Course Descriptions

ENG 283 - Short Prose Fiction

Examines the history and development of the modern short story and its various subgenres through a close reading of texts from many authors and cultures.  The course also gives some attention to writing for publication and allows the option of submitting creative work.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
 

ENG 284 - African American Drama

We will read work by playwrights including (but not limited to): August Wilson, Katori Hall, Lynn Nottage, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Lynn Manning.


Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America).
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 285 - Politics & Performance: 20th Century Theatre (=THE 285)

The course is a study of plays and theatrical theory from a range of geographic regions.  The course explores ways practitioners experimented with form and content in articulating their reactions to the human condition of the 20th century.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.

ENG 286 - African-American Literature: 1900- (=AFR 286)

This course introduces students to examples of African American literature and literary criticism from the 20th to 21st centuries. Major authors from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement and beyond will be considered alongside theoretical formulations from critics such as Barbara Christian, Michael Awkward, and Henry Louis Gates.

Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English Department major.
Satisfies the Humanities elective in the Africana Studies major.
Satisfies elective in the Global Literary Theory Interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.

ENG 288 - Contemporary American Multicultural Drama

• What does it mean to use the stage to give voice to being part of a multicultural community?
• How does theater help fight stereotypes and oppression?
• In what ways do plays rewrite history and create pride?
• What does it mean to stage the multicultural experience in a globalized world?
• How does theater show us the intersections of different kinds of identity?

This course will answer these questions and more through our study of twentieth- and twenty-first century drama from several rich traditions of multicultural playwriting in America. Communities represented will include African-Americans, Asian Americans, disabled Americans, Latino/a Americans and LGBTQ Americans. We will explore issues raised in their plays including identity, the American Dream, stereotypes, history, and hope. No prior experience reading drama is necessary.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
​Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 289 - Environmental Literature

Overview of environmental literature from Thoreau to the present day.  Generally focuses on the environmental literature of the United States, but may include other English-language literature.  Designed for both majors and non-majors.

Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 290 - World Literatures

A survey of selected major works outside of the British and American literary traditions, including literature from Europe, Japan, Latin America, Russia, and South Africa. No prerequisites; designed for majors and non-majors.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

Satisfies a major (diversity) and minor requirement in English.

ENG 292 - Documentary Film - History, Theory, and Production of Documentary

The course will first examine the modes of the documentary genre, often described as expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive. For each mode we will read relevant history and theory, and watch representative documentaries. Students will then make a series of short documentaries as a means of understanding how these modes affect both the production and reception of a documentary. We also consider more specific sub-genres of documentary such as science/nature, politics/protest, biography, and mockumentary.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.

ENG 293 - Film as a Narrative Art

We examine the relations among the three terms of the course title: film, narrative, and art. The examination will  suggest some reasons for the curious and almost hypnotic power of visual and literary images to console and chastise us;  reshuffle our memories and our priorities; hurt us and heal us by getting us out of ourselves or more deeply into parts of ourselves we have not visited lately;  teach us self-evasion or self-confrontation; and  move us to tears, dreams, eloquence, and action.

The course is an introduction to film language. Students may make short videos, but the instructor  does not assume any production experience

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Film and Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 294 - Harlem Renaissance

Read major texts of the Harlem Renaissance and explore issues of race, gender, sexuality, migration, & diaspora that shaped this formative moment in twentieth century literature. We will read poetry, fiction, essays, and plays by W. E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, and others, situating their work in the context of developments in modern art, music, sociology, psychology, and print culture.

Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Area: North America).
Satisfies a requirement in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 295 - Women Writers

This course prowls the house of fiction’s dangerous and often forbidden spaces employing the visions and voices of transgressive agents, who go places they should not, wrestle monsters literal and figurative, and rescue bodies (of information and imagination) essential to us all. Readings: selected 19th, 20th, and 21st century fiction by women, from A Room of One’s Own, to In the Cut, to Swamplandia, and lots of great works in between.   

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.

ENG 296 - Science Fiction & Technology

In 2018, the Pew Research Center surveyed over 1,000 experts about their perspectives on how living in a technology-saturated world might impact human physical and mental well-being. The results were mixed, with 47% predicting more help than harm, 32% predicting more harm than help, and 21% seeing little change.  In other words, there’s little agreement:  are we in/entering a cyberutopia, in which the internet favors the oppressed over the oppressor or instead headed toward a cyberdystopia, in which individuals lose control, lose privacy, become datafied? 

Despite its limitations, science fiction allows us to explore and reflect richly on how living, loving, and working-being-in a digital world shapes existence as individuals or in communities.  Given widespread current concern about digital inequalities and isolation, we should ask how equality and justice are and may be defined in digital communities.  ENG 296: Science Fiction and Technology will engage these issues through exploring relevant films, novels, and short stories, focusing on themes including

• Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and persuasion architecture

• Big data, datafication, and discrimination

• Digital inequalities and intersectionalities

• The surveillance state

Satisfies English major and minor requirement
Satisfies Digital and Screen Media interdisciplinary mjaor requirement
Satisfies Digital Studies interdisciplinary minor requirement
Satsifies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement
Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement

ENG 297 - Caribbean Literature (=AFR 297)

The Caribbean is key to any understanding of the New World. Caribbean Literature takes students beyond the islands’s popular music, food, and landscapes-ah, those sandy beaches!-to an understanding of the formation of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India that have produced three winners of Nobel prizes-two in Literature and for Economics. In novels, poems and plays we’ll examine the ways in which this particular part of the “Empire” wrote back to Europe before creating its own distinctive body of literature. The course is open to all students, and knowledge of literary theory is not a prerequisite. The most relevant theories will be taught to the class.

Satisfies the diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Latin America/Caribbean).
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 301 - Creative Nonfiction

The core of this class is the writing workshop, in which students review of one another’s work develops objectivity on their own writing and essential editorial skills. In preparation for drafting each writing assignment, students read and discuss model essays representing such approaches as description, scene-setting, interviewing, analysis, argumentation, story-telling, personal narrative, and art reviewing. At the end of the semester, students craft longer essays on topics of their choice. The course also features attention to style, voice, and key choices that constantly face a working writer.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.

ENG 302 - Forms of Poetry

“Forms of Poetry” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. “Forms of Poetry” explores three different types of writing (literary criticism, critical theory, and poetry) while assuming no significant expertise in any one area.

Satisfies English major requirement.
Satisfies English minor requirement.
Satisfies Global Literary Theory Interdisciplinary minor requirememnt.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing & Rhetoric

 

Prerequisites & Notes
No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites.

ENG 303 - Advanced Poetry Writing

ENG 304 - Advanced Fiction Writing

Advanced work in writing fiction.

Satisfies English major and minor requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors. 

Students must complete ENG 204.

ENG 306 - Digital Design

The digital revolution has opened up scholarship to broader audiences via new platforms. This course applies user-centered design to humanities scholarship in order to reach new audiences. Students will design their own humanities research projects, from initial conception to online publication and audience outreach. They will learn how to frame a topic, identify experts in the field, prepare an annotated bibliography, compile a literature review, and make an original contribution. Students will select digital tools appropriate to their projects, using WordPress as the primary platform for publishing their work and social media for networking with real audiences. The course will focus on UX-design: making humanities scholarship accessible, interactive, and immersive in order to enhance users’ experience. Students will develop digital dexterity and acquire skills in research, design, project management, collaboration, and social media networking that they can apply within and beyond academia.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Digital Studies.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 307 - Forms of Fiction

“Forms of Fiction” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites.

Satisfies the Innovation requirement for the English major.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory.
Satisfies the Literary Thought, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

ENG 308 - Time & Space in Creative Nonfiction

Memoirs and essays can never correspond directly with reality. One real-world element that we can manipulate, like magicians–while remaining firmly in the realm of fact–is time. Compressing, speeding up, slowing down, or otherwise manipulating time can help us convey the meaning and emotional resonance of events. If we accept that linear time itself is a fiction-albeit a useful one-a new universe of possible story structures opens up around us. In this course, we will examine memoirs and personal essays (and a film or two) that flout conventional structures and play with time in innovative, interesting ways, and use these explorations as inspiration for our own writing, with a particular focus on the events of our lived realities.

ENG 309 - Forms of Poetry

“Forms of Poetry” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. “Forms of Poetry” explores three different types of writing (literary criticism, critical theory, and poetry) while assuming no significant expertise in any one area.

Satisfies English major (Innovation Course) and minor requirements.
Satisfies Global Litererary Thoery Interdisciplinary minor requirement.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing Rhetoric requirement. 

