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Experiential Academics – Undergraduate

Spring 2018 Undergraduate Courses

students sitting in colorful adirondack chairs on the grass at centennial common

The following information is subject to change.

For the most up-to-date and comprehensive course schedule, including meeting times, course additions, cancellations, and room assignments, refer to the Banner Class Schedule on the Registrar’s website.

For curriculum information, see the Undergraduate Full-Time Day Programs catalog, also on the Registrar’s website.

Please note: 4000-level courses are open to all students (not just Juniors and Seniors), and everyone is encouraged to register for them. In the English Department, the course number designates the type of course, not the level of difficulty—4000-level courses are organized around a focused reading list and topic of analysis, and 1000-level classes are broad surveys.

ENGL by Major Requirement

ENGL 1400 Intro to Literary Studies

Instructor: Professor Kim
Sequence: B (2:50-4:30PM MW)
Attributes:

This foundational course will introduce Literary Studies to English majors. It will examine methodologies for reading, interpreting and theorizing about texts, for conducting research; for developing skills in thinking analytically and writing clearly about complex ideas; and for entering into written dialogue with scholarship in the field of literary studies. Readings will include critical theory to a range historical periods and literary genres, from fairy tales, poetry, theater, and contemporary multi-ethnic novels.

ENGL 1410 Intro to Writing Studies

Instructor: Professor Poe
Sequence: D (9:50-11:30AM TF)
Attributes:

Our homes, schools, work places, and personal space are all shaped by our use of reading and writing. In Introduction to Writing Studies, we make that everyday reading and writing the focus of our study. This course will introduce students to the basic histories, theories, and methodologies surrounding how people learn to write and how writing is used in home, school, work, and public contexts. We will explore writing practices in the U.S. and in international contexts, including the social and political significance of writing in such cultural contexts. Class projects emphasize archival research and research on the development of writing practices, including students’ understanding of their own experiences and practices of other groups. Satisfies introductory course requirement for English majors.

ENGL 1700 Global Literatures to 1500

Instructor: Professor Blessington
Sequence: 2 (9:15-10:20AM MWR)
Attributes:

Readings in Greek, Roman, and biblical literature and beyond: Homer, Virgil, Old and New testament, and Dante’s Inferno. The works all writers read. Emphasis upon background to Western culture and imagination: myth, literary genres and conventions, philosophy, and religion.

ENGL 4000 Topics in Early Literatures: Greek Tragedy

Instructor: Professor Blessington
Sequence: 3 (10:30-11:35AM MWR)
Attributes:

Greek tragedy forges powerful emotions and complexity of thought. Its actions are the most violent imaginable: matricide, patricide, infanticide, incest, madness, suicide, and mutilation, and sometimes they even end happily. Actions that many cultures avoided mentioning publically the Greeks put on the stage. To balance the atrocities and avoid disgust, Greek drama had formal elements that gave aesthetic distance and acceptability to its plots.  Such controlled culture shock had an exportablility, a clarity, and a relevance that fascinated later civilizations with its examination of the human condition.

ENGL 4020 Topics in 17th/18th Century Literatures: Becoming Human

Instructor: Professor Leslie
Sequence: D (9:50-11:30AM TF)
Attributes:

The boundaries of the human came into visibility in the early modern period primarily through a series of border skirmishes. The relationship between human and beast, man and woman, human and machine, flesh and spirit, matter and mind were all subjects of fierce debate, whose terms did not generally resolve into strict or stable binaries. Indeed, early modern print culture is well-populated by monsters, faeries, sprites, savages, werewolves, hermaphrodites, talking animals, automata, and other multiform creatures who complicated notions of human exceptionalism, autonomy, and dominion. We will explore the contributions of 17th-century philosophy, travel, and science to the controversies over what it meant to be human and consider how a range of ideas constructing and contesting the human are animated in the literature of the period.  Readings will include Pico, Descartes, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Aphra Behn, Walter Raleigh, John Webster, and Margaret Cavendish.  Assignments will include an archival exercise, collaboration on a class anthology of primary sources, and a final research paper.

ENGL 2330 The American Renaissance

Instructor: Professor Davis
Sequence: E (11:45-1:25 WF)
Attributes:

The American Renaissance describes an especially rich period in American literature, the thirty years leading up to the Civil War. In this era, American authors grappled with philosophical, political, and personal questions in a wide range of experimental prose and poetry. Major themes include American individualism, evident in Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance and Emily Dickinson’s peculiar, demanding poetry; the presence of slavery within the nation and the struggle for freedom from it, at play in the autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson; and philosophical doubts about the ability of human beings to know reality and to build a just world, as in the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. This class will explore these major themes as they intersect across this uniquely complex and adventurous period of American literary history, which continues to be a touchstone in discussions about the nation today.

