Fall 2026 Courses

Class information on LOCUS takes precedence over information posted here.

UCLR 100E Interpreting Literature

ENGL 210  Business Writing

ENGL 211 Writing for Pre-Law Students

ENGL 212 Science Writing, Technical Communication, and Problem Solving in Public

ENGL 271 Exploring Poetry

ENGL 272 Exploring Drama

ENGL 273 Exploring Fiction

ENGL 274 Exploring Shakespeare

ENGL 282 African-American Literature 

ENGL 282C African-American Literature Post-1900

ENGL 283 Women in Literature

ENGL 284 Asian American Literature

ENGL 288 Nature in Literature

ENGL 290 Human Values in Literature

ENGL 293 Advanced Writing

ENGL 299 Topics in Advanced Writing

ENGL 315C South Asian Lit in England Post-1900

ENGL 317 The Writing of Poetry

ENGL 318 The Writing of Fiction

ENGL 319 Writing Creative Nonfiction

ENGL 322 Chaucer

ENGL 326 Plays of Shakespeare

ENGL 335 British Literature: Romantic Period

ENGL 340 British Literature: Victorian Period 

ENGL 345 British Literature Since 1900

ENGL 354 Contemporary Critical Theory 

ENGL 384C Studies in African American Literature Since 1900

ENGL 390 Advanced Seminar

ENGL 393 Teaching English to Adults: Internship

ENGL 394 Internship

ENGL 397 Advanced Writing: Poetry

ENGL 399 Special Studies in Literature

 

Interpreting Literature (UCLR 100E)

Section: 001 #2369
Instructor: Rodriguez, B.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 08:15 a.m. – 09:05 a.m., LSC

Interpreting literature is often inseparable from the way we experience and perceive everyday life. In this course, we will read American fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama and film from different periods and cultural contexts. We will practice close reading, focusing on memory, senses, identity, and belonging. We will also turn to these works to highlight how literary devices produce meaning and shape the ways we understand and inhabit the world and the spaces around us. 

Section: 002 #2887
Instructor: Sleevi, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 08:15 a.m. – 09:05 a.m., LSC

This foundational course introduces students to the study of literature through the close reading and analysis of fiction, poetry, and drama. We will gain familiarity with key literary terms and approaches as we read novels, short stories, plays, and poems, examining their thematic content and formal features in relation to the unifying theme of “perspective.” The course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature and its study—including how literary works reflect (and reflect on) culture, society, and human experience—that will help students develop the skills of analysis and interpretation needed to approach literature in a sophisticated manner. Work for the course will include reading quizzes, written response assignments, a midterm exam, and a final exam. Our eclectic syllabus will include authors such as Nella Larsen, Edward Albee, Edgar Lee Masters, and Britt Bennett.

Section: 003 #2888
Instructor: Bayley, E.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 10:25 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

In this course we will be reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and plays. We will look at how literature explores death, grief, life, and joy. We will be reading authors like Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Larson, and several other authors. Assessment will include in-class writings, class participation, and projects. 

Section: 004 #2889
Instructor: Parlato, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 10:25 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

In this course, we will explore themes of haunting, confinement, and identity across novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, and film. Some of the works on the syllabus include: August Wilson’s Fences, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Students will be introduced to key methods of literary and film analysis, with an emphasis on close reading and interpretation. Through discussion, writing, quizzes, and examinations, students will develop critical skills while engaging questions of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Content warning: Course materials include themes of racism, sexism, family conflict, body image, and engage with supernatural or horror elements.

Section: 005 #2890
Instructor: Hopwood, E.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., LSC

In this course, we will explore connections between literature and games, examining how both forms construct narrative, mediate and remediate ideas of success and survival, and reflect the significance of leisure as a cultural force. Through a study of fiction, poetry, drama and, of course, games themselves (both analog and video), we will consider the meaning and meaningfulness of play. Questions we will take up: How does play shape (and how is it shaped by) social structures and power relations, including class, gender, and identity? How can attending to the language and logic of games help us analyze text and subtext? And how do games, like literature, offer spaces for imagining otherwise: different worlds, knowledges, and modes of cultural production? We will undertake a survey of games, from the first commercially produced game in the U.S. ,“The Mansion of Happiness” (1843) to Dungeons and Dragons, as we read (and often play) with the works of authors such as Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, Henry David Thoreau, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Qui Nguyen.
This course satisfies the first tier of Loyola University’s core Knowledge Area requirement in “Literary Knowledge.”

Section: 006 #2891
Instructor: Hovey, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., LSC

The Literature of Horror

In this section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies we will focus on some of the literature of horror.  Texts include Shakespeare’s Macbeth--a play so cursed that actors are not allowed to speak its title—as well as stories by Edgar Allen Poe, specializing in madness. We will consider some famously creepy short stories by Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, short stories from Jordan Peele’s collection Out There Screaming, tales from Carmen Maria Machado and Stephen King, stories from the indigenous writers collection Never Whistle at Night, and other recent writing.
These texts will allow us to read closely and analyze prose, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to conceptual questions about literature and its study. What is literature? Why does it matter? What is horror? How has it been conceived in different times and places? Where does meaning come from in literature? What is literary interpretation and what role does it have in the production of literary meaning? How are literary works related to culture and society and how do they reflect—and reflect on—questions of value and the diversity of human experience?
This course satisfies the first tier of Loyola University’s core Knowledge Area requirement in “Literary Knowledge.”

Section: 008 #2893
Instructor: Goldstein, L.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 12:35 p.m. – 01:25 p.m., LSC

Living Literature: The Value of Literature in Community 

In this course, we will read and discuss contemporary literature that has created crucial new forms that provide space for historically marginalized voices and challenge the tide of literary history. In our sessions we often watch videos of performances alongside published pieces and spend time analyzing the impact of a work as well as its components. The units in the course have a special focus on innovations in form that respond to racial and gendered hierarchies, and that strive to produce an awareness of the conditions in our modern world. You will encounter short stories, all types of poetry, and some film and art that crosses generic boundaries. You will be introduced to multiple strategies to approach and interpret challenging texts through lectures, class discussions, group work, and short responses. Materials include short stories by Octavia Butler, Carmen Maria Machado and Nam Le, the poetry of Joe Brainard, Agha Shahid Ali, Khadijah Queen, Douglas Kearney, Hala Alyan, Ross Gay and Joy Harjo, and film and visual art by Wanuri Kahiu,  Renee Gladman, Glenn Ligon and Lauren Halsey. 

Section: 009 #2894
Instructor: Bayley, E.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 01:40 p.m. – 02:40 p.m., LSC

In this course we will be reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and plays. We will look at how literature explores death, grief, life, and joy. We will be reading authors like Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Larson, and several other authors. Assessment will include in-class writings, class participation, and projects. 