Prerequisites & Notes
 No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites.

ENG 310 - The English Language

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 311 - Advanced Filmmaking

This course is focused on the development of a filmmaking practice. Students learn the iterative process of audiovisual storytelling by embracing risk, failure, and constructive feedback among peers as necessary to the creative process. Students will learn to construct short films through all three stages of production, building skills in camerawork, editing, use of artificial lighting, and sound design. Students also learn traditional three-act structure as part of larger scale works. Assignments include progressively complex short films and video art.

ENG 333 - Literary Satans

In the first chapter of Job, God asks Satan, “Whence comest thou?”  And Satan responds, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”  This course follows Satan’s travels through texts such as Job, the Gospels, Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, short fiction by Hawthorne and Poe, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, films The Exorcist and The Witch, TV shows Supernatural, Fargo, and Lucifer.  Faculty from several departments will visit ENG 333 to help contextualize these varied Satans and the cultures that produced them.

Before there were humans or texts composed by humans, according to Abrahamic traditions, Satan was the first being to plot his own path, the first to want something new and different.  In that sense, Satan is the driving energy of innovative courses.  ENG 333 accordingly satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major.  The course is innovative in scope and in its assignments.  It requires not only students’ participation but also their leadership in class meetings; five brief projects in response to the course’s texts and topics; and an oral presentation on a representation of Satan omitted from the current syllabus.  The course culminates in a collaborative digital mapping project, through which students will document some important appearances of Satan across millennia and across the globe where he has walked up and down.

Satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 340 - Early British Literature and Media

Early British Literature and Media

This course proposes that how we encounter literature matters.  It suggests that the same poem can be understood quite differently if it is recited at Freeword or assigned in an anthology or skimmed on a phone.  This course accordingly surveys how the founding texts of British literature were first encountered and how we encounter them now.

ENG 340 examines the ways that texts of early British literature were initially circulated:  oral performances of epic poetry, amateur and professional theatrical productions, the first printed books, handwritten texts shared as intimate alternatives to print, chapters of novels published in issues of magazines, words embedded in visual art and set to music.  ENG 340 also examines where we find early British literature now, in modern scholarly editions, film adaptations, digitized versions of medieval and early modern artifacts, even greeting cards and video games and t-shirts. As the course spans diverse scenes of reading, listening, and looking, both now and long ago, it raises broad questions of how culture is produced and consumed and urgent questions of access and privilege.

Readings emphasize early British texts that were innovative in the media of their time and that continue to inspire reimagining in current media.  Assignments combine literary analysis with hands-on exercises-studying volumes in the Rare Book Room, setting blocks of type in the Letterpress Lab, and translating old texts to new media.

Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory major and interdisciplinary minor.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

ENG 352 - Shakespeare in Action

This course begins with the premise that Shakespeare’s dramas are not only works of dramatic literature that trace an action across five acts, but also play scripts for actors who performed 400 years ago.  As such, they require their own set of reading skills. Through regular writing assignments, class discussions, and acting workshops, students acquire the skills required to understand the words on the page as clues to their enactment on the early modern stage. The course surveys plays across Shakespeare’s theatrical career–comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Critical reading includes both literary criticism and theatrical history.  This course doesn’t require a background in acting and isn’t aimed at actors per se.  Rather, the course, which is pitched to both readers and actors, situates the plays in the theater for which they were written.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a dramatic literature requirement in the Theatre major and minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 353 - Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement for the English major.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 355 - Milton

This course follows John Milton’s carefully shaped career, starting with early poems, such as Lycidas, before considering prose, such as Areopagitica, and the late masterpieces, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.  Milton’s texts ask some of the most important questions of the Western tradition:  what is the relation between an artist and predecessors?  how much should governments constrain individuals’ choices?  are there “natural” elements of gender and sexuality?  if God is both all-good and all-powerful (a huge “if”), why is there so much suffering?  As befits these big questions, ENG 355 emphasizes class discussion and individual discovery through formal and informal writing.  In the Miltonic tradition, this course also emphasizes choice:  students may choose to take a comprehensive final examination or participate in an all-day reading of Paradise Lost, a rare opportunity for students to learn about themselves and about one of the most influential poems in literary history, all in one unforgettable day.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 360 - Studies in Brit Lit: 1660-1900:Desire

Examines representations of sexuality, desires, and passion in British literature. This trans-historical course proceeds both from the observation that we may see sexuality as a set of scripted performances and from the theory that sexual desire has a history, even a literary one.

Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 361 - Decadence and Seduction

The Eighteenth Century was not just a time of powdered wigs and bone-crunching gowns.  It was a time of deception, seduction, and decadence writ large.  By studying a variety of texts like mock epics, trenchant satires, feisty novels, caustic engravings, flippant opera, and bawdy comedies, we will explore this culture of privilege and irreverence built in part on a growing consumer culture that was underwritten by an expanding empire as well as class and gender disparities. Raunchiness was both celebrated and satirized in a culture where people across the classes were as consumable as the newly fashionable chocolate sold in the classy hubs of decadence and debauchery - the infamous chocolate houses –and the result was as bitter, if you couldn’t afford the sugar.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 362 - A: British Romanticism or B: Reimagining Blake

362A British Romanticism

Instructor 
Vaz

Topical study of the poetry and prose of the period ranging from the examination of Romantic gender ideology to studies of individual authors

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

362B Reimagining Blake

Instructor
Vaz

William Blake was a risk-taker and a rule-breaker.  In his creative output, he sought to unshackle the ideological “mind-forg’d manacles” that stunted human thought.  We will study Blake’s seminal works and apply some risk-taking and rule-breaking of our own by digitally recreating a few of his illustrated plates.  Just as Blake used text and image in his original plates, so will we, as we creatively and critically reimagine Blake’s work and his message.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 363 - History of the Novel

The origins of the novel in Britain and the circumstances, both historical and sociological, surrounding its emergence. 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 370 - Davidson Summer Program in Cambridge England

ENG 372 - British Fiction: 19th and 20th Centuries

Selected British and Commonwealth fiction from 1800 to 2000. 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 373 - Studies in Modern Poetry: Poetry and Politics

“For poetry makes nothing happen,” W. H. Auden famously declared, a statement often held up as a disavowal of poetry’s political power and purpose. But the line doesn’t stop there: Auden adds an emphatic “it survives,” going on to describe poetry as “A way of happening, a mouth.” Poetry may not cause things to happen, but it gives voice to important ideas that often don’t find expression in everyday discourse.  “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” writes William Carlos Williams, “yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

This survey of modern poetry will investigate relationships between poetry and politics. How, when, and why has poetry played a role in national politics? How can poetry help us interrogate the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Beginning with Walt Whitman’s declaration that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” our survey will take us to poetry of “the Great War,” through modernism and the politics of the “New Negro” and “New Woman,” to the rise of Fascism and leftist political poetry of the 1930s, WWII poetry, the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements of the 1960s, first wave feminism of the 1970s, and continue on to contemporary developments in queer poetry, eco-poetry, spoken word.

…when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

                          - Audre Lorde, from “Litany of Survival” (1978)
 

Satisfies the historical approaches requirement for the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major or minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
No prerequisites, but a willingness to speak, even when you are afraid, is required.

ENG 374 - Picturing Disability

What does it mean to consider the visual representation of disability as a kind of text? Why does it matter? This course will consider the ways in which picturing disability helps us do several things: expose and challenge stereotype, understand how disabled or ill bodies have been used to create cultural meanings, better understand the social experience of disability, reconsider disability in the medical context, and appreciate the amazing human variation of all bodies that disability underscores. Representation also presents us with some of the thorny issues with which we will grapple: what are the ethics of picturing disability, and how can we avoid spectacle or voyeurism even as we take advantage of the “visual activism” staring allows? How do we make typically invisible impairments like anxiety or depression visible? How do we show the reality of pain without reinforcing the sense that disability is only a tragic or isolating existence? How do we create visual representations that retort against tropes so familiar that we may not even realize we are using them to shape our personal definitions of disability? How can we create representations that suggest “disability gain”-that disability begets creativity and innovation in the arts and sciences? In this course, we’ll look at a wide-ranging assortment of ways disability has been pictured in society. We’ll explore everything from public health posters to medical textbook photographs; painting and sculpture to zines and graphic novels; charity campaigns to material objects (including medical or adaptive devices). You will create your own representation of disability, do some disability hacking of material objects, and work together to curate an online exhibition of disability representations.