Requirements include three five-page papers and three one-page response papers.

ENGL 3685 Modern & Contemporary Jewish Literature

Instructor: Professor Lefkovitz
Sequence: B (2:50-4:30PM MW)
Attributes:

In this class you will read and interpret great 20th and 21st-century novels, stories, plays, and poems by writers who happen to be Jewish. We will ask both how these texts constitute a multi-national and multilingual ethnic canon and how they are informed by and comment on the particular historical circumstances in which they produced. We will consider themes of immigration and alienation, cross-cultural influences, and issues of religious, ethnic, and gender identity. With an emphasis on American and European literatures, the syllabus includes Yiddish poets and playwrights, Russian fabulists, classic modern writers such as Kafka, Roth, Malamud, Olsen, and Paley, Ginsberg’s beat poetry of the 60s, and contemporary American novelists, such as Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and Nicole Krauss.

ENGL 2450 Postcolonial Literature

Instructor: Professor Aljoe
Sequence: 3 (10:30-11:35AM MWR)
Attributes:

This course provides a basic introduction to 20th & 21st century Postcolonial (also known as global and transnational) literatures. Although the course will certainly familiarize students with different cultural paradigms that respond to the transnational experiences of colonialism, our central focus will be on the artistic strategies and literary techniques employed by writers to communicate contemporary Postcolonial experiences and themes, as well as debates about art, politics, nation, representation, language, form, diaspora, race, and identity. For Spring 2018 in addition to reading novels from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean by Chinua Achebe, Chimimanda Adichie, Arundhati Roy, and Shani Mootoo, we will also read Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Man Booker Prize nominated novel, Exit/West, of which novelist Ayelet Waldman writing in The New York Times said, “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world and gave us a road map to our future… This book blew the top off my head.” The novels will be read as a means of exploring four themes about the relationships between Postcolonial literature and social justice: The Empire Writes Back; Arundhati Roy and Feminist Social Marxism; Creolizing Gender Binaries in the Caribbean; and Global Immigration.

ENGL 2510 Horror Fiction

Instructor: Professor Goshgarian
Sequence: 3 (10:30-11:35AM MWR)
Attributes:

This course explores English and American horror fiction from Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker (Dracula) to contemporary masters such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker. Using short stories, novels, and movies, we will examine the evolution of horror fiction and the various themes, techniques, and uses of macabre. Student writing: announced quizzes, midterm & final take-home essay exams (7-10 pages); optional critical analysis of some horror work not read in the course (7-10 pages).

ENGL 2690 Boston in Literature

Instructor: Professor Aljoe
Sequence: A (11:45AM-1:25PM MR)
Attributes:

This course explores the various ways in which the city of Boston is represented in literature and other media. Each semester, the course will focus on a different aspect of Boston in literature, such as representations of Boston’s different communities, different historical eras, particular genres or concepts associated with the city, and etc. Students will build upon their readings about the city by experiencing independent site visits, class field trips, guest speakers, and other activities. In addition to a culminating group or individual research project about Boston, students may also have the opportunity to participate in a community-based reading project. For Spring 2018 the course will focus on Representations of Black Boston. In addition to reading literature produced by African American writers in Boston such as Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker, Danzy Senna, and Pauline Hopkins, the course will focus on four themes: Blacks in Revolutionary Era Boston, 19thC Black Beacon Hill; The “American Dream,” and Education.

ENGL 1410 Intro to Writing Studies

Instructor: Professor Poe
Sequence: D (9:50-11:30AM TF)
Attributes:

Our homes, schools, work places, and personal space are all shaped by our use of reading and writing. In Introduction to Writing Studies, we make that everyday reading and writing the focus of our study. This course will introduce students to the basic histories, theories, and methodologies surrounding how people learn to write and how writing is used in home, school, work, and public contexts. We will explore writing practices in the U.S. and in international contexts, including the social and political significance of writing in such cultural contexts. Class projects emphasize archival research and research on the development of writing practices, including students’ understanding of their own experiences and practices of other groups. Satisfies introductory course requirement for English majors.

