitative methods to consider the civic purpose of writing within cultures and we consider our social responsibilities when writing about cultures. We will analyze models of qualitative research across interdisciplinary studies of literacy in communities and cultures. You have the opportunity to design and carry out a qualitative research project of your own choosing or to participate in ethnohistoric research on the civic value of the Cherokee language manuscripts in DAILP: Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence. Four writing assignments during the semester culminate in a group or individual research project.

ENGL 3340 Technologies of Text

Instructor: Professor Erika Boeckeler
Sequence: B – MW 2:50-4:30 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Theories and Methods, Experiential
• NUPath Conducting Formal and Quantitative Reasoning (FQ), Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Integrating Knowledge and Skills Through Experience (EX)

Examines innovations that have reshaped how humans share information, e.g., the alphabet, the book, the printing press, the postal system, the computer. Focuses on debates over privacy, memory, intellectual property, and textual authority that have historically accompanied the rise of new media forms and genres. Offers students an opportunity to gain skills for working with texts using the rapidly changing tools of the present, e.g., geographic information systems, data mining, textual analysis.

ENGL 3381 The Practice & Theory of Teaching Writing

Instructor: Professor Chris Gallagher
Sequence: 4 – MWR 1:35-2:40 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Theories and Methods, Experiential
• NUPath Integrating Knowledge and Skills through Experience (EX), Writing Intensive in the Major (WI)

Focuses on the teaching of writing by studying the professional literature of writing theory as well as a teaching practicum. Students work as a writing tutor or shadow experienced teachers. Offers students an opportunity to prepare for future teaching of writing and to obtain deeper insight into their own writing processes.

ENGL/AFAM 3404 African American Rhetorical Traditions

Instructor: Professor Melissa Pearson
Sequence: B – MW 2:50-4:30 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Theories and Methods, Diversity
• NUPath Engaging Diversity & Difference (DD), Interpreting Culture (IC)

Examines and organizes the ways that African Americans have historically maintained their humanity and negotiated freedom through discourse. Explores various discursive practices of African American discourse communities—such as the enslaved, abolitionists, feminists, nationalist/revolutionaries, and entertainers—to engage discussions about freedom, access to democracy, racial uplift, gender equity, and the discursive and recursive nature of racial identity. Studies historical contexts and current sociopolitical dynamics emphasizing the Black Jeremiad, civil rights rhetoric, the Black Power Movement, Black Feminist Thought, and Hip-Hop.

ENGL 2710 Style and Editing (Online)

Instructor: Professor Beth Britt
Sequence: ONLINE

Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing
• NUPath Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Writing Intensive in the Major (WI)

Style is often imagined as the clothes with which we dress our thoughts. Such an understanding tends to separate what we say from how we say it. Since antiquity, philosophers and others have urged speakers and writers to speak as plainly as possible to allow the truth of their thoughts to emerge unadulterated by language. Others have argued that language and thought cannot be so neatly separated, that what we say cannot be disentangled from how we say it. Drawing on the rhetorical tradition, this course explores the relationship between style and substance through close attention to choices made at the level of the paragraph, sentence, and word. In the first part of the course, you’ll learn standard vocabularies for describing the stylistic techniques of published authors, and you’ll use imitation (a practice common among classical and Renaissance theorists) to make these techniques your own. In the second part, you’ll learn to revise your own prose to make it more clear and elegant. In the third part, you’ll learn techniques used by professional editors to make documents more consistent and useful to readers. Our emphasis throughout the course will be on how stylistic choices and editorial practices, rooted in community conventions, shape social reality. Assignments include online discussions, quizzes, two papers, and an editing project.

ENGL 2760 Writing in Global Contexts

Instructor: Professor Qianqian Zhang-Wu
Sequence: A – MR 11:45 AM-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing, Diversity
• NUPath Engaging Diversity & Difference (DD), Interpreting Culture (IC), Writing-Intensive in the Major (WI)

Explores the various ways that linguistic diversity shapes our everyday, academic, and professional lives. Offers students an opportunity to learn about language policy, the changing place of World Englishes in globalization, and what contemporary theories on linguistic diversity (such as translingualism) mean for writing. Invites students to explore their own multilingual communities or histories through empirical or archival research.

ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal

Instructor: Professor Laurie Edwards
Sequence: A – MR 11:45 AM-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing
• NUPath Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Writing Intensive in the Major (WI)

Explores how creative writing can be used as a healing tool. Offers students opportunities to analyze, theorize, and create healing narratives through readings, in-class writing activities, writing workshops, and process journals. Culminates in the creation and revision of written personal narratives as well as a digital storytelling project.