This course presumes no prior coursework in English and welcomes those from all majors interested in studying the representation of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 375 - Fan Fiction

The practice of writing works using the universes and characters of already established authors–Fanfiction–is a recent cultural phenomenon, beginning with Kirk/Spock slash of the 1970s and fueled by 21st century technologies that have enabled fans to appropriate, extend, and transform beloved characters and plots. The output is staggering: as of March 2017, Fanfiction.net alone holds 761,000 Harry Potter stories, and fanfiction writers have become best-selling authors (Cassandra Clare, E.L. James). Yet centuries of adaptation and appropriate permeate the Western canon, from Homer’s stock phrases to Shakespeare’s work with sources such as the Decameron and Holinshed’s Chronicles. 

ENG 375 will explore the world of fanfiction, from past iterations to the present extensive array of fanfiction. We will consider common tropes in fanfiction, such as fanon/canon, gender swapping, shipping, and transgressive pairings of many kinds, and investigate how social media enables empowered, creative fandom. The author may be “dead,” in Barthes’ estimation, yet he/she/zer are also very much alive and writing.

Satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing & Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 380 - Studies in American Literature

Special topics in American literature with attention to critical approaches. 

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 381 - 19th Century American Fiction Revisited

This course pairs classic 19th-century American novels with their 21st-century rewritings: Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke (2012), Melville’s Moby-Dick and Jeffrey Ford’s Ahab’s Return (2018), Alcott’s Little Women and Geraldine Brooks’s March (2006), and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jon Clinch’s Finn (2007).  For each pairing, we will investigate the literary, cultural, and political contexts that inspired the texts, exploring enduring issues that vex and captivate American writers: race, class, gender, religion, violence - and the power of stories.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 382 - W.E.B. Du Bois at Large (=AFR 303)

(ENG 382 cross-listed with AFR 303 during spring 2018 semester only.)

This course will introduce students to the major works of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.  Readings will include (in chronological order): The Philadelphia Negro (1899); The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Dark Princess (1928); Black Reconstruction in America (1935); Color and Democracy (1945); and The World and Africa (1947) to name a few.  They will be supplemented with secondary readings by: Booker T. Washington, Michael Rudolph West, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Adolph Reed, Lewis Gordon, Marina Bilbija, C.L.R. James and others.

Fulfills a 300-level major thinkers requirement of the Africana Studies major (Geographic Area: North America).
Counts as a 300-level elective and fulfills the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Counts as an elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Community, and Equality requirement.

ENG 384 - When Whites Write Black

Flanagan

This course examines literary texts with prominent Black characters, written by 20^th century American and South African Caucasian writers. Analyses will be focused on characterization of people and cultural images which might shed insight upon the sensibilities of various writers as well as on the impressionistic effects such characterizations might have on student readers. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s challenge in her essay, Romancing the Shadow, that “Reading and charting the emergence of an Africanist persona in the development of a national literature is both a fascinating project and an urgent one if the history  and criticism of our literature is to become accurate,” the course will engage in close readings of fiction by American writers such as Eudora Welty, Fred Chappell, Truman Capote, Sue Monk Kidd and Harper Lee, and South African writers such as Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and John Coetzee. The Modern Civil Rights Movement and Apartheid are the historical landscapes within which most of these texts were written.

Satisfies English major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.

ENG 385 - African American Literature of the Civil Rights Movement

Following the bus boycotts and other struggles for civil rights in the early 20^th century, African American writers created a literature that is not only distinctive from that of their literary ancestors, but intellectually and spiritually different from any other American literature across timed. The early years of this literature can be described as the most neo-African-centered of African American literary output, concerned, as it is, with the cultural values that writers such as Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, and Leopold Senghor espoused. It is a literature that was a necessary corollary to the social. Economic, and political battles being waged in American’s streets, courts, congress, and in parts of the African diaspora. This course focuses, therefore, on the connections between the literary product and those particular social, political, and economic issues most of linked to the modern Civil rights and Black Power Movements, and beyond. In addition to novels, poems, and at least one play, the course will give serious consideration to the development of an African American Literary aesthetic through the study of critical essays.

Satisfies English major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.

ENG 386 - Law, Literature, and Film

Law, Literature, and Film: The Narrative Structure of Trials builds off and borrows heavily (including the subtitle) from the monumental Legal Fictions seminar taught by Prof. Randy Nelson before his retirement in 2018.  Prof. Nelson’s course started from the premise that “a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read.  Indeed, modern trials are in effect telling contests, with two competing ‘narrators’ telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience.  Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions.”  

This course will also keep Prof. Nelson’s emphasis on contemporary literary theory as it applies to courtroom proceedings/narratives, his insistence on  direct observation of some real trials in progress in the Charlotte area, and his requirement that the course textbooks include  transcripts of real trials to complement literary trials.  I will add film to literature and arrange the course in thematic units on the trial as a story (Billy Budd, The Trial), crime of passion (Virginia vs. Bobbitt,  Brossard/Stern, K. M. Nanavati vs. State of Maharashtra),  insanity plea (Anatomy of a Murder, Primal Fear), women and the law (A Jury of Her Peers, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Crucible),  race and representation (Amistad/”Benito Cereno”/O.J. Simpson/The Wrong Man),   censorship (portions of Ulysses, Women in Love, and Tampa (Florida vs. LaFave),  the rhetoric of (scientific) evidence (a CSI episode),  the styles of dissent in judicial opinions (Cardozo, Kerr, Tushnet).  Three other units will be chosen by the students from a list of questions we will compile on the first day of class.  Proposed ones so far:  Can your texts to a person who later commits suicide get you convicted of involuntary manslaughter (Conrad’s Law)?  Can your Google search history be seen as constituting intent to commit homicide  (Iowa vs. Mullis)? What is the role of scientific evidence in courtroom proceedings (language of medicine/psychology vs. language of the law)?   Does court TV have any effect on juries? What would happen if we abolished the Supreme Court?

The levels of student enthusiasm for these units will determine the organizing model for the course.

Satisfies Global Literary Studies interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 387 - Modern Poetry and Politics

A course concerned with schools, movements, and problems in the literary arts,”Contemporary Poetry” will include exploration of poetic geneaologies, and investigate the relationship between poetry and cultural theory, poetry and current affairs, and poetry and technology.

Satisfies the history requirement for the English major.
Satisfies as a literature course for the Global Literary Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 388 - Contemporary Theatre

Instructor
Fox

Despite our highly visual and multimedia age, we don’t often think of the stage as being a site of significant cultural conversation. Yest there is simply no substitute for the vitality and importance of live theater. To paraphrase Edward Albee, theater puts the mirror up infront of an audience and asks them: “This is who you are. Now what are you going to do about it?”

This course will examine the origins and development of contemporary theater in the Western tradition, post-1960, with an emphasis on American and British drama. We will particularly place heavy emphasis on text-based drama of the last two decades, examining the ways in which recent theater has asked its audiences to contemplate issues of concern to contemporary life including (though not limited to) race in America; global violence against women; class division; and the commodification of human relations, both personal and international. We will also discuss how theater challenges us to find creative solutions through connection, community, and claiming identity. No prior experience reading drama is necessary.

In the past, this course has included works by (but is not limited to): August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Quiara Algería Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Jez Butterworth, Tony Kushner, and Ayad Akhtar.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Literacy, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 389 - Speculative Environments

How is speculative fiction different from science fiction, and what can it teach us about our world today and possible worlds to come?  How does environmental speculative fiction engage climate change, ecoapocalypse, pandemics, genocide, the petrostate - and how humans grapple with them?  This course addresses these and other questions by focusing on novels by Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Waubgeshig Rice, Margaret Atwood, and Omar el Akkad.  This discussion-based, upper-level English course also delves into literary theory about speculative fiction, Afrofuturisms, and Indigenous futurisms.

Satisfies English major requirement.
Satisfies Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and minor.

ENG 390 - Word Art

Instructor
Churchill

We live in an age of visual culture. To be literate, we need to read and interpret words and images, as well as the interactions between them. Word-Art examines texts that combine words and images, such as graphic novels, illuminated books, and visual poetry. Read and analyze word-art, and then create your own. The course is a double hybrid-word/image texts and critical/creative writing-designed to stimulate your critical and creative faculties. Take a creative approach to critical writing and apply critical thinking to your creative expression.

 Word-Art will respond to President Carol Quillen’s call for “Stories Yet to Be Told: Race, Racism and Accountability on Campus.” We will explore how words and images work together to construct, reinforce, challenge, and subvert racial legacies in America, with particular attention to constructions of Black and white. The Black/white binary has deep historical and conceptual ties to the word/image dialectic in Western culture. In addition to analyzing how words and images contribute to constructions of Black and white in America, students will draw upon the Library archives and Visual Art Center collections in order to create original Word-Art that tells as yet untold stories about race and racism at Davidson College.