ENGL 3340-01 Technologies of Text

Instructor: Professor Cordell
Sequence: D (9:50-11:30AM TF)
Attributes: See below

ENGL 3340-02 Technologies of Text

Instructor: Professor Cordell
Sequence: F (1:35-3:15 TF)

Attributes:

Every old media was once new media, including moveable type, the steam press, radio, film, television, the internet. Many of the debates that seem unique to the twenty-first century—over privacy, intellectual property, and textual authority—are but new iterations of familiar battles this course will trace through its history of new media. The course is also experiential, asking students to experiment making texts as well as reading them. In “humanities lab” sessions students will work with text technologies new and old: e.g. paper making, setting type and printing on a letterpress, encoding in HTML and CSS, or writing code to computationally analyze text. This course aims to help students understand texts in terms of technology, labor, design, and medium through practices of critical reading and critical making.

ENGL 4410 Research in Rhetoric and Writing

Instructor: Professor Poe
Sequence: F (1:35-3:15 TF)
Attributes:

This class is for students who really want to dig into cutting-edge research on writing. We will begin with readings on the nature of research, including the goals of research, what certain methods can tell us (or not), and our ethical responsibilities as researchers. We will then explore three innovative methodologies: digital ethnographies, large data studies, and writing assessment studies focused on making testing fairer. Class projects will give students the opportunity to sample the various methodologies we discuss in class and then design their own semester-long study.

ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement

Instructor: Professor Walzer
Sequence: B (2:50-4:30 MW)
Attributes:

How do communities understand themselves through narratives and stories? More specifically, how do communities make sense of collective trauma through writing and representation? What is the relationship of writing and narrative to communities’ sense of collective memory, identity, or imagining? This course explores community writing both as a disciplinary conversation as well as a practice by considering writing as a means of participating in as well as learning from local and global communities. To that end, we will partner with local and international community organizations around issues of social justice and human rights for a service-learning credit.

ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal

Instructor: Professor Edwards
Sequence: A (11:45AM-1:25PM MR)
Attributes:

This course will examine how expressive writing can serve as a healing tool for physical or emotional adversity. Select essays and excerpts from patients, physicians, and artists will demonstrate the transformative power of the personal narrative, and we will not only explore examples of the “healing through writing” genre but will also look at DeSalvo’s theory behind the process of it. We will also investigate the ways technology and social media have influenced storytelling and the publishing of healing narratives. Most importantly, we will compose three major written and digital healing narratives, and will use substantive writing workshops and peer review to revise your work. By the end of the semester, you will be able to identify suitable places of publication for your healing narrative and understand the process of pitching your work. You will also have the chance to reflect on the process of creating and revising a personal narrative through process journals.

ENGL 3378 Fiction Workshop

Instructor: Professor Goshgarian
Sequence: 2 (9:15-10:20AM MWR)
Attributes:

This is a fiction-writing workshop, the objective of which is to get you started on the novel you always wanted to write. With an eye to producing material worthy of publication, our primary objective is for you to produce at least two solid chapters (the first and a subsequent chapter) and an enticing synopsis which will serve as bases to develop and eventually present to a literary agent and or editor.  Any fictional genre is acceptable—mainstream, literary, mystery, thriller, horror, science fiction, romance, western, etc.—all but vampire or zombie stories.  Those have been overdone. I do not encourage writing short stories since they don’t sell. You will be expected to read your own material in class for roundtable response and to offer comments on others’ material.  Maximum 15 students. 

ENGL 3382 Publishing in the 21st Century

Instructor: Professor Stockman
Sequence: 4 (1:35-2:40PM MWR)
Attributes:

“Publishing in the 21st Century” offers students an investigative experience into publishing and writing. Students will explore a variety of questions, including but not limited to: What does it mean to be a publishing writer today? What does it mean to be a publisher today? How have technological advances and the social media craze changed the publishing industry?

As part of participating in an experiential-learning course, students will be required to attend local activities, such as readings, plays, lectures, and other community literacy events. Students will interview and profile a Boston-area writer or publisher to learn about the writing process, trends in the publishing field, and potential career paths. Students will compose and curate a class blog as a way to document and share their research and experiences. Finally, students will share their knowledge about writing through a collaboration with 826 Boston and our partner site, the Writers’ Room at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics & Science in Roxbury. Students will help younger writers develop and publish a book of their creative works. By the end of the course, students will have gained a better theoretical understanding of the art of publication, as well as practical experience with writing production and publication.