Section: 010 #2895
Instructor: Karatas, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 01:40 p.m. – 02:30 p.m., LSC

What does it mean to grieve — and what does it mean to endure, connect, and find words for the hardest parts of being alive? This course looks at how literature and other cultural forms take on experiences of loss, mourning, and emotional life, with a focus on storytelling as a tool for healing. Drawing on the medical humanities, we explore how narrative and language shape the way we understand the mind, mental health, and care for one another.

We read and discuss a wide range of texts — fiction, essays, music, visual art, television, and digital media — paying close attention to how creators make sense of painful experiences and give voice to inner lives. The course emphasizes close reading and critical writing, treating storytelling as a way of reflecting, making meaning, and finding restoration. At its heart, the course asks a simple but open question: Can literature help us heal?

Section: 012 #2897
Instructor: Quirk, K.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 01:40 p.m. – 02:30 p.m., LSC

The foundational course of literary studies will require students to read closely and analyze carefully a representative variety of prose, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. The readings will cover various historical periods, ranging from the Ancient Greece to the 21^st century and will include some modern retellings of classic works of literature and folklore. Course requirements will include in-class quizzes, short in-class essays, and exams.

Section: 013 #2898
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 02:45 p.m. – 03:35 p.m., LSC

Section: 014 #2899
Instructor: Hovey, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 02:45 p.m. – 03:35 p.m., LSC

The Literature of Horror

In this section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies we will focus on some of the literature of horror.  Texts include Shakespeare’s Macbeth--a play so cursed that actors are not allowed to speak its title—as well as stories by Edgar Allen Poe, specializing in madness. We will consider some famously creepy short stories by Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, short stories from Jordan Peele’s collection Out There Screaming, tales from Carmen Maria Machado and Stephen King, stories from the indigenous writers collection Never Whistle at Night, and other recent writing.
These texts will allow us to read closely and analyze prose, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to conceptual questions about literature and its study. What is literature? Why does it matter? What is horror? How has it been conceived in different times and places? Where does meaning come from in literature? What is literary interpretation and what role does it have in the production of literary meaning? How are literary works related to culture and society and how do they reflect—and reflect on—questions of value and the diversity of human experience?
This course satisfies the first tier of Loyola University’s core Knowledge Area requirement in “Literary Knowledge.”

Section: 015 #2900
Instructor: Judy, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 02:45 p.m. – 03:35 p.m., LSC

This literature course is designed to offer students training in reading literature across time periods in the forms of poetry, prose, and drama. In doing so we will use Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus as our primary text in understanding the beginnings and evolution of the Faustian bargain, and the themes of ambition and forbidden knowledge. Other texts may include poetry by John Donne, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Section: 017 #2902
Instructor: Molby, B.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 08:30 a.m. – 09:45 a.m., LSC

Monsters and Mazes

This foundational class explores literary portrayals of the monstrous and the unknown through a selection of prose, poetry, and drama.  Through an examination of works including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, this class will discuss how these texts portray ideas of knowledge, identity, power, community, and our relationship to the natural world.  This class will introduce students to key terms, techniques, and methods of literary interpretation.  Course requirements include reading quizzes, short written analysis assignments, a midterm exam, and a final exam.

Section: 018 #2903
Instructor: Coomes, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

Speculation Station

In this hands-on course in literary studies, students will read, analyze and create across literary genres by using the lens of speculation. Diving into speculative fiction, nonfiction, poetry and film, we work together to exercise our creative muscles, using the text to help us envision different pasts, presents, and futures. This course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature including: why do we write? Who are we writing for? How can literature be used in society? What is the archive, and how do we use it? Students will develop skills in criticism, generative writing, and archival research through exploration of these questions.

Section: 019 #2904
Instructor: Kessel, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

In this class we will explore the elements of fiction, poetry and drama in speculative and science fiction. While this genre is often associated with white men as authors and protagonists, we will be reading and viewing texts created by persons from a variety of ethnicities and gender identities. Speculative and science fiction, or “SF” takes us to the fringe of the imagination to show us universal human characteristics of joy, pain, fear, and desire. Join us on this inter and intra galactic journey!

Section: 020 #2095
Instructor: Coomes, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 a.m., LSC

Speculation Station

In this hands-on course in literary studies, students will read, analyze and create across literary genres by using the lens of speculation. Diving into speculative fiction, nonfiction, poetry and film, we work together to exercise our creative muscles, using the text to help us envision different pasts, presents, and futures. This course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature including: why do we write? Who are we writing for? How can literature be used in society? What is the archive, and how do we use it? Students will develop skills in criticism, generative writing, and archival research through exploration of these questions.

Section: 021 #2906
Instructor: Reddon, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 01:00 p.m. – 02:15 p.m., LSC

Dreams, Visions, Fantasies

“From dreams we talk to each other about reality,” writes Jean Toomer in his collection of aphorisms Essentials (1931). Using “dreams” as a thematic bridge, this course will introduce students to poetry, drama, and prose that explores the relationship between literary representation and subjectivity. We will consider questions such as how does literature define and mediate our experiences of the world? How does fiction, like the dream, express our desire for a better future? Alternatively, how does fiction represent our ambivalence to the past and our frustration with the present? Throughout the course our class will foreground issues around gender, race, sexuality, nationality, place, and spirituality in our readings. Course texts may will include experimental poetry, plays, and prose from a range authors and historical periods. Students who take this course will be introduced to a variety of approaches for reading literature in its cultural, historical, and political contexts, develop close writing and analytic skills through literary analysis and essay writing, and gain critical vocabulary to describe figurative language and genre.

This course satisfies the first tier of Loyola University’s core Knowledge Area requirement in “Literary Knowledge.”

Section: 022 #3288
Instructor: Tricker, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 01:00 p.m. – 02:15 p.m., LSC

“Vibes & Feels in American Literature”

People often talk about the “vibe” or “aesthetic” of a person, place, or thing. In this course, we’ll examine how moods, atmospheres, and emotion are produced in and through literature and other media. Exploring a range of American fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, song, drama, and film, we will work to become careful interpreters of texts and other cultural artifacts. We will also consider how reading can help us reclaim fading powers of concentration in today’s fickle “attention economy.” Authors and artists studied may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Emily Dickinson, Ross Gay, Lorraine Hansberry, Lawson Inada, Yusef Komunyakaa, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Noname, Jenny Odell, Ed Park, Edgar Allan Poe, Noʻu Revilla, and Chloé Zhao. Assignments may include essays, student-led small group discussions, and reading quizzes.

Section: 023 #3335
Instructor: Weller, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 01:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m., LSC

Section: 024 #4078
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 04:15 p.m. – 06:45 p.m., WTC

Section: 025 #5522
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 04:15 p.m. – 06:45 p.m., WTC

Business Writing (ENGL 210)

Section: 01W #3322
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., LSC

ENGL 210-01W #3322 is a writing-intensive class.