Possible texts for study include:

• Kyle Baker, Nat Turner
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing
• James Elkin, Just Looking
• bell hooks, Black Looks
• Tyehimba Jess, Olio
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.

ENG 391 - Literary Criticism

Analytic and comparative reading of major critical texts.

Satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

 

ENG 392 - Literature of the American South

How do Asian American writers and poets imagine the future? In this course, students will be introduced to key narratives, aesthetics, themes, and social concerns of Asian American and diasporic speculative fiction and poetry through reading and analyzing primary texts. We will begin the course by interrogating how the figure of the Asian/Asian American emerged in the science fiction imaginary at the turn of the twentieth century, as nativist anxieties in the US and colonial narratives abroad contributed to narratives of Asian workers as “machinelike,” animalistic, and alien. Then, we will explore how Asian diasporic writers envision different versions of the future to reflect on historical and social dynamics of racism, labor exploitation, war and forced migration, queerness, natural resource extraction, and environmental contamination. Finally, we will engage with Asian diasporic writers and poets who imagine alternative worlds that contain possibilities for social justice. Authors include: Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Larissa Lai, Franny Choi, Cynthia Kadohata, Charles Yu, and Akwaeke Emezi.

Satisfies the Gender & Sexuality Studies major, and the Africana Studies major.
Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 393 - Special Topics in English

Instructor
Jung, Kuzmanovich

Spring 2022- ENG 393 A- Film Genres: Romance, Comedy

Genre is both a theoretical concept useful in film analysis and a function of  film  industry’s market forces. For Spring 2019, the genres will include Romantic Comedy, The War Film, Psychological Thriller, and (based on student choice) either Film Noir or Sci-Fi.  In each case we will examine the genre’s roots and legacies, common themes, narrative structures, and visual styles.

Students will be invited to satisfy requirements by making short movies, writing papers, participating in a writers’ bullpen and/or creating longer individual screenplays.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Satisfies a requirement in the Film and Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.

Spring 2022 - ENG 393 B - New Fables of the East Asian Diaspora

In this course, students will explore literary writing as a way of creative self-assertion within a variety of traditions by closely reading poetry, fiction, and essays by Asian Americans, a people of the ongoing Asian diaspora. The literature of the Asian diaspora is a collection of stories and voices of people from many points of origin in the constant process of moving, diffusing, arriving, and re-making themselves in the modern era. Their global movements have resulted in Asian diasporic writings as the site of profound transformations for literature written in English: transformations that came about because of their creative self-assertions within the literary tradition they arrived in. 

These writers and poets are at the crossroads of cultural and historical influences from their origin language and the language in which they live, work, and write. They exist in-between traditions. In a sense, the literature of Asian diaspora is the literature of struggle for imaginative minds claiming singular spaces within the English and American literary tradition through their creativity.

There are many investigate this facet of recent literary history. Our specific focus will be on writers and poets who re-imagine folklore and mythologies from their origin cultures by introducing these elements into English literary forms, and how this re-imagination creates a new space for their creativity to provide meaning for their identities of arrival. Some of the writers and works we will be diving into are Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, Angela Hur’s Folklorn, Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On, and Franny Choi’s Soft Science. 

Satisfies English Department major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.

ENG 394 - Nationalism, Race, and Empire

British imperialism permeated the British literary tradition much as it did the globe. Using the lens of postcolonial theory we will examine the fictions and critiques of empire constructed in and through selected texts from the eighteenth century through the present in an attempt to unravel the cultural function of these powerful fictions. Our investigations will be informed by contemporary public discourse about slavery, imperialism, and nationalism, so that we can better grasp the literary and socio-political context of British colonialism and its after-effects. 

Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Cultural Production and Expressions category).
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 395 - Independent Study in Literature

ENG 396 - Independent Study in Writing

ENG 397 - Independent Study

ENG 400 - 494 - Seminars

Seminars, numbered 400 through 494, are limited to twelve juniors and seniors with preference to English majors.  Topics vary by section and year and are posted on the English Department website.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Some topics provide credit in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor (as noted in individual seminar descriptions).

ENG 401 - Creative Writing Seminar: Literary Journalism

Just the facts? Journalism. Presenting the facts in the form of a story, with an engaging plot, well developed characters, descriptive color, and inclusion of the author’s voice? Creative nonfiction. This creative writing seminar combines the essential elements of creative nonfiction with the fruits of journalistic research and reportage-in both the library and the field, through interviewing. 

Students will define appropriate projects almost immediately and set about researching them under the guidance of the instructor and other professionals. The research will culminate in a piece of reported creative nonfiction, prepared for publication, ranging from 6000 to 7000 words. Weekly meetings will be devoted to discussing a wide array of reading in the genre, presenting research to the class, and revising drafts in a workshop setting.  Readings will include works by such writers as Truman Capote, John McPhee, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, Thomas Mallon, Atul Gawande, Francine Prose, and many others.

Prerequisites & Notes
Ideally, students who enroll will have taken a creative writing course at the 200 level or higher.

ENG 404 - Seminar: Writing the “Sexy”* Novella

This course offers students in any major at Davidson College an opportunity to realize their dream of writing the first strong draft of a novella that has the potential to be developed into a novel.  Before the writing begins, students will read and dissect two novellas, each selected from a list of prize-winning books.  These selections are intended to inspire the student-writer’s creativity.  By the fourth week, writing begins in earnest with short exercises produced in and out of class.  By the end of the term, each writer would have produced at least 60 pages of a compelling story.  Writers should be prepared to write often, discuss their work in the seminar, and be open to critiques that are intended to help them create “sexy” fiction.

*”Sexy” means provocative, intriguing, inspiring, and/or compelling. It does not refer to pornographic butit can encompass the erotic.

ENG 405 - Refugee Lit: The Self in Transit

How is the self seen, categorized, empowered and disempowered in its migrant, refugee status? In this course we will read and investigate texts that negotiate the sociopolitical, cultural, and personal frames by which the refugee/migrant is read, made visible or invisible, legitimized or not. The fluidities of self and border are as much about traversing emotional thresholds as geographical space. In a world where war, persecution and environmental change have resulted in the dispersal of millions of people we are being asked to reimagine communities, and dismantle exclusionary constructions of “Self” and “Other.”  Key issues will include how displacement contests and reconfigures paradigms of citizenship, belonging, home, and family, as well as the role of memory, trauma, and location for identities in transit.

Satisfies English major and minor requirements.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 406 - Digital Design Seminar

The digital revolution has opened up humanities scholarship to new modes of producing and disseminating knowledge, resulting in the emergence of a new field: Digital Humanities. This team-taught seminar will emphasize four pillars of Digital Humanities: 1) design, 2) collaboration, 3) inclusivity, and 4) networks. You will design your own humanities research projects from initial conception to online publication via a WordPress website hosted in Davidson Domains. You will learn project design strategies and apply principles of UX-design in order to make your scholarship accessible, interactive, and immersive. You will collaborate with classmates and other experts, pooling your knowledge and working together to redress critical biases and exclusions in the humanities. And you will use social media to network, connect with scholars in the field, and cultivate an audience for your project. In the process, you will develop digital dexterity and skills in research, writing, design, teamwork, networking, and project management-skills that are not only fundamental to digital humanities, but also sought after by employers outside academia.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Digital Studies.

ENG 409 - Television: Queer Representations (=GSS 401)

With its roots in the gendered domestic suburban household, television has a longstanding investment in questions of gender and sexuality.  Pushing back against the assumption that LGBTQ characters did not appear on our screens in a sustained way until the 1980s, this course will investigate how TV representation of queer life have changed with the evolution of the medium since the 1950s.  Recent work in the field of queer TV studies has unearthed queer characters from previously invisible archives, charted changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity in broadcast programming, and documented the organizational strategies  employed by television narrative that disclose and contain expressions of non-normative sexualities. Indeed, in one of the foundational texts on queer TV, Lynne Joyrich argues that “U.S. television does not simply reflect an already closeted sexuality but actually helps organize sexuality as closeted.” Extending Joyrich’s line of reasoning, we will seek to understand the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that structure representations of televised queerness. How might we understand the contemporary series Transparent alongside or against the representation of a trans character on All in the Family (1975)? Why might The New Normal, a seemingly positive portrayal of new kinship structures, have failed as a series in 2013? Even as we watch the problematic take on villainous lesbian characters in the Angie Dickinson vehicle, Police Woman (“Flowers of Evil,” 1974), we will move beyond diagnoses and critiques of “bad” versus “good” queer representations to acknowledge the pleasures that may attend the viewing of even ideologically corrupt programming. Which shows and episodes became lightening rods for desire despite their failure to produce fully realized queer characters? And what genealogy (or genealogies) of queer TV might take us from the groundbreaking episodes of Ellen (“The Puppy Episode”) and Roseanne (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) in the 1990s to the moment at which a Vanity Fair cover declared that with “Gay-per-view TV” shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, prime time had “come out” (2003)? As we historicize such developments, we will consider the contributions of writer-producers and series creators such as Alan Ball and Ryan Murphy, and analyze a variety of programs from “quality television” to animation, from the sit-com to reality TV, and from sci-fi to the game show.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies a minor requirement in English.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality and Community requirement.