ENGL 2450 Postcolonial Literature

Instructor: Professor Aljoe
Sequence: 3 (10:30-11:35AM MWR)
Attributes:

This course provides a basic introduction to 20th & 21st century Postcolonial (also known as global and transnational) literatures. Although the course will certainly familiarize students with different cultural paradigms that respond to the transnational experiences of colonialism, our central focus will be on the artistic strategies and literary techniques employed by writers to communicate contemporary Postcolonial experiences and themes, as well as debates about art, politics, nation, representation, language, form, diaspora, race, and identity. For Spring 2018 in addition to reading novels from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean by Chinua Achebe, Chimimanda Adichie, Arundhati Roy, and Shani Mootoo, we will also read Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Man Booker Prize nominated novel, Exit/West, of which novelist Ayelet Waldman writing in The New York Times said, “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world and gave us a road map to our future… This book blew the top off my head.” The novels will be read as a means of exploring four themes about the relationships between Postcolonial literature and social justice: The Empire Writes Back; Arundhati Roy and Feminist Social Marxism; Creolizing Gender Binaries in the Caribbean; and Global Immigration.

ENGL 3685 Modern & Contemporary Jewish Literature

Instructor: Professor Lefkovitz
Sequence: B (2:50-4:30PM MW)
Attributes:

In this class you will read and interpret great 20th and 21st-century novels, stories, plays, and poems by writers who happen to be Jewish. We will ask both how these texts constitute a multi-national and multilingual ethnic canon and how they are informed by and comment on the particular historical circumstances in which they produced. We will consider themes of immigration and alienation, cross-cultural influences, and issues of religious, ethnic, and gender identity. With an emphasis on American and European literatures, the syllabus includes Yiddish poets and playwrights, Russian fabulists, classic modern writers such as Kafka, Roth, Malamud, Olsen, and Paley, Ginsberg’s beat poetry of the 60s, and contemporary American novelists, such as Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and Nicole Krauss.

ENGL 2690 Boston in Literature

Instructor: Professor Aljoe
Sequence: A (11:45AM-1:25PM MR)
Attributes:

This course explores the various ways in which the city of Boston is represented in literature and other media. Each semester, the course will focus on a different aspect of Boston in literature, such as representations of Boston’s different communities, different historical eras, particular genres or concepts associated with the city, and etc. Students will build upon their readings about the city by experiencing independent site visits, class field trips, guest speakers, and other activities. In addition to a culminating group or individual research project about Boston, students may also have the opportunity to participate in a community-based reading project. For Spring 2018 the course will focus on Representations of Black Boston. In addition to reading literature produced by African American writers in Boston such as Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker, Danzy Senna, and Pauline Hopkins, the course will focus on four themes: Blacks in Revolutionary Era Boston, 19thC Black Beacon Hill; The “American Dream,” and Education.

ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement

Instructor: Professor Walzer
Sequence: B (2:50-4:30 MW)
Attributes:

How do communities understand themselves through narratives and stories? More specifically, how do communities make sense of collective trauma through writing and representation? What is the relationship of writing and narrative to communities’ sense of collective memory, identity, or imagining? This course explores community writing both as a disciplinary conversation as well as a practice by considering writing as a means of participating in as well as learning from local and global communities. To that end, we will partner with local and international community organizations around issues of social justice and human rights for a service-learning credit.

ENGL 3382 Publishing in the 21st Century

Instructor: Professor Stockman
Sequence: 4 (1:35-2:40PM MWR)
Attributes:

“Publishing in the 21st Century” offers students an investigative experience into publishing and writing. Students will explore a variety of questions, including but not limited to: What does it mean to be a publishing writer today? What does it mean to be a publisher today? How have technological advances and the social media craze changed the publishing industry?

As part of participating in an experiential-learning course, students will be required to attend local activities, such as readings, plays, lectures, and other community literacy events. Students will interview and profile a Boston-area writer or publisher to learn about the writing process, trends in the publishing field, and potential career paths. Students will compose and curate a class blog as a way to document and share their research and experiences. Finally, students will share their knowledge about writing through a collaboration with 826 Boston and our partner site, the Writers’ Room at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics & Science in Roxbury. Students will help younger writers develop and publish a book of their creative works. By the end of the course, students will have gained a better theoretical understanding of the art of publication, as well as practical experience with writing production and publication.

ENGL 3340-01 Technologies of Text

Instructor: Professor Cordell
Sequence: D (9:50-11:30AM TF)
Attributes: See below

ENGL 3340-02 Technologies of Text

Instructor: Professor Cordell
Sequence: F (1:35-3:15 TF)
Attributes:

Every old media was once new media, including moveable type, the steam press, radio, film, television, the internet. Many of the debates that seem unique to the twenty-first century—over privacy, intellectual property, and textual authority—are but new iterations of familiar battles this course will trace through its history of new media. The course is also experiential, asking students to experiment making texts as well as reading them. In “humanities lab” sessions students will work with text technologies new and old: e.g. paper making, setting type and printing on a letterpress, encoding in HTML and CSS, or writing code to computationally analyze text. This course aims to help students understand texts in terms of technology, labor, design, and medium through practices of critical reading and critical making.