Section: 02W #3323
Instructor: Janangelo, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., WTC

Our course covers the rhetorical principles of effective writing, focusing on specific types of discourse practiced in business and professional settings. You will gain experience reading and writing texts pertinent to business communication including press releases, customer reviews, and resumes.
Our course is writing intensive. We will use a process approach to writing, emphasizing problem-solving, prewriting strategies, and editing and revision skills. You will plan and share some of your writing with me in draft conferences. That gives you a chance to raise ideas, ask questions, get assistance, and receive feedback on your work.

ENGL 210-02W #3323 is a writing-intensive class and a grade of C- or better in UCWR 110 is required to enroll.

Section: 03W #3642
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., WTC

ENGL 210-03W #3642 is a writing-intensive class.

Writing for Pre-Law Students (ENGL 211)

Section: 01W #3942
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., WTC

ENGL 211-01W #3942 is a writing-intensive class.

Section: 02W #3291
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., WTC

ENGL 211-02W #3291 is a writing-intensive class.

Science Writing, Technical Communication, and Problem Solving in Public
(ENGL 212)

Section: 01W #6326
Instructor: Scharfenberg, K.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 08:30 a.m. – 09:45 a.m., LSC

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your work is if no one can understand it. This course will introduce you to the principles and practices of technical writing to help you develop the skills you need to make your work legible beyond a narrow specialty area. The ability to explain complex information clearly is a sought-after skill in the sciences, engineering, finance, business, and medicine. This course teaches you to bring versatility and clarity to your complicated written, oral and visual communication. Unlike business or legal writing, technical writing requires explaining complex ideas and processes to vastly different audiences, from specialists and executives, to investors, policymakers, and the public. Through hands-on assignments and team-based projects, you will learn how to draft, design, revise, analyze, and present technical and scientific documents, including proposals, research grants, instructional guides, literature reviews, and reports. The term concludes with a poster session, presentation, and collaborative feasibility study.

Exploring Poetry (ENGL 271)

Section: 01 #5608
Instructor: Cragwall, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

Why should we care about poetry—and how should we care about it?  We’ll start historically—who before us cared about poetry, and why?  We’ll study the pressure poems put on their historical moment, and how they’re shaped by it in surprising ways: for example, our discussion of Shakespeare will start with the formation of “Shakespeare” as a figure, often at odds with the “evidence” of the poems, of canonical standards throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a program that affected even the spelling of his poems. Many of the authors we’ll read were white, male, and rich—how has literature been used to promote a series of questions and assumptions that they may have shared (sometimes called “the canon”), and how has it, even in some of these same authors, blown apart (some of) the stereotypes and orthodoxies we’d expect to find?  We’ll watch the invention not only of English-speaking cultures, but of the English language itself, its twists and triumphs, detours and degenerations—and most importantly, we’ll watch as language, especially literary language, is fashioned into a vehicle of social (as well as aesthetic) contest. Readings in genres epic, lyric, dramatic, and pornographic, from many hundreds of years. We (well, you) will also write papers, take exams, and mix metaphors—the entire range of academic abjection, in one convenient course.

Section: 02 #5609
Instructor: Cragwall, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 01:00 p.m. – 02:15 p.m., LSC

Why should we care about poetry—and how should we care about it?  We’ll start historically—who before us cared about poetry, and why?  We’ll study the pressure poems put on their historical moment, and how they’re shaped by it in surprising ways: for example, our discussion of Shakespeare will start with the formation of “Shakespeare” as a figure, often at odds with the “evidence” of the poems, of canonical standards throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a program that affected even the spelling of his poems. Many of the authors we’ll read were white, male, and rich—how has literature been used to promote a series of questions and assumptions that they may have shared (sometimes called “the canon”), and how has it, even in some of these same authors, blown apart (some of) the stereotypes and orthodoxies we’d expect to find?  We’ll watch the invention not only of English-speaking cultures, but of the English language itself, its twists and triumphs, detours and degenerations—and most importantly, we’ll watch as language, especially literary language, is fashioned into a vehicle of social (as well as aesthetic) contest. Readings in genres epic, lyric, dramatic, and pornographic, from many hundreds of years. We (well, you) will also write papers, take exams, and mix metaphors—the entire range of academic abjection, in one convenient course.

Section: 03 #5612
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., LSC

Section: 01W #5610
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., LSC

ENGL 271-01W #5610 is a writing-intensive class.

Section: 02W #5613
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 02:30 p.m. – 03:45 p.m., LSC

ENGL 271-25W #5613 is a writing-intensive class.

Exploring Drama (ENGL 272)

Section: 01W #3293
Instructor: Peters, R.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 10:25 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

English 272 focuses on the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of drama; extensive readings and several critical analyses are required in this class. This section of English 272 offers a rigorous study of numerous significant 20th and 21st Century dramas. Course texts will include works from Tennessee Williams, Margaret Edson, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage, and several others.

ENGL 272-01W #3293 is a writing-intensive class.

Exploring Fiction (ENGL 273)

Section: 001 #5713
Instructor: Mun, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 p.m. – 12:45 p.m., LSC

Conflict (polemos) has been written about by philosophers since the pre-Socratic era—from war to ethical struggles. We, in the 21^st century, have continued with this obsession, but our tastes have broadened a bit to include not only external conflict, such as war or the cosmos, but psychological dilemmas as well. To put it succinctly: Conflict is an integral part of human nature. It surrounds us, whether we want it or not, which is why we do our best to avoid it. Literature can take advantage of this avoidance. Novels and stories can provide a "safe space" of sorts for readers to look at conflict, directly and unflinchingly. Conflict pulls us into the text and allows us to witness, experience, and perhaps process what we might not be able to in our own (very real, sometimes absurdly real) lives. We’ll start by diving into how writers mechanize and think about conflict, and try to understand concepts such as, chronic and acute conflicts. From there we’ll discover numerous creative writing elements writers use to make readers feel, think, react, and even take action, long after they’ve turned the final pages of the book. We’ll also consider all the different “types” of conflict a reader might engage with while reading: interpersonal conflict, person vs. society, person vs. self, etc. By the end of the course, students will have a solid understanding and appreciation for not only how fiction works, but also how conflict—when combined with “eros”— can behave as a motor force that propels the reader toward the final pages of stories and novels. Students will also be able to articulate their understanding and evidence-based opinions in thoughtful writing projects.  

ENGL 273-001 #5713 is a multicultural class.

Section: 01W #5710
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 p.m. – 12:45 p.m., LSC

ENGL 273-01W #5710 is a writing-intensive class.

Section: 02W #5711
Instructor: Jacob, P.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 12:35 p.m. – 01:25 p.m.