ENG 415 - Seminar Topic- Poetics of Relation: James Baldwin (=AFR 304)

Poetics of Relation: James Baldwin
Instructor
Flanagan 

Poetics of Relation: James Baldwin - One of the country’s most important 20th century essayists, fiction writers, and playwrights, James Baldwin penetrated the consciousness of America with his eloquent and insightful writing. His words are a living legacy of the ways in which African Americans and members of LGBT communities have continued to prevail in the presence of unrelenting antipathy. His friend, Amiri Baraka, said of him: “This man traveled the earth like its biographer. He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human or perhaps more acidly prehuman.”

Poetics of Relation is the rubric for a seminar in which students analyze relations between prominent writers– many of African descent–and specific cultures, landscapes or historical moments. Previous iterations of this seminar have focused on writings by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Derek Walcott, Vidia Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, and August Wilson.

In addition to close, analytical readings, substantive class discussions, oral presentations and  weekly one-two page MOUs, seminar participants will write a major essay which will be added to the existing Poetics of Relations digital site.

Cross-listed as AFR: 303 in Africana Studies  for Major Thinkers credit
Satisfies a requirement in Africana Studies and Global Literary Theory.
Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies Literary and Cultural Representations track major requirement.
Satisfies English major requirement.
Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement. 
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 416 - Style

From Samuel Richardson’s titular heroine Pamela obsessing about her wardrobe (1740), to the conspicuous consumption of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and from the discussion of Hero’s sartorial choices in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) to the iconic Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), there is a clear literary history of fashion. This course will consider both fictional and theoretical engagements with fashion alongside the works of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James, whose prose reveals the fingerprint specificity of their writing styles. Working from Roland Barthes’s theory in The Fashion System to Cecil Beaton’s diaries and Joseph Roach’s study of the “It” factor (“the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people”), this transcultural and transhistorical course will investigate style as both form and content. Whether we are looking at the fashion and literary styles of the roaring twenties in Fitzgerald’s works or the punk subcultures of the UK in the 1980s, we will question how literary innovation and fashion interpenetrate.

ENG 421 - Writing the Self

This seminar looks at the ways that writers, often from marginalized communities, used “non-literary” forms such as letters, diaries or notebooks as a form of expression when traditional avenues of publication or literary recognition were not available to them. In addition to looking at texts from various literary traditions we will also examine the ways that contemporary writers have returned to these forms, including a consideration of blogs and social media as part of the contemporary expression of these forms.

Instructor: S. Campbell

Looking into the past to make sense of the present pervades non-fiction writing.  This type of reflection emerges in a variety of forms and lengths, including the brief personal memoir, the podcast, and the multi-volume autobiography.  Whereas autobiography explores large pieces of a life in an effort to explain a whole person, the memoir uses a narrow focus, what William Zinsser terms a “window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition” (136).  We will read memoirs that provide windows into the childhoods and adulthoods of people of varied classes, ethnicities, and experiences.  Students will approach the genre both critically and creatively, exploring what it means and can mean to write the self.

ENG 422 - Creating Narratives: Investigating Davidson’s Literary Past

Although scholars debate aspects of creative writing’s origins in the American academy, faculty at institutions such as Harvard were known to accept fiction or poetry for class credit by the late nineteenth century (Myers 283).  If the following excerpt from the 1895 Quips and Cranks is not merely satirical, the same was true at Davidson.

          He looked so strange I asked him if he was sick.  He said no, a thought had struck him. I asked him what kind of thought.
          He said an unthought-like thought that was the soul of thought. I felt dazed at this answer, but said nothing, as the 
          subject was getting beyond me.  [N. B. He was writing a poem for Quips and Cranks–Editor of Q and C.] So I turned the
          subject deftly by asking him what he had in his notebook.  He said mostly bout rimes that he had written in his Soph. 
         year for the English professor, and a few little things of his own that he called Heart-Foam.

It is clear that Davidson students read and wrote creatively, whether “rimes” for class or personal “Heart-Foam,” long before the inclusion of formal creative writing instruction in our curriculum.  

In this seminar, we will explore early literary activities and attitudes at Davidson.  As exemplified by the work of Davidson’s Commission on Race and Slavery, revisiting our institutional past “with fresh, critical eyes” can provide what John Thelin terms “a source of renewal and rediscovery” (History of American Higher Education xi).  The Davidson archives hold rich material in both print and digital forms, including multiple student literary publications, from 1886, when the Eumenean and Philanthropic Literary Societies launched the Davidson Monthly.   For example, the same issue of Quips and Cranks yields not only the passage provided above but also a satiric description of an English class as well as multiple student poems.   

Seminar participants will collaborate in uncovering evidence of student literary activity on campus, analyzing that evidence, and situating these activities amid broader literary trends and collegiate practices.  We will inevitably encounter writing that reveals contemporaneous biases and limitations even as we witness the abiding drive to creative work among our student body.  Class projects will be published in Omeka, a content management system that allows rich displays of archival material.

Satisfies English major requirement.

ENG 430 - Italo Calvino and Invention

A hybrid course focusing upon the works of Italo Calvino and Postmodernism, this seminar will offer scholars and writers the opportunity to study “invention” as both an idea and a practice.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory major.
Satisifes a minor requirement in English.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory.

ENG 452 - Seminar: Performing Shakespeare/Radio Shakespeare

In Shakespeare’s London, audience members referred not to “watching” or “seeing” a play, but to “hearing” it.

“Radio Shakespeare” is a new incarnation of English 452, “Performing Shakespeare.”  The course will culminate in three full-length radio performances of The Merchant of Venice before live audiences.  A fourth performance, a Sunday matinee on the order of a staged reading, may occur at the Zimmermanns’ Renaissance villa, Pian del Pino.  One of the audio performances will be broadcast live on WDAV.  Post-production, engineers will assemble an immortal podcast combining the strongest elements of the three recorded performances into one whole.

Satisfies the Innovation requirement for the English major.

ENG 453 - Literary Alchemy

What happens when a literary genius takes hold of a mere suggestion and transforms it into literary gold?  By what process of imagination does a snippet of news in The New York Times become Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or spawn Susan Orleans’s orchid thief, John Laroche, who reemerges as played by Chris Cooper in Spike Jonze’s conversion of The Orchid Thief into a film about the very matter of Adaptation?  How does Miss Kay grow from what Muriel Spark calls “the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie” into that fully formed character in her prime?  What happens when Shakespeare takes hold of a lackluster little narrative by Giraldi Cinthio, turns it on its ear, and produces Othello out of base metal?  Or when George Saunders spins Lincoln in the Bardo out of a line of history that concerns Abraham Lincoln’s visit to his son’s tomb?  This seminar will explore the literary imagination by focusing on such transformations into nonfiction, fiction, drama, and film-some from humble origins, others from already established masterpieces.