ENGL 3375 Writing Boston

Instructor: Professor Chris Gallagher
Sequence: 3 – MWR 10:30-11:35 AM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing, Experiential
• NUPath Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Writing-Intensive in the Major (WI), Interpreting Culture (IC), Integrating Knowledge and Skills through Experience (EX)

ENGL 3376 Creative Nonfiction

Instructor: Professor Neal Lerner
Sequence: D – TF 9:50-11:30 AM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing
• NUPath Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Writing-Intensive in the Major (WI)

Explores how writers apply narrative strategies and techniques to factual material. Offers students an opportunity to read and write a variety of nonfiction forms (e.g., narrative essays and narrative journalism, travel and science writing, memoir, editorials, protest and political essays), as well as cross-genre and hybrid forms (e.g., nonfiction prose mixed with poetry, audio and graphic nonfiction). The topics for narrative nonfiction writing apply to a wide array of disciplines, including the humanities, the sciences, and journalism.

ENGL/AFAM 2296 Early African-American Literature

Instructor: Professor Nicole Aljoe
Sequence: 3 – MWR 10:30-11:35 AM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s 17th-18th Century Literatures, Diversity
• NUPath Interpreting Culture (IC), Engaging Difference and Diversity (DD)

Surveys the development and range of black American writers, emphasizing poetry and prose from early colonial times to the Civil War. ENGL 2296 and AFAM 2296 are cross-listed.

ENGL 2760 Writing in Global Contexts

Instructor: Professor Qianqian Zhang-Wu
Sequence: A – MR 11:45 AM-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing, Diversity
• NUPath Engaging Diversity & Difference (DD), Interpreting Culture (IC), Writing-Intensive in the Major (WI)

Explores the various ways that linguistic diversity shapes our everyday, academic, and professional lives. Offers students an opportunity to learn about language policy, the changing place of World Englishes in globalization, and what contemporary theories on linguistic diversity (such as translingualism) mean for writing. Invites students to explore their own multilingual communities or histories through empirical or archival research.

ENGL/AFAM 3404 African American Rhetorical Traditions

Instructor: Professor Melissa Pearson
Sequence: B – MW 2:50-4:30 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Theories and Methods, Diversity
• NUPath Engaging Diversity & Difference (DD), Interpreting Culture (IC)

Examines and organizes the ways that African Americans have historically maintained their humanity and negotiated freedom through discourse. Explores various discursive practices of African American discourse communities—such as the enslaved, abolitionists, feminists, nationalist/revolutionaries, and entertainers—to engage discussions about freedom, access to democracy, racial uplift, gender equity, and the discursive and recursive nature of racial identity. Studies historical contexts and current sociopolitical dynamics emphasizing the Black Jeremiad, civil rights rhetoric, the Black Power Movement, Black Feminist Thought, and Hip-Hop.

ENGL 3340 Technologies of Text

Instructor: Professor Erika Boeckeler
Sequence: B – MW 2:50-4:30 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Theories and Methods, Experiential
• NUPath Conducting Formal and Quantitative Reasoning (FQ), Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Integrating Knowledge and Skills Through Experience (EX)

Examines innovations that have reshaped how humans share information, e.g., the alphabet, the book, the printing press, the postal system, the computer. Focuses on debates over privacy, memory, intellectual property, and textual authority that have historically accompanied the rise of new media forms and genres. Offers students an opportunity to gain skills for working with texts using the rapidly changing tools of the present, e.g., geographic information systems, data mining, textual analysis.

ENGL 3375 Writing Boston

Instructor: Professor Chris Gallagher
Sequence: 3 – MWR 10:30-11:35 AM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Writing, Experiential
• NUPath Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation (EI), Writing-Intensive in the Major (WI), Interpreting Culture (IC), Integrating Knowledge and Skills through Experience (EX)

ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar

Instructor: Professor Mya Poe
Sequence: A – MR 11:45 AM-1:25 PM
Attributes:

• Major Requirement/s Capstone
• NUPath Capstone (CE), Writing Intensive in the Major (WI)

Capstone: Regulating Reading and Writing in the U.S.