The story within the story is a trick as old as storytelling itself. From folktales to dystopian novels, a fictional narrative is frequently encased within a framing device—a bedtime story, a found diary, a novel being written inside the novel being read. In this course, we will explore why fiction so often demands a frame. What happens when we bring our attention to the inside and the outside of a story? When does the act of storytelling delay, protect, ensnare, and enchant? In addition to narrative theory, this reading-intensive course will include fiction from the 18^th century to the 21^st.  Prepare to read a lot! Texts may include: the One Thousand and One Nights, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Salman Rushdie’s Victory City, and Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil.

ENGL 273-02W #5711 is a multicultural and writing-intensive class.

Section: 03W #5712
Instructor: Sen, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 12:35 p.m. – 01:35 p.m., LSC

Neighborhoods of Fiction

Chicago is known as a city of neighborhoods, but what exactly is a neighborhood and who decides its boundaries? What kind of politics, identities, and emotions do they produce, and what conflicts seethe within their apparent bubbles? This course will take up predominantly prose fiction (short stories, novellas, novels) and occasionally, TV and film, so we can immerse ourselves in the intricate details and worlds of neighborhoods, and try to interrogate their logic. In our three units, we will move from small towns to major cities, and finally to suburban gated communities, identifying what shape the neighborhood takes in each of these formations. In the process, and with the help of literary style and devices, we will trace what we might call “neighborhood logic.” We will investigate traces of the utopian, the horrific, and the absurd in these spaces to see how the ideal vision for a neighborhood collides with material reality. Authors in our syllabus are likely to include Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, and Hanif Kureishi. Assignments will mostly be as follows: journal entries on weekly texts, three scaffolded essays of increasing length that analyze fiction based on prompts, and a small creative component that will involve engaging with a neighborhood of your choice in Chicago.

ENGL 273-03W #5712 is a multicultural and writing-intensive class.

Section: 04W #5709
Instructor: Aftab, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 2:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m., LSC

“Identity, Power and Resistance in Fiction”

What is the function of literature in challenging or reinforcing dominant ideologies about race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality? How do writers use fiction to reveal the intricacies of interpersonal and systemic oppression? How do different modes and forms of fiction – such as the bildungsroman or the speculative short story – represent structures of power and strategies of resistance? These questions will guide our class as we delve into contemporary fiction by writers of color. In this course, we will use an intersectional lens to analyze literary representations of identity formation in relation to intersecting systems of dominance. We will read novels and short stories by writers such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ocean Vuong, W.E.B DuBois and Nnedi Okorafor. By the end of the semester, students will be able to analyze the relationship between literary aesthetics and the politics of race, gender and sexuality.

ENGL 273-04W #5709 is a multi-cultural and writing-intensive class. 

Section: 05W #6242
Instructor: Glover, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., LSC

Why do people enjoy reading stories about made-up characters? This course will offer students an introduction to prose fiction as a mode of literary representation.  It will aim to acquaint students with the historical development of fictional characters, as well as the many techniques authors use to make fictional worlds, including the creation of perspectives, the description of setting, and the rules of genre. Most of our energy will be devoted to reading and discussing short stories and novels, but we will range across genres from realism to science fiction.

ENGL 273-05W #6242 is a writing-intensive class. 

Section: 06W #6241
Instructor: Glover, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., LSC

Why do people enjoy reading stories about made-up characters? This course will offer students an introduction to prose fiction as a mode of literary representation.  It will aim to acquaint students with the historical development of fictional characters, as well as the many techniques authors use to make fictional worlds, including the creation of perspectives, the description of setting, and the rules of genre. Most of our energy will be devoted to reading and discussing short stories and novels, but we will range across genres from realism to science fiction.

ENGL 273-06W #6241 is a writing-intensive class. 

Exploring Shakespeare (ENGL 274)

Section: 01 #5621
Instructor: Knapp, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 02:30 p.m. – 03:45p.m., LSC

This section of English 274 will offer an introduction to the variety of Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic output. The course will place Shakespeare’s treatment of these works in historical context, while considering the ways in which they continue to speak to us today. Much like our own era of rapid technological development, religious conflict, and political upheaval, Shakespeare’s England was a period shaped by a tumultuous religious reformation, the emergence of modern science, and shifting economic and political realities. With these issues in mind, we will examine the development of Shakespeare’s art beginning with some early plays and poetry, including Much Ado About Nothing and the sonnets, and then turning to tragedies and romances such as Othello, Hamlet and The Tempest. The course will require regular reading responses and exams.

African-American Literature (ENGL 282)

Section: 01 #4314
Instructor: Staidum, F.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 01:40 p.m. – 2:30 p.m., LSC

While the activist movement, Black Lives Matter, has garnered national attention since its inception in 2013, African American literature has long been concerned with asserting the value of Black lives since the late eighteenth century. African and African-descendent peoples in the US have used the written word to express their desires for freedom and its iterations (i.e., equality, citizenship, self-determination, justice) and to represent the full humanity and beauty of Black peoples and their cultures. This literary tradition developed across myriad forms, such as autobiographies, pamphlets, nonfiction and literary essays, short stories, novels, poetry, and plays, and the resulting canon demonstrates both aesthetic diversity and ideological breadth. We explore important literary works and their artistic and socio-political context for what they reveal about the ever-changing status of the Black condition and blackness within the United States. These works convey the past contexts and belief systems from which they sprang, but they also inform us about the feelings, ideas, and ideals that continue to shape our present. The course also considers, when relevant, interactions amongst African American literary production and the cultural movements of the greater African diaspora, Europe, and the Americas.

The overall goal of the course is to orient you with a fundamental understanding of African American literature's artistic merit, socio-political context, the critical terms of its discussion, and the basic method of close reading. The following are some of the major questions, which will guide our scholarly journey toward this goal. What does it mean to be a Black writer? How was the work composed? How does gender (i.e., femininity, masculinity, or nonconformity) and sexuality shape the production of African American Literature? How does power relations and/or class struggle intersect with aesthetic choice and convention? How does literature embody and shape the view of black humanity and inhumanity? Why was the work at any given time written? What does the work reveal about the historical and social context (e.g., the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, Antebellum Slavery, Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow Segregation, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the Post-Civil Rights era)?

ENGL 282B-01W #5440 is a writing-intensive and multicultural class. A grade of C- or better in UCWR 110 is required to enroll.

African-American Literature Post-1900 (ENGL 282C)

Section: 001 #4065
Instructor: Graves, H.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 04:15 p.m. – 05:30 p.m., LSC

In this course, students will gain holistic knowledge of the long arc of 20th and 21st century African American Literature, from 1900 to the Contemporary Period. Beginning with the Nadir of Race Relations where writers contended with the color line to contemporary literary expressions, this course will introduce students to critical snapshots of expressive writings by and about African Americans. We will read the work of early 20th century writers like W.E.B. DuBois to Harlem Renaissance writers; mid-century protest writer Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry; late twentieth century writers and contemporary 21st century writers like Natasha Trethewey. In short, the aim of this course will be to explore how black people in the U.S. meditated on a range of topics during different historical periods such as the importance and dynamism of black art, black lived experience, and sociality. Each writer contends with unique questions as it pertains to the peculiar circumstances that emerge from living in the afterlife of Transatlantic Slavery

ENGL 282C-01W #4566 is a writing-intensive and multicultural class. A grade of C- or better in UCWR 110 is required to enroll.