ENG 455 - Seminar- Milton and Paradise Lost

This seminar offers intensive study of John Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost.  Discussions will involve close analysis of individual lines-and indeed, individual words-and will examine the contexts of the text, from ancient traditions to the present.  Assignments will require researching the critical history of the most influential epic poem in English and considering the poem’s distinctive claims about humans, angels, devils, God, and nature in “the story of all things.”  This seminar is designed for juniors and seniors who hope to refine their advanced literary criticism; who hope to share their criticism in both orthodox and unorthodox forms, such as staging public performances of Milton’s poem; and who hope to reflect on big questions before graduation, that looming ritual of expulsion from Paradise.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year and second year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 462 - Seminar: A: Romantic Radicalism or B: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic

Instructor
Vaz

For William Godwin, truth, if it exists, comes about in the “collision of mind with mind.”  In this seminar, we will investigate and interrogate how Romantic literature manifests this “collision” by creating and participating in the aesthetic, economic, and socio-political tectonic shifts of the period.  By doing so, we will examine how Romantic literature intersects with the richness and complexity of the period’s radical and revolutionary thought.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

462B The Long Eighteeth Century Gothic

lnstructor
Vaz

There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read.  That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception.  Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hotcakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama.  In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760’s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worth of scholarship only in the last 30 years of the twentieth century.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

ENG 472 - Seminar A: Gossip or B: Twenty-First-Century British Literature or C: Joyce/Nabokov

472A Gossip

Instructor
Fackler

Drawing on cultural studies and performance studies, this trans-historical and transnational course investigates the role gossip plays in literature, psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, film, and new media. The seminar foregrounds the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality.

This topic counts for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor.
 

472B 21st Century British Literature

Instructor
Fackler

This course considers the transformation of the book as artifact and idea since the turn of the century. We will investigate the new, often experimental, narrative forms authors have developed as a response to such twenty-first-century pressures as globalization, terrorism, and genetic engineering. Questions for the seminar include: What are the overarching concerns for fiction in the wake of the postmodern and postcolonial moment? What kind of relationship can we expect between science and literature in the 21^st-century novel? Does contemporary science contribute to newly emergent structures of feeling that the novel might register? And if such structures call up concepts of the posthuman, how might they sit with the traditionally humanistic orientation of the novel as a broadly popular genre?  How does post-9/11 fiction respond to current fears of technological and/or natural annihilation? What are the factors determining pre-canonical status for the texts on this syllabus, and how can we understand the new circulation of global capital and cultural value? Students will consider the following concepts: virtual fiction; cloning, the post-human, and dystopian responses to the possibility of a genetically engineered future; alternative modes of narration; the figure of the artist manqué; ghostwriting as a narrative technique (and as a 21^st-century replacement for the omniscient narrator); detective fiction; fictions of terrorism and the politics of post-9/11 vulnerability; the new Bildungsroman; the author business, and the influence of book clubs and literary prizes such as the Man Booker. 
 

472C Joyce/Nabokov

Instructor
Kuzmanovich

Why a seminar on Joyce/Nabokov?   Like most seminars, this one requires intensive attention to the themes and techniques of  major writers.  These two long dead writers consists of their still having in print almost all the books they’ve written,  with those books provoking over 10,000 critical pieces just since 1963.  Joyce’s influence is acknowledged by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Umberto Eco, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Raymond Queneau, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, and Derek Walcott while Martin Amis,  John Barth, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Bobby Ann Mason, James Merrill, Thomas Pynchon, W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith, Mark Strand,  Amy Tan, and Richard Wilbur mention Nabokov’s, and probably Joyce’s by way of Nabokov.

Method:  We will concentrate on (1) their styles (Joyce’s “High Modernist” and Nabokov’s supposed “post-modernist”/”metafictional”/”intertextual” one) since the grit in these men’s words has gotten under the skin of many a reader with an innovative critical approach; (2) their tendencies to generate their respective narrative authority from events in their own lives, especially their respective experiences of exile; (3) their depictions of Love in its various forms (including the loss of it); (4) the absenting presence of the big bogey, Death; and (5) the last member of that robust triumvirate, Art. 

Goals:   A foretaste of mature and thoughtful reading; confidence that you can do independent, original,  and careful scholarship on even the most challenging writing.

But is this class really for you?  If you believe that certain words or subjects should be off-limits to writers or readers, this is not the class for you.  Ulysses and Lolita each continue to sell well over 100,000 copies per year, yet they not only contain but also provoke language and situations which some students may find objectionable.  This is a class for those students who not only possess the already uncommon share of discipline, imagination, memory, and attention to details vouchsafed to most who choose Davidson, but who are also blessed with an ability to heft another’s words and deliver and withstand therapeutic non-rancorous badgering especially on the topics of  suspending disbelief in the transfigurative power of art and the (ir)relevance of contemporary critical theory. 

Texts: 0-14-024774-2 Joyce,  Dubliners; 670-0 180301; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; 0-19-511029-3 Fargnoli: James Joyce A-Z 0-394-74312-1; Joyce: Ulysses, Gabler Edition;  0-679-72725-6 Nabokov, Gift; 1-883011-18-3 Novels and Memoirs; 1-883011-19-1 Novels 1955-1962 0-679-72997-6; Nabokov,  Stories  of Vladimir Nabokov; 052153643X; Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (Recommended Only); 0-679-72609-8 Nabokov: Strong Opinions (Recommended Only); 978-0-3-0-7-27189-1Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Recommended Only)

Prerequisites & Notes
Juniors and Seniors only. 

ENG 483 - Black Literary Theory (=AFR 383)

(Cross-listed with AFR 383)

This course will bring together readings both literary and critical/theoretical, beginning with Frantz Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Taking Fanon as its point of departure, then, this course will necessarily turn to a discussion of the recent discourse on Afro-pessimism and black optimism, attempting to introduce students to issues and questions of race, race relations, anti-black racism, black sociality, the universality of whiteness, the fungibility of the black body, and of the vulnerability and precarity of black life; and together we will think more closely about how the complex and “unthinkable” histories of slavery, colonialism, and the Middle Passage, for examples, continue to challenge the representational limits and potentialities of traditional literary genres and modes of emplotment. In addition to Fanon, authors will include Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten.

Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major.
Satisfies a senior seminar and the Diversity requirement for the English major.
Satisfies a literature elective for the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 485 - Seminar: Moby-Dick: Texts and Contexts

In this seminar designed for advanced English majors, we will take a deep dive into Herman Melville’s classic, deeply flawed, troubling, jubilant, vexed, and vexing novel Moby-Dick.

Published in 1851 - the same year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized, Sojourner Truth first delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, Western Union was founded, and the US Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act - Moby-Dick was very much a novel of its time and place.

Early in the semester, we will read some of the texts that inspired Melville; at the end of the semester, we will stage a live 24-hour reading of the novel.  In between, we’ll take our time to read, investigate, interrogate, and interpret a work that has baffled and beguiled readers for 170 years.

ENG 486 - Seminar: Special Topics

Instructor

Kuzmanovich

English 486: Law, Literature, and Film: The Narrative Structure of Trials
 
Law, Literature, and Film: The Narrative Structure of Trials builds off and borrows heavily from the monumental Legal Fictions seminar taught by Prof. Randy Nelson before his retirement in 2018.  Prof. Nelson’s course started from the premise that “a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read.  Indeed, modern trials are in effect telling contests, with two competing ‘narrators’ telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience.  Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions.”  

We will keep Prof. Nelson’s emphasis on contemporary literary theory as it applies to courtroom proceedings/narratives, and we will study several of those courtroom narratives by observing real trials in the Mecklenburg County Superior Court. Please familiarize yourself with the functioning of this court:   Mecklenburg County | North Carolina Judicial Branch (nccourts.gov). The course  textbooks will include  transcripts of real trials to complement literary trials.  I will add film to literature and arrange the course in thematic units on the trial as a story and as criminal procedure(Billy Budd, The Trial).  Those thematic units will include 
(1) show trials (The Crucible + local trials you select), 
(2) crime and emotion/crime of passion/insanity plea  (Anatomy of a Murder, Primal Fear ), 
(3) the nature of punishment (Merchant of Venice),  
(4) women and the law (Civil Action, The Music Box),
(4) race, equal justice,  and representation (Amistad/”Benito Cereno”/O.J. Simpson),  
(5) law and ethics (analysis of Supreme Court decisions and minority opinions,  
(6) censorship (portions of Ulysses, Women in Love, and Tampa (Florida vs. LaFave),  
(7) the rhetoric of law and of (scientific) evidence (a CSI episode),   
(8) the styles of dissent in judicial opinions (Cardozo, Kerr, Tushnet).  We will also spend some times on 
(10) cyber crimes and cyber evidence, starting with Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode. 

Instructor
Churchill

Navigating the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy and Her Nework

The emergence of the avant-garde in the early 20th century coincided with an explosion in magazines. Between 1885 and 1905 alone, 7500 new periodicals were established in the U. S., and thousands more in Great Britain. This seminar will explore the avant-garde as it circulated through magazines, ranging from experimental “little magazines” to “quality” monthlies and the mass-market glossies and pulps. Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared in The Dial in 1922, the same year that T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in the same journal and James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review. By the 1920s, avant-garde writers had become celebrities, featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The central node the seminar’s inquiry will be Mina Loy-an artist, writer, feminist, inventor, and entrepreneur who moved in the circles of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and migrated among metropolitan centers of avant-garde activity, including Paris, Florence, Rome, New York, London, and Berlin, from the 1910s to the 1950s. Since Loy played a role in almost every major avant-garde movement, we will explore and map the avant-garde networks she navigated, using magazines to chart lines of connection and influence.