ENGL 4410 Research in Rhetoric and Writing

Instructor: Professor Poe
Sequence: F (1:35-3:15 TF)
Attributes:

This class is for students who really want to dig into cutting-edge research on writing. We will begin with readings on the nature of research, including the goals of research, what certain methods can tell us (or not), and our ethical responsibilities as researchers. We will then explore three innovative methodologies: digital ethnographies, large data studies, and writing assessment studies focused on making testing fairer. Class projects will give students the opportunity to sample the various methodologies we discuss in class and then design their own semester-long study.

ENGL 4710-01 Capstone Seminar: Literature and Health

Instructor: Professor Altschuler
Sequence: F (1:35-3:15 TF)
Attributes:

In this course we will explore the complex relationship between literature and health. Taking both theoretical and historical approaches, the class will be organized around the varieties of work at this intersection. Using literature from critical moments in US health from the 18th to the 21st centuries as the texts through which we will pursue our inquiries, we will ask questions such as: How does literature help people make sense of their worlds during a health crisis? How have doctors used literature in medical research and practice? What are the plot conventions of health narratives? And, how is literature itself used as a tool for both healing patients and improving medical care? We will also use critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and disability studies to broaden our perspectives on the concept of health and its literatures.

Requirements: two four-page papers and a final twelve-page research paper.

ENGL by Attribute

NUCore

Capstone

ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar (see Capstone)

Comparative Study of Cultures

ENGL 2450 Postcolonial Literature (see Comparative, Diversity)

Experiential Learning

ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement (see Experiential Learning, Writing)
ENGL 3382 Publishing in the 21st Century (see Experiential Learning, Writing)

Humanities Level 1

ENGL 1700 Global Literatures to 1500 (see Foundational)

Math/Anly Think Lvl 2

ENGL 3340 Technologies of Text (see Theories & Methods)

Writing-Intensive in the Major

ENGL 1400 Introduction to Literary Studies (see Foundational)
ENGL 1410 Intro to Writing Studies (see Foundational or Theories & Methods)
ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement (see Experiential Learning, Writing)
ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal (see Writing)
ENGL 4410 Research in Rhetoric and Writing (see Theories & Methods)
ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar (see Capstone)

NUpath

AD = Analyzing and Using Data

ENGL 3340 Technologies of Text (see Theories & Methods)

CE = Demonstrating Thought and Action in a Capstone

ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar (see Capstone)

DD = Engaging Difference and Diversity

ENGL 1700 Global Literatures to 1500 (see Foundational)
ENGL 2450 Postcolonial Literature (see Comparative, Diversity)
ENGL 3685 Modern & Contemporary Jewish Literature (see 20th-21st Centuries, Diversity)

EI = Exploring Creative Expression and Innovation

ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement (see Experiential Learning, Writing)
ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal (see Writing)
ENGL 3340 Technologies of Text (see Theories & Methods)
ENGL 3378 Fiction Workshop (see Writing)
ENGL 3382 Publishing in the 21st Century (see Experiential Learning, Writing)

EX = Integrating Knowledge and Skills Through Experience

ENGL 2690 Boston in Literature (see Comparative, Experiential)
ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement (see Experiential Learning, Writing)
ENGL 3382 Publishing in the 21st Century (see Experiential Learning, Writing)
ENGL 3340 Technologies of Text (see Theories & Methods)

IC = Interpreting Culture

ENGL 1700 Global Literatures to 1500 (see Foundational)
ENGL 2450 Postcolonial Literature (see Comparative, Diversity)
ENGL 2690 Boston in Literature (see Comparative, Experiential)
ENGL 3685 Modern & Contemporary Jewish Literature (see 20th-21st Centuries, Diversity)

ND= Engaging with the Natural and Designed World

—

SI = Understanding Societies and Institutions

—

WI = Writing Intensive in the Major

ENGL 1400 Intro to Literary Studies (see Foundational)
ENGL 1410 Intro to Writing Studies (see Foundational or Theories & Methods)
ENGL 2740 Writing and Community Engagement (see Experiential Learning, Writing)
ENGL 2770 Writing to Heal (see Writing)
ENGL 3382 Publishing in the 21st Century (see Writing, Experiential)
ENGL 4410 Research in Rhetoric and Writing (see Theories & Methods)
ENGL 4710 Capstone Seminar (see Capstone)