Women in Literature (ENGL 283)

Section: 001 #3659
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., LSC

Section: 01W #3069
Instructor: Goldstein, L.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 12:35PM - 1:25PM

Asian-American Literature (ENGL 284)

Section: 001 #5633
Instructor: Tricker, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

The resurgence of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic revived a long-standing question in Asian American experience: where do Asian Americans belong? Their myriad histories include movement and continued connection across oceans and continents; subjection to laws and regulations that have restricted their movement into and within the U.S.; and, in the case of many Pacific Islanders, changes to their homes driven by colonialism. Their social positioning has been ambivalent, whether embraced as the “model minority” or rejected as racial others, unassimilable foreigners, and potential threats. Thus, their literary productions often grapple with problems of place and setting. Our examination of Asian American literature will explore various spatial scales – for instance, local community, island, nation, and globe – that have been sites of belonging, constraint, political investment, and conflict. Across these diverse settings, Asian American literature questions where and why we draw the boundaries of community, identity, and political responsibility. In our exploration, we will examine texts in a range of literary forms and styles – including poetry, drama, prose fiction, memoir, and graphic text – from various historical moments and cultural contexts. In doing so, we will analyze how Asian American/AAPI/APIDA authors have used aesthetic means to illuminate and critique conditions in the U.S. and in the world.

Nature in Literature (ENGL 288)

Section: 01W #3295
Instructor: Bayley, E.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., LSC

In this course we will use several different Ecocritical approaches, with a particular focus on Ecofeminism to explore and interpret pieces of fiction. This course is cross listed with WSGS and Environmental Science and is writing intensive. Literature provides a vast account of how the natural world is represented, treated, understood, and further, misused or abused. In response to this, we will explore the question: is there a direct correlation between the treatment of nature and the treatment of humans? Therefore, this course will focus heavily on the connections between the treatment and abuse of humans and nature. Assignments in the semester will include writing papers, reading reflections, and classroom participation.

ENGL 288-01W #3295 is a writing-intensive class.

Human Values in Literature (ENGL 290)

Section: 01 #3660
Instructor: Janangelo, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., WTC

We will explore major critical approaches and apply them to a range of literary texts. Our theme: what comprises and compromises social class and wealth? Our course will help refine our critical thinking and analytic abilities. To that end, we will work on close reading, focused discussion, and effective writing.
We will also explore and apply a range of theories (including Post Colonialism, Gender, Psychology, and Marxism) to our course texts. Each class, we will discuss our readings together. That gives you opportunities to share ideas and raise questions. We will have two exams, two papers, a group presentation, and an in-class reading journal. Our readings include Dorothy West’s “Rachel,” Guy du Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and Scarlett Bermingham’s Big Boy Pants.

Section: 01W #3662
Instructor: Sikich, W.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 10:25 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

This section will explore the concept of monstrosity and its importance to the way we understand ourselves and others. Every culture on Earth has its monsters, and contemporary popular culture is no different. The goal of this section will be to investigate how and why we return to the monstrous time and again to answer our most urgent questions and to contain our most profound anxieties. Case studies for our exploration of monsters will include novels, short stories, films, and tabletop role-playing gametexts that span from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Learning outcomes include being able to: close read literary works for authorial and cultural meaning, critically examine our own relationship with monstrosity, and produce original literary work that contributes to the ongoing global conversation about how we make monsters as much as they make us.

Section: 02W #3663
Instructor: Sorenson, P.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 01:40 p.m. – 02:30 p.m., LSC

In this course, we will be exploring literary monstrosity. We will consider confrontations with otherness, the ethics of difference, the role of the outsider, and the power of metamorphosis. We will encounter horrible, indeterminant, evolving bodies. We will read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn, Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast/Meridian, and the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In addition to our reading, and as a feature of this section’s “writing intensive” designation, we will discuss the expectations for strong academic writing, and you will be required regularly to compose low-stakes in-class journal responses and some higher-stakes single-page responses. You will also write two high-stakes three-page responses and one final five-page essay near the semester’s end.

Section: 03W #4735
Instructor: Cheung, D.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 04:15 p.m. – 05:30 p.m., LSC

“I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator,” begins Rousseau’s Confessions. “I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself.” This course is about Rousseau’s paradoxical resolve to speak of fellowship and natural truth by recording the inimitable self. We will study works that invite attention to their creative processes as singular exercises in autonomy. We will use the term “autography” to name a broad class of exacting self-expression: ideally willed, sometimes analog, necessarily embodied, often but not always in writing. “Autonomy” we will be more skeptical about. We will take care to distinguish between questions of personal, moral, and political autonomy. Then we will consider the historical and theoretical value of these questions for thinking about the possible autonomy of art. Are artworks self-governing? Do they illuminate or reflect the world? Are they agents or mere symptoms of history and markets? Are they like autographs? In addition to completing an independent creative project, students will read, research, and write about required primary readings as well as the current cultural significance of our course’s themes. Possible genres of primary readings include confessions, autobiographies, novels, slave/freedom narratives, letter-writing, poetry, critical theory, autofiction, newsletters, photography and film.

ENGL 290-01W #4735 is a writing-intensive class.

Advanced Writing (ENGL 293)

Section: 01W #3768
Instructor: Fiorelli, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 12:35 p.m. – 01:25 p.m.

Ready to take your writing, and your understanding of it, to the next level? English 293 explores academic writing as both an activity and a subject of study. As contributors in this class, we will take part in the activity – academic writing – and also step back to think about, read about, discuss, and theorize it. As we work on essays, we will also ask questions about the purposes of academic writing, what strong academic writing looks like, how one produces it, where expectations for academic writing come from, and more. Course content will therefore center around students’ reconsiderations of their own writing processes and additions to their repertoire of strategies, as well as active reading and discussion of composition theory.

Prerequisite: UCWR 110 (C- or higher) or equivalent, except for students in the Honors Program. ENGL 293-01W #3768 is a writing-intensive course. 