Just as the avant-garde began with an explosion of new print media, you will enter the field of new digital media, operating your own Davidson Domain and using WordPress, Google Docs and Google Drive, as well as mapping and timeline tools-skills you can market in job, fellowship, and employment applications, along with your experience working on a team. The seminar is a collaborative research & methods course with readings drawn from the field of periodical studies. You will find and select many of primary source readings, collaborate on a major research project, and contribute to the expansion of the web site Index of Modernist Magazines: a select bibliography. In addition, your digital scholarship may be published on the scholarly website, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (mina-loy.com).

Prerequisite: Desire to study the past, eagerness to equip yourself for the future, willingness to take risks, and team spirit.

ENG 487 - Seminar: Legal Fiction

The principal claim of English 487 is that a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read. Indeed, modern trials are in effect storytelling contests, with two competing “narrators” telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience. Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions. Nevertheless, a great deal of contemporary literary theory offers genuine insight into the kinds of fictions that get constructed in a courtroom. This seminar tests a number of hypotheses about legal fictions, offers direct observation of some real trials in progress, and asks students to undertake research in the interdisciplinary areas where legal studies and literary studies overlap.
 

ENG 491 - Literary Mysteries

Literary Mysteries is an exciting Innovation course that offers opportunities for students to explore the lovely literary language that writers such as P.D. James, Umberto Eco, Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell employ in novels such as An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, The Island of the Day Before, Missing Joseph, and Dark Corners, respectively. Forget the blood, gore, shoot-em-up of many ordinary crime stories. Literary Mysteries are intellectually and dramatically intriguing, layered, intricate, and deftly plotted. Students will build evidence boards in digital sites as they follow the clues embedded in these plots to try to solve the mysteries before the end of the text, and in doing so, they will enhance their deductive skills.

Satisfies the Innovation course requirement in English.
Satisfies a literature elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 493 - Film Art

Film Art is a hands-on study of style and narration in the fiction film. That does not mean that you cannot make a documentary film for your final project.  Study and production are two very different processes.  We’ll proceed in this way:  After a reminder of the pre- and post- production processes, we’ll focus on individual directorial styles. We’ll also make a communal film to  learn that (most of the time) film is a collaborative art and to explore the capabilities and shortcomings of the available equipment (and talent). Then, each student  will be given a chance to write/adapt, direct, film, and edit a short film using digital video cameras and non-linear editing equipment.  The individual film need not be a fiction film.  It should, however, be your best work.   In the past, these were the films students submitted as their portfolio films for graduate school.  We’ll look at those films in light of the latest theories of narrative and the knowledge about cinema acquired from the film-maker’s end.  The final versions of all films will be burnt to DVDs and posted to VIMEO. If there are musicians among us, they will be given a chance to score a film and/or do sound design.

Satisfies a requirement in the English major and minor.
Satisifes a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Limited to juniors and seniors.

ENG 494 - Seminar: A - Disability in Literature and Art; B - Multicultural Literature

Instructor
Fox

The literary tradition in English is rife with representation of disability. These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil. Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death. Disability Studies asks us to reframe our understanding of disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and understand and learn about the presence of “disability culture” and its widely diverse members are also using literature to tell their own stories in a vibrant new artistic tradition.  Literature is and has been obsessed with the disabled body, both as metaphor and actual subject – an extension of the degree to which disability has loomed in the larger societal imagination in one way or another across centuries.

Rather than trying to catalogue all the examples of disability in literature, this seminar seeks to use disability studies as a genesis point and theoretical framework through which to examine several core questions about disability, literature, and the problems and opportunities arising from the intersection of the two. We will:

• Reconsider representations of disability in literary, artistic, and cultural texts. We’ll ask how these are used as “narrative prosthesis.” How are such depictions used as literary devices? What beliefs do these images promote about disability?
• Examine how “disability” and “normalcy” are culturally constructed categories like race, gender, class, and sexuality. How does disability intersect with these other identity categories?
• Study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture. This writing establishes history, explores identity, refutes/reclaims stereotypes, and promotes discourse within the disability community. We will look at genres ranging from memoir to fiction to performance to film.
• Consider how a “disability aesthetic” of literature might be conceived. How can disability contribute to the reconsideration of the processes and products of literary creation?

Therefore, while our course has a loose chronological frame, it’s more appropriate to think of it as organized conceptually. The survey here will be of the questions to which the intersection of disability and literature gives rise.  While this is a senior English seminar, disability studies is a very interdisciplinary field. Junior and senior students in other majors with an interest in the course topic are very welcome to join; the course does not presuppose a familiarity with disability studies.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the diversity requirement for the English major. 
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
 

494B Multicultural Literature

Instructor
Campbell

Beyond just teaching children letters, counting, and shames, children’s literature teaches individuals how to interact with one another based on their similarities and differences.  This seminar will explore how what is accepted and promoted as “appropriate” multicultural representation in literature for children and adolescent changes over time.  At a moment of intense American debates about immigration, demographic shifts, and marriage equality, we will explore issues of power and representation-who has the right to write, whose stories are worth telling, what version of those stories should one tell through focusing on literature for children, including picture books, stories, comics, and short novels.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Satisfies the diversity requirement for the English major. 

Prerequisites & Notes
Juniors and seniors only.

ENG 495 - Senior Capstone Seminar

The senior capstone for English majors is a departure from our typical senior seminars, which typically focus on a specific author(s), critical field, theoretical approach, or creative genre, and aspire to yield near graduate-level work. Yet many of our majors have no immediate plans for graduate study and are more concerned with finding a job and figuring out how to live as adults in “the real world.” This capstone seminar is designed to help students build bridges between their academic study at Davidson and the lives they’d like to live after they graduate. Through student-directed reading, digital research and writing, collaborative inquiries, and consultations with alums, this seminar will help students set goals and develop a personal narrative and toolkit of practices to help achieve them. Culminating in a research project that uses digital tools and platforms to demonstrate the knowledge and skills students have gained during their college careers, the course will include substantial reflection on developing a sustainable life and finding a career path or direction for the near future.

Prerequisites & Notes
Not open to first-year students and sophomores without instructor’s permission.  

ENG 498 - Seminar: Senior Honors Research

ENG 499 - Seminar: Senior Honors Thesis

ENV 100 - Special Topic: TBD

The Environmental Studies Department will welcome a new faculty member in the environmental social sciences in the 2018-19 academic year.  As of this time, the instructor and topic of the course are still to be determined, but the course will count toward the social sciences track of the Environmental Studies major and minor.

ENV 120 - Introduction to Environmental Geology

A study of basic geologic principles and critical issues in environmental geology on a global scale. Topics to be covered can include: minerals, rock types and cycles, earthquakes and tectonics, volcanoes, mass wasting, stream systems, coastlines, soils, water resources, mineral and rock resources, fossil fuels, and climate change. Generally, the class will divide time between learning introductory geologic principles and applying those principles to understand environmental issues associated with geology.

Satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 150 - Environmental Analysis with Econ Lens

The course will introduce students to thinking about interdisciplinary environmental issues as an economist does.  We will concentrate on a few economics themes and use topical issues to motivate and to illustrate interdisciplinary economic analyses.Note: The course does not earn economics credit and does not replace the Economics 101 prerequisite for any of the three Economics environmental courses (ECO 226, 235, or 236).  

Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement

ENV 155 - Climate, Energy, and Society

Climate change is the most profound environmental problem facing human society and challenges the foundations of the global economy and energy system that relies on burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases. This course examines how economic, political, and cultural systems have produced global warming and how those same systems can and are being transformed to reduce carbon emissions and create resilient communities. Questions of justice across intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality are emphasized in understanding dynamics of power and privilege in how climate change was created and who will bear the costs and burdens of mitigation and adaption.

