Course Descriptions

ECO 322S - Health Economics

Analysis of the U.S. health care sector: demand for health, medical care and health insurance;  supply of physician services, hospital services and insurance; health care markets and government interventions; cost effectiveness analysis; comparison of international health care systems. Focus is on policy applications.

Students entering 2012 or after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
 

 

Prerequisites & Notes
ECO 202 required

ECO 323 - Industrial Organization

Theoretical basis for antitrust laws and the regulation of industries. Mergers, market power, economies of scale, barriers to entry, and contestable market theory. Emphasis is placed on past and recent antitrust cases.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 required.

ECO 324 - Labor Economics

Labor markets, unionization, unemployment, and public policy primarily in the setting of the United States. (A student may not receive credit for both ECO 224 and ECO 324.)

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 and 105 or permission of the instructor.

ECO 325 - Public Sector Economics

Analysis of the role the public sector plays in a mixed economy.  Topics include public goods, externalities, tax policy, expenditure policy, budget deficits, and the national debt.  Includes proposals for tax welfare, and health care reforms.  A student may not receive credit for both Economics 225 and Economics 325.  

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement. 

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202. 

ECO 328S - Money and the Financial System

Term structure of interest rates, structure of financial markets, regulatory framework, asset demand theories, Federal Reserve system and operation of monetary policy.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 203.

ECO 329 - Sports Economics

Sports economics covers the major economic issues confronted in professional and major college sports. The course examines four topics in depth: (1) the structure of professional sports industry, (2) public finance issues surrounding stadium construction and team ownership in professional sports, (3) labor market issues in professional sports, and (4) the economics of amateur athletics (with a focus on the NCAA).

Prerequisites & Notes
ECO 105 and 202

ECO 333S - Political Economy and Economic Development

This course will analyze the major theoretical arguments to how and why politics affects economic development, and study the ways in which economic development influences politics.  Empirical studies will be analyzed in order to evaluate various policies that may promote the support economic growth and devlopment.

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 105 and 202, or equivalent.

ECO 337 - International Trade

Economic basis for international trade, determinants and consequences of trade flows, barriers to trade, and trade policy.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202.

ECO 338 - International Finance

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 203.

ECO 380 - Seminars

Reading, research, papers, and discussion on selected topics in economics. Each faculty member announces in advance the particular topic or area of the seminar.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 381 - Seminar

Instructor
Staff

Reading, research, papers, and discussion on selected topics in economics. Each faculty member announces in advance the particular topic or area of the seminar.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 382 - Seminar

Reading, research, papers, and discussion on selected topics in economics. Each faculty member announces in advance the particular topic or area of the seminar.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 383 - Seminar

Instructor
Staff

Reading, research, papers, and discussion on selected topics in economics. Each faculty member announces in advance the particular topic or area of the seminar.

Prerequisites & Notes

Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.           

ECO 384 - Seminar

Instructor
Staff

Reading, research, papers, and discussion on selected topics in economics. Each faculty member announces in advance the particular topic or area of the seminar.

Prerequisites & Notes

Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 389 - Organization of Firms

This course will explore the global contours of economic integration by tracing the flows of fixed investments and commodities across geographic and national boundaries.  Globalized firms span various geographies, cultural contexts, political regimes, and levels of economic development.  An overarching theme in our course will be the various ways that information, culture, and public policy influence the scope of global production networks.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
ECO 203

ECO 395 - Individual Research

Designed for the major who desires to pursue some special interest in economics. A research proposal must be approved in advance by the faculty member who supervises the student and determines the means of evaluation as well as the Department Chair.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 396 - Individual Research

Designed for the major who desires to pursue some special interest in economics. A research proposal must be approved in advance by the faculty member who supervises the student and determines the means of evaluation as well as the Department Chair.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 401 - Honors Research

Independent research designed to formulate a written proposal for an honors thesis. The proposal will encompass a review of recent literature, development of a theoretical framework and research hypotheses, and the preparation of an annotated bibliography. An oral defense of the written proposal is required. Graded on a Pass/Fail basis. 

Not for major or minor credit in Economics.

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of the Department Chair. (Fall)

ECO 402 - Honors Thesis

Completion of the honors research proposed in Economics 401. Oral defense of the thesis is required.

Prerequisites & Notes
Pass in Economics 401 and permission of the Department Chair. (Spring)

ECO 495 - Senior Session

Required of all seniors majoring in economics. Students participate in colloquia on economic problems, theory, and policy; prepare projects on economic issues (see below); and take comprehensive examinations that include the ETS Major Field Test in economics, an oral exam and written examinations in economic theory and analysis.

Prerequisites:  Economics 202, 203, and 205 or permission of the instructor. (Spring)

Group Projects: One part of the Senior Session