Topics in Advanced Writing (ENGL 299)

Section: 01W #4315
Instructor: Weller, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., LSC

Feminist Rhetoric in Personal, Political, and Public Persuasion:

In this course we will investigate writing and the meaning-making of writing through a gendered lens. We will explore contemporary feminist rhetoric as it collides and collaborates with researched and persuasive writing for academic, personal, and public audiences. We’ll ask questions about whose voices are heard and whose have been silenced or left out? We’ll discuss how voice, style, gender, and rhetoric affect our understanding of what is persuasive ---personally, politically, publicly, and why.
We'll read a variety of feminist rhetorical theory, some writing process and composition theory, and a range of texts and articles by feminist writers, thinkers, and activists as they make their personal, political, and public arguments for change in pursuit of gender equity.
Students will write a variety of essays, projects, and pieces for a range of audiences as they interact with the course content. There will be wide student choice in terms of topic focus for each writing assignment. Assignments will include project proposals, annotated bibliographies, researched arguments, Op-Ed pieces, personal and/or journalistic essays, podcasts, short film/documentary, blogs, and social media. Students will participate in peer review and draft workshops throughout the course to support the writing process and advanced development of their personal, academic, and public writing skills.

ENGL 294-01W #4315 is a writing-intensive course. 

South Asian Lit in England Post-1900 (ENGL 315C)

Section: 001 #5640
Instructor: Mann, H.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 1:00 p.m. – 2:15 a.m., LSC

This course examines literatures in English from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Focusing primarily on the issues of modern-day colonization, independence and partition, decolonization, and globalization, this course also investigates the representation of multiple nationalities, ethnicities, classes and castes, religions, linguistic traditions, gender and sexuality, migration, and "terror" in the writings under study. In addition, the course assesses the role of the English language and the authors' locations and target audiences in determining the reception of the literatures both at home and abroad; and it analyzes the cultural bases of contributing literary techniques, including structure, language, narrative focalization, and characterization among others. Finally, the course addresses the disciplinary and pedagogical practices underwriting the study of South Asian literatures in English in the western academy. Readings will include novels written by authors residing in India, Pakistan, USA, UK, or Canada, as well as some supplementary essays.

Please note that this course meets the post-1900 period requirements of the English major.

ENGL 315C-001 #5640 is a multi-cultural course. 

The Writing of Poetry (ENGL 317)

Section: 001 #2436
Instructor: Baker, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 04:15 p.m. – 06:45 p.m., LSC

This course offers practice and instruction in the techniques and analysis of poetry through reading, writing, discussing, and revising poems. We will give particular attention to the unique challenges and opportunities  facing  beginning poets as we first seek to channel our ideas and life experiences into poetry, to find and then develop our own voices in relation to not only our own impulses but to "the tradition" and the aesthetically diverse and fascinating world of contemporary poetry. The poems you write will be carefully read and critiqued by both your classmates and the instructor. The culmination of the course will be to compile a portfolio of the work you have written over the term.

Section: 002 #3296
Instructor: Goldstein, L.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 04:15 p.m. – 06:45 p.m., LSC

The Writing of Poetry: An Experimental Workshop 

Poetry creates an experience for readers on a page as well as in a room. It is a craft that requires reading, discussion, exploration and sharing. Each week we read a unique work of contemporary poetry, mostly by POC and queer writers, to form a framework for discussion about vulnerable points of view and innovative forms. From there, students are encouraged to find their own process, form and voice. In our sessions, we experiment with language together to discover and foster creativity and delight by creating work both as a group and on our own. The course also includes prompts for writing in between sessions, and presentations of student poetry for review by the full group or small groups. Finally, students spend several weeks compiling and reviewing their own final collections of poetry for a self-published chapbook and give a reading of their work at the end of the semester. 

Section: 003 #3297
Instructor: Sorenson, P.
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 02:45 p.m. – 05:15 p.m., LSC

This course centers poetry as an individual and collective project. Through outside reading, students will question their relationships to contemporary modes and cultures while also working to develop their own voices, styles, and methods of production. Thus, students will begin to situate their craft in a larger poetic conversation. Weekly class meetings will center on discussions and presentations of outside materials, in-class writing and writing experiments, discussions of student-generated poetry, and collaborative writing. In addition to regular writing assignments and in-class presentations, students will develop a twenty-page chapbook by semester’s end.

The Writing of Fiction (ENGL 318)

Section: 001 #3299
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 02:45 p.m. – 05:15 p.m., LSC

Section: 002 #3300
Instructor: Mun, N
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 02:45 p.m. – 05:15 p.m., LSC

Five Beginnings, One Ending.  

Writing a short story, much like standing on the edge of a cliff, can be terrifying. My ideas are terrible, one might think. Or I don’t know where to begin. Or The world seems to be in chaos. Is this really a good time to try something new? In this course, we’ll hold hands at the proverbial cliff for moral support but also to nudge each other off (gently). Some might tiptoe. Others might cannonball. And still others might swan dive into that abyss. But no matter our varying degrees of fear, we will, without a doubt, leave the cliff’s ledge and land on our feet as better writers and better risk-takers. For the first five weeks, we’ll analyze notable beginnings and ask questions, such as: What propels the story forward? What stings us? What questions are being raised that can’t be easily answered? Then we’ll write five propulsive and unrelenting beginnings of our own. The final 10 weeks will be focused on developing one of those beginnings and transforming it into a polished story of publishable quality.  

Section: 003 #3301
Instructor: Meinhardt, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 07:00 p.m. – 09:00 p.m., LSC

The course presents an advanced exploration of the principles of fiction writing through a combination of brief lectures, craft and response exercises, targeted assigned reading, in-class reading, critical workshops and multiple opportunities for discussion. The course is both aggregate and recursive, meaning we continue to use and understand earlier concepts and techniques even as we progress, most notably through student critical awareness and creative writing. The course establishes an advanced sense of genre, structure and style using both established and student writing using the Short Story form. Work-shopping of student writing is the primary means of attention and communication. We learn and prepare for publication potential, including viable outlets, contact protocols, and invaluable research tools. Topics include: recognition of fiction elements; recognition and prioritization of craft elements; appreciation for creative expectations and obstacles; stimulation of identity within drama and conflict; and attention to concrete sensory detail, plot or setting structural considerations, internal and standard dialogue, characterization, opening and ending considerations, revision considerations, and fiction stylistics expected of publication-worthy work.

Section: 004 #3302
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC

Writing Creative Nonfiction (ENGL 319)

Section: 001 #3304
Instructor: Coomes, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 02:45 p.m. – 05:15 p.m., LSC

Together, in this class, we will embark on an exploration of the genre known as creative nonfiction. Our priority will be generativity; reading other nonfiction writers, stealing from what we admire, rejecting what we don’t, and above all, scrapping any preciousness toward the form and writing as much as we can. Students can expect to leave this class with several starts of essays, as well as at least one full essay and one full revision.  We will also discuss methods of research and criticism, as well as dedicate one half session to preprofessional advice on how to publish nonfiction in today’s changing media landscape.