Fulfills social science track depth component credit in the environmental studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Sociology major.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENV 160 - Environmental Justice

This course introduces students to the concepts, contexts, and conflicts of environmental justice, both in the U.S. and globally.  After covering some general history and theoretical frameworks, the course is organized according to six cases studies (Love Canal, Hurricane Katrina, Hydro-Quebec, US migrant farmworkers, Bhopal, and Ogoniland).  Throughout this interdisciplinary course based in the environmental humanities, students will make connections among various kinds of information sources (literary, documentary, ecocritical, theoretical, ethical, historical, etc.).  For the final course project, students will create their own environmental justice case study, based on a case not covered in class, and with their choice of relevant literary text, documentary film, and background readings.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies minor

Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement

ENV 170 - Social Science Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Poor and minority populations have historically borne the brunt of environmental inequalities in the United States, suffering disproportionately from the effects of pollution, dispossession of land, resource depletion, dangerous jobs, limited access to common resources, and exposure to environmental hazards. Paying particular attention to the ways that race, ethnicity, class, and gender have shaped the political and economic dimensions of environmental injustices, this course draws on the work of scholars and activists to examine the long history of environmental inequities in the United States, along with more recent political movements that seek to rectify environmental injustices.

Satisfies a requirement of the Sociology major.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought Ways of Knowing requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENV 200 - Special Topic: Global Food Systems Transformation

Global Food Systems Transformation

Global food systems are failing.  Globally, 30% of the world’s population is food insecure and 30% of global population is malnourished. The sector employees 1 out of 3 people, who are often living at or below the poverty line. Nearly 30% of food is lost or wasted.  Food and agriculture account for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions; 80% of deforestation, 70% of global biodiversity loss, 25% of land degradation and 70% of freshwater use. This course will take a systems approach to look at the challenges facing today’s global food and agricultural sectors and how those challenges can be met, from the perspective of 6 major developed, emerging and developing agricultural countries. There are no prerequisites for this course, as leaders from every discipline will be needed to address these multifaceted challenges.

ENV 201 - Environmental Science

Overview of the scientific concepts, principles, processes, and methodologies required to understand how ecosystems work. This knowledge will be applied to selected environmental problems to help students understand the scientific basis, estimate the risks associated, and evaluate alternative solutions for resolving and/or preventing them.  One laboratory meeting per week.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
 

ENV 202 - Environmental Social Sciences

Overview of social science approaches to environmental issues, with problem-based and topical approaches to the study of interactions between society and the environment. This course teaches students to integrate concepts and the qualitative and quantitative methods of the social sciences (primarily anthropology, economics, geography, psychology, political science, and sociology) in interdisciplinary analyses of environmental issues.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.

ENV 203 - Environmental Humanities

Overview of humanistic approaches to environmental issues, including perspectives from art, cultural studies, history, literature, philosophy, and religion.  This course emphasizes humanistic methodologies such as close reading and analysis of primary and secondary materials in both written and visual forms.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
 

ENV 210 - Introduction to Environmental Literature: Food Literature

This course is for Foodies, Ag Activists, Farm Fans, and anyone who is interested in literature about food from a variety of perspectives.  We’ll read fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about the pleasures of eating, the cultural and aesthetic significance of food, rural and urban agriculture, and food justice.  Field trips will include farm visits, and students will participate in hands-on, community-based assignments connected to the college’s Food and Sustainability project. 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 214 - Energy, the Environment, and Engineering Design (=PHY 214)

An introduction to engineering design through a focus on energy and the environment.  Students work in teams to create computer-controlled models of energy-efficient buildings. Class meets for 2 hours 3 times/week in a combined discussion/laboratory setting with 3 hours of open laboratory activity per week.

Counts as an environmental natural sciences content course for the environmental studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Experimental Physics minor.
Satisfies the Natural Science requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Who Should Take This Class?  This class welcomes all Davidson students, especially first- and second-year students that have not yet chosen a major, non-science major students, and students interested in Engineering and/or Environmental Studies. There are no math or science prerequisites, and no prior experience in physics is expected. Of course, we will need to use math - at the level of high school algebra and trigonometry - in this course. The creative and open-ended nature of the labs and final design project will give all students the opportunity to work at an appropriate and rewarding level consistent with relevant STEM preparation. Students of all cultures, backgrounds, and abilities are welcome, valued, and appreciated in this class.

ENV 220 - Climate Systems: Present and Past

The climate of the Earth is changing. It has always changed. It will continue to change. How do we assess the impact of humanity on climate? We need to understand how our Earth system works, now and in the past, if we expect to predict our climatic future. This course looks at the current climate system and explores the Earth archives that illuminate our climatic past.  Topics covered include: The Earth energy budget; the role of carbon dioxide and methane in short-term and long-term climate cycles; orbital cycles and the ice ages; Earth as a snowball; the Greenhouse Earth; ice cores and tree rings; oceanic and atmospheric circulation systems; and the impact of human activity on climate. Class discussions, demonstrations, and exercises provide opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and practice analytical techniques.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 221 - Water

Mni Wiconi - water is life. This course focuses on how water movement, water hazards and water resources affect human societies, ecosystems, and our changing planet. Students will learn about broad topics in water science, including oceans, rivers, ice, hydrology, and aquatic ecology. Case studies will look at recent destructive floods, river restoration projects, and agricultural water use. Interactive labs and field trips will include projects on groundwater contamination, delta development, and river hydrology.

Satisfies Environmental Studies major  and minor requirement- Natural Science, Humatities, and Social Science Tracks.
Satisfies Natural Science Ways of Knowing requirement.

ENV 225 - Physical Geography of the Southeast

This course works to help students understand the physical diversity of  North Carolina and the southeast by looking at the earth processes that create various terrains. Specifically, we break down the region into physiographic provinces: the coastal plain, the Piedmont, and the Blue Ridge. Then we examine how different surface processes worked to create each of those regions. In the coastal plain, we examine how beach processes shape the landscape, transport sand, and move barrier islands. In the Piedmont, we examine how a relatively inactive landscape comes to be dominated by weathering and soil processes. In the Blue Ridge, we look at the ways that gravity impacts landscapes by driving landslides and rivers. Along the way, we examine the ways that landscapes impact human populations.

Satisfies Environmental Studies major and minor requirement

ENV 232 - Introduction to Environmental Health with Community-Based Learning (=HHV 232)

Students will apply biological, chemical and epidemiological content to environmental health case studies and community-based learning projects. This is an introductory course designed to expose students to different scientific disciplines within the context of environmental health.

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Public Health.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Liberal Studies requirement.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
ENV 232 may not be taken for credit after ENV 233.

ENV 233 - Introduction to Environmental Health with Laboratory-Based Learning (=HHV 233)

Students will apply biological, chemical and epidemiological content to environmental health case studies and laboratory projects. This is an introductory course designed to expose students to different scientific disciplines within the context of environmental health. ENV 233 may not be taken for credit after ENV 232.

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Public Health.
Satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 235 - The Ocean Environment

Covering 71% of the surface, yet mostly unexplored, the Earth’s oceans are a source of food, hurricanes, used as a wastebasket by human kind, and a great unknown in our climate future. This introductory course covers the formation of ocean basins; the composition and origin of seawater; currents, tides, and waves; the ocean-atmosphere connection; coastal processes; the deep-sea environment; productivity and resources; marine pollution; and the influence of oceans on climate. The class will focus on how oceanic systems work with class discussions, demonstrations, and exercises providing opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and practice analytical techniques.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
 

ENV 237 - The Interdisciplinary Use of Geographic Information

Geographic information is not bound to any particular way of knowing and can be used to visualize and  analyze spatial information of any type. This course will teach methods for using geographic information that will be applicable across the liberal arts. This course serves as an introduction to the ArcGIS software and will explore its abilities in a combination of inclass exploration, explanation, and exercises that teach the functionality of the software using interdisciplinary examples with a primary, but not exclusive focus, on environmental issues. For instance, we can visualize issues of environmental justice by mapping demographic data. Conservation issues can be better understood through mapping environmental data. Land use history can be explored through a blending of narrative, historical maps, and modern satellite imagery. In the later part of the course, we will spend time exploring and learning about some of the more interesting geostatistical tools available with the ArcGIS software. All skill levels with computers are welcome. Some comfort with PC-based software will be helpful at the start.

Counts as an Applied Environmental Science course in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies interdisciplinary major.
Counts as a methodology or elective course in the Environmental Studies major.
Satisfies the Mathematical and Quantitative Thought requirement.

ENV 240 - Environment and Ecology of India

This course introduces students to major environmental issues with both local and global impacts.  Through lectures, research, and field visits, students will analyze key questions of ecological integrity posed by the Earth Charter Commission, specifically the importance of biological diversity, best practices for environmental protection, methods to safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, and the study of ecological sustainability.  The course will give particular attention to sustainability, food security, and food sovereignty.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.