This course will invite students to explore the history of reading and writing in the U.S. to understand why and how literacy has been regulated and how attempts to regulate literacy have been met with resistance. By exploring various histories of literacies, we will ask questions, such as what does literacy have to do with nation building? Why has literacy testing been so central in U.S. schools, immigration policies, and military training? How have historically marginalized communities resisted literacy regulation to reclaim literacy for their own ends? Students will investigate these questions through independent and collaborative work on projects that define their pathways through the English major, whether literary, rhetorical, digital, or some combination of those lenses. We will explore the writing and research processes in depth, and students will ultimately be engaged in projects that reflect their own uptakes to the questions we pursue in this class. These cumulative projects might be digital, textual, aural or some combination of those modalities, whatever is be suited to the students’ methodological interests and relation to the subject matter.

Introductory Course Offerings*

• ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric (see Foundational, Theories & Methods)
• ENGL/HIST/INSH 1300 Introduction to Health and Humanities
• ENGL 1400 Introduction to Literary Studies (see Foundational)
• ENGL 1700 Global Literatures 1 (see Foundational)

*Students in the English minor will need to contact CSSHAdvising@northeastern.edu to have the ENGL 1400 registration restriction removed, as the class is currently only open to English majors and combined majors in Banner.

Foundational 

• ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric (see Foundational, Theories & Methods)

Electives

• ENGL 3381 The Practice & Theory of Teaching Writing (see Theories & Methods, Experiential)
• ENGL/AFAM 3404 African American Rhetorical Traditions (see Theories & Methods, Diversity)

Writing Theories & Methods

• ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric (see Foundational, Theories & Methods)
• ENGL 3381 The Practice & Theory of Teaching Writing (see Theories & Methods, Experiential)
• ENGL/AFAM 3404 African American Rhetorical Traditions (see Theories & Methods, Diversity)

Writing Electives

• ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric (see Foundational, Theories & Methods)
• ENGL 2710 Style & Editing (see Writing)
• ENGL 2760 Writing in Global Contexts (see Writing)
• ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal (see Writing)
• ENGL 3375 Writing Boston (see Writing, Experiential)
• ENGL 3376 Creative Nonfiction (see Writing)
• ENGL 3440 Technologies of Text (see Theories & Methods, Experiential)

Digital and Computational Methods Courses or Culture, Society, and Value in the Digital Age

• ENGL 3440 Technologies of Text (see Theories & Methods, Experiential)

Introductory Course

• ENGL/HIST/INSH 1300 Introduction to Health and Humanities

Humanities Requirement

• ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal (see Writing)
• ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar (see Capstone)

• ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric (IC, SI)
• ENGL 1400 Introduction to Literary Studies (WI)
• ENGL 1410 Introduction to Writing Studies (WI)
• ENGL 1701 Global Literature 1500 to Present (IC, DD)

Early Literatures

• No offerings planned.

17th-18th Centuries

• ENGL 3120 17th and 18th Century Literatures: Becoming Human

19th Century

• ENGL 3140 19th-Century Literatures: Dis/Ability

20th-21st Centuries

• ENGL 2440 The Modern Bestseller (IC)

• ENGL 1500 British Literature to 1800 (IC)
• ENGL 1502 American Literature to 1865 (IC, SI)
• ENGL 2470 Asian American Literature (IC, DD)
• ENGL 2520 Science Fiction
• ENGl 2620 What is Nature (Abroad) (IC, EX)
• ENGL/AFRS/WMNS 3900 Gender and Black World Literatures (IC, DD)

• ENGL 1160 Introduction to Rhetoric (IC, SI)
• ENGL 1410 Introduction to Writing Studies (WI)
• ENGL 3325 Rhetoric of Law (IC)
• ENGL 3400 Opening the Archive (IC, EX, WI)
• ENGL 3458 Language Matters
• ENGL 3700 Narrative Medicine (IC)
• ENGL 4100 Topics in Literary Criticism: Queer Theory

• ENGL 2700 Creative Writing (EI)
• ENGL 2730 Digital Writing (EI, WI)
• ENGL 2780 Visual Writing: Writing Visuals (IC, EI, WI)
• ENGL 3375 Writing Boston (EI, EX, IC, WI)
• ENGL 3377 Poetry Workshop (EI)

• ENGL 2470 Asian American Literature (IC, DD)
• ENGL/AFRS/WMNS 3900 Gender and Black World Literatures (IC, DD)

• ENGL 2620 What is Nature (Abroad) (IC, EX)
• ENGL 3375 Writing Boston (EI, EX, IC, WI)
• ENGL 3400 Opening the Archive (IC, EX, WI)

• ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar (CE, WI)