Section: 002 #3305
Instructor: Coomes, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 02:45 p.m. – 05:15 p.m., LSC

Together, in this class, we will embark on an exploration of the genre known as creative nonfiction. Our priority will be generativity; reading other nonfiction writers, stealing from what we admire, rejecting what we don’t, and above all, scrapping any preciousness toward the form and writing as much as we can. Students can expect to leave this class with several starts of essays, as well as at least one full essay and one full revision.  We will also discuss methods of research and criticism, as well as dedicate one half session to preprofessional advice on how to publish nonfiction in today’s changing media landscape.

Section: 003 #3306
Instructor: TBD
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 02:45 p.m. – 05:15 p.m., LSC

Plays of Shakespeare (ENGL 326)

Section: 001 #3307
Instructor: Knapp, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 01:00 p.m. – 02:15 p.m., LSC

This course will focus on a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in all the major genres (comedy, history, tragedy, and romance). We will read the plays through a variety of critical approaches, taking into account the historical context in which they were produced. Throughout the semester we will focus on the development of drama in England, the material history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and the political and cultural place of the theater in Shakespeare’s England. Plays may include: Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. The primary text will be David Bevington’s edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th edition. There will be reading responses, papers, a midterm and a final.

British Literature: Romantic Period (ENGL 335)

Section: 01W #5642
Instructor: Cragwall, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 02:30 p.m. – 03:45 p.m., LSC

“Romanticism and the Age of Revolutions”

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the most powerful earthly king was beheaded, the institution of monarchy annihilated, and a God who had been heretofore supposed “Almighty” overthrown.  “The French Revolution is,” conceded even Edmund Burke, its greatest British opponent, “all circumstances taken together … the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.”  We’ll study this time of exuberance, dispute, and outburst, in which every inherited piety and orthodoxy seemed debatable. We’ll read poets and novelists, of course—but we’ll also read lunatics and prophets, opium addicts and enslaved people, “blue-stocking” feminists and the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Lord Byron. In William Wordsworth, we’ll find the first poetry created out of a “language really used by men”; in Mary Wollstonecraft, a fiery annunciation that “it is time to affect a revolution in female manners”; in John Keats, a verse dismissed as “mental masturbation.”  We’ll follow the rise of Napoleon, the fall of the Slave Trade, and the foundation of Australia—in newspapers and magazine articles, political pamphlets and diaries, as well as the parlors of Jane Austen.  Fulfills post-1700, pre-1900 requirement. Papers, exams, other miscellaneous torment.

ENGL 288-01W #5642 is a writing-intensive class..

British Literature: Victorian Period (ENGL 340)

Section: 001 #5643
Instructor: Jacob, P.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 10:25 a.m. – 11:15 p.m., LSC

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British empire had expanded its presence across the globe, through economic, military, political, and also cultural means. Even as British culture swallowed up objects and practices from around the world, it also shored up the boundaries around Britishness ever more firmly, selling Britishness as a major global export, popular even today. In this survey of literature from, roughly, the period of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901), we will examine how Victorian culture represented itself and the empire. We will discuss how literary works produced and contested ideas around class, race, gender, sexuality, and labor that continue to shape our world today. We will also identify the literary trends of the period, from the crystallization of the realist mode to the development of new genres like detective and science fiction. Texts will include: Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and others. Assignments may include oral presentations, close reading essays, and written exams.

ENGL 288-01W #5643 is a writing-intensive class.

British Literature Since 1900 (ENGL 345)

Section: 001 #5664
Instructor: Stayer, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 08:30 a.m. – 09:45 p.m., LSC

Modernist British Literature

By the end of the nineteenth century, the small islands of Great Britain had extended their rule over a quarter of the globe: self-assured Victorians used to brag that the sun never set on the British Empire. But by the Great War, British influence had begun to crumble, and modern uncertainty replaced Victorian earnestness. As a complex of artistic movements (futurism, vorticism, primitivism, Imagism, neo-classicism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, Symbolism), “modernism” is the umbrella term given to the anxieties and exuberances that attended early twentieth-century dynamics in the arts. This course in British modernism is the study of how social, political, cultural, religious, gender, and sexual anxieties played themselves out in literature. As received notions of beauty and the default aesthetic of the nineteenth century fell apart, artists had not only to create art, but to argue for its place. It was a great era of polemical sloganeering and defending one’s turf. And Great Britain—the dominant-if-crumbling world power at the time—offers a perfect vantage point for watching the fireworks of this global phenomenon.

Using the rough timeframe of the first half of the twentieth century, we will look at British modernists whose birthplace or identities fall outside English borders but whose influence mattered within the British Isles. Narrowly “British” modernism has always been more broadly “Anglophone,” and critics have long noted the irony that British modernism was led mainly by the non-English: Ezra Pound (American); T. S. Eliot (American); James Joyce (Irish), Dylan Thomas (Welsh), W. B. Yeats (Irish), David Jones (Welsh heritage); Hugh MacDiarmid (Scottish); Katherine Mansfield (New Zealander); Joseph Conrad (Polish); Wyndham Lewis (Canadian born); Claude McKay (Jamaican); Jean Rhys (West Indian). Of course, a number of British modernists, major and minor, were English: Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Mina Loy, Edith Sitwell.

Near the end of the semester, the course material peeks through the end of modernism toward the dawn of a new era. The aftermath of World War II, when the British Empire crumbled quickly and definitively, opens onto a changed, post-colonial world. Those literatures are now commonly grouped as Anglophone, to distinguish the previously subjugated colonies from their newly independent identities. In addition to the earlier authors we will have read (Claude McKay and Jean Rhys), the post-colonial authors we’ll read include Chinua Achebe (Nigerian), Louise Bennett (Jamaican), Kamau Brathwaite (Barbadian), and Derek Walcott (Saint Lucian).

Contemporary Critical Theory (ENGL 354)

Section: 001 #3665
Instructor: Sen, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 01:40 p.m. – 02:30 p.m., LSC

This course will track the emergence of the “self,” also known as the “I” or the “subject,” and its legacies in contemporary culture, such as autobiography or therapeutic growth. However, we will place this topic in dialogue with another, equally enduring concept: that of being in relation, society/world, or at risk of a confrontation that annihilates the self (think “chosen family,” “leadership in organizing,” “ego-death”). We will contextualize this fraught pairing with the help of theoretical traditions through which notions of the self and its relational or (more antagonistic) “other” possibilities emerge. We will ask questions such as: is there anything such as a true self? Why does the idea have such a strong hold on our imaginations? Is every form of challenge to individuality—such as multiculturalism, communism, or multispecies ecology—equally effective? Through a combination of lecture, class discussion, and activities applying theory to literary readings, we will try to salvage meaningful answers for ourselves.
Rather than break the course up into distinct units, we will have labels for almost every week's readings that allow us to trace some nuanced friction between a theory of the self and its counterpoint. We begin with a brief emphasis on traditional, Eurocentric theories of the self to set up how their legacies persist and mutate through the twentieth-century into contemporary writing. However, we also discover that those original assertions of the self were fragile and conflicted from the start, allowing us to understand the idea through contradiction early on, and eventually to understand collective forms of experience and aspiration. Case studies in the form of literature, film, and other media will help us at every stage! Assignments will include an edited portfolio of short weekly responses and a mid-term exam.

ENGL 354-001 #4083 is a multicultural class.

Studies in African-American Literature Since 1900 (ENGL 384C)

Section: 01W #5645
Instructor: Graves, W.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., LSC

In this course, students will gain a holistic knowledge of the major writers and cultural producers of the African American literary movement known as the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930s-1950s).  The Black Chicago Renaissance is the name given to the surge of artistic expression, community organizing, and social activity in Chicago’s African American community during the 1930s through the 1950s, and which figured prominently in the years leading to the modern Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Through the tumultuous years of the Depression, World War II, and a second “Great Migration” of African Americans to an almost completely segregated Chicago of the 1940s and 1950s, this multi-disciplinary collaboration of artists, writers, scholars, and activists promoted the study of black history, art and politics to inform social protest against anti-black racism and discrimination. During this dynamic era Chicago was one of, if not the center, of urban African American art, blues and jazz, dance, theater, poetry and fiction, and sociological study.  This semester, we will learn about the political and cultural history of the Chicago Black Belt, and we will read work from prominent writers during this movement which include African American writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Attaway, and Lorraine Hansberry.  This course will introduce students to critical snapshots of expressive writing by and about African Americans produced during this period.

Advanced Seminar (ENGL 390)

Section: 01W #3308
Instructor: Stayer. J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., LSC

Three New England Poets: Frost, Dickinson, Eliot

Three great American poets—Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot—are bound together by the accident of geography. All three authors were shaped not only by the landscape of New England but by its inhabitants and its culture. The ethos associated with that region is marked by skepticism, pragmatism, rationality, reticence, stoicism, and hard work. Recognizably Puritan in origin, the stern moralizing and work ethic of Calvinist cultures have been understood as a socio-religious phenomenon since the publication of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Germany 1905; English translation 1930). Frost, Dickinson, and Eliot were strongly influenced by this ethos, but they also actively fought against some of its elements. They rejected the Calvinist suspicion of beauty, and in their poetry they explored natural, spiritual, psychological, and emotional worlds beyond the iron cage of instrumental rationality dominating the modern world. This course will take a deep dive into these authors’ works, using the frameworks of biography, ethical criticism, and rhetoric. No specialized knowledge of poetry or scansion is required or expected of students.

ENGL 390-01W #3627 is a writing-intensive class.  This class requires department consent.  Please contact your English advisor for permission.

Section: 02W #5647
Instructor: Aftab, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 01:00 p.m. – 02:15 p.m., LSC

Decolonial Theories of Gender and Sexuality

What is the relationship between colonialism and the historical constructions of gender and sexuality? How are contemporary feminist, queer and trans discourses mediated by colonial violence and anti-colonial movements? This seminar takes a critical look at the intersections of colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and sexuality by introducing students to foundational and current theoretical writing in postcolonial feminist studies, woman of color feminism, queer of color critique, and Black trans studies. We will examine the major epistemic interventions and possible futures in the study of how empire and race mediate and shape the gender binary. Some key theorists we will read include Audre Lorde, C. Riley Snorton, Maria Lugones, and Jasbir Puar. We will also read creative works by Jackie Kay, Octavia Butler and Kai Cheng Thom.

ENGL 390-02W #5647 is a writing-intensive class. This class requires department consent.  Please contact your English advisor for permission.

Teaching English to Adults: Internship (ENGL 393)

Section: 01E #1379
Instructor: Heckman, J.
1, 2 or 3 credit hours
MTWR 05:00 p.m. – 07:00 p.m., LSC

Engage with Jesuit Values - Meet our Adult Neighbors Who Come from Many Cultures

You will have a challenging and exciting experience as you help our neighbors improve their English skills and learn about their cultures in turn.  It is said that Rogers Park is the most diverse neighborhood in the city, with over 70 languages spoken, and our neighbors are truly grateful for your assistance. 

We tutor online as the Loyola Community Literacy Center.  No previous tutoring experience is necessary.  English 393 can be taken for 1, 2, or 3 credit hours.  When taken for 3 credit hours, this course satisfies the Core Engaged Learning-Service Learning Internship requirement.  It is open to second-semester freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  Incoming freshmen are always welcome to tutor as volunteers and take the course at a later date. 

Requirements:  Only UCWR 110 or its equivalent.

The Center is open for tutoring M-Th evenings 7-9:30 pm during the fall and spring semesters when the university is in session.  1 credit hour students tutor one evening per week; 2 and 3 credit hour students tutor two evenings a week.  In addition, there are 5 class meetings scheduled at times convenient for all students; 3 credit/Core students meet for a 6^th session.

This class requires department consent.  Please contact Ms. Jacqueline Heckman at jheckma@luc.edu or (773) 508-2330 for permission.  This class satisfies the Engaged Learning requirement in the Internship category.

Internship (ENGL 394)

Section: 01E #1380
Instructor: Cragwall, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture

English 394 provides practical, on-the-job experience for English majors in adapting their writing and analytical skills to the needs of such fields as publishing, editing, and public relations.  Students must have completed six courses in English and must have a GPA of 3.0 or higher before applying for an internship. Qualified second-semester juniors and seniors may apply to the program.  Interested students must arrange to meet with the Internship Director during the pre-registration period and must bring with them a copy of their Loyola transcripts, a detailed resume (which includes the names and phone numbers of at least two references), and at least three writing samples.  Students may be required to conduct part of their job search online and to go out on job interviews before the semester begins.  Course requirements include completion of a minimum of 120 hours of work; periodic meetings with the Internship Director; a written evaluation of job performance by the site supervisor; a term paper, including samples of writing produced on the job.

This class requires department consent.  Please contact Dr. Cragwall at jcragwall@luc.edu or (773) 508-2259 for permission.

Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry (ENGL 397)

Section: 01W #3312
Instructor: Baker, A.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 04:15 p.m. – 06:45 p.m., LSC

In this advanced poetry workshop, we will seek to deepen our engagement with poetry as an art form—both as readers and writers. Through reading, writing, and workshopping, we will grow more familiar with the anatomy and texture of poetry: image, word, voice, syntactical configurations, rhetorical devices— stanza, line, punctuation, and page. Your work will be given a great deal of individual attention in our workshops, and you will be offered the opportunity to work very closely with the instructor as you write and revise your final project for the course—a portfolio of your best work.

ENGL 397-01W #3312 is a writing-intensive class.

Special Studies in Literature (ENGL 399)

Section: 001 #1381
Instructor: Cragwall, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture

This class requires department consent.  Please contact Dr. Cragwall at jcragwall@luc.edu or (773) 508-2259 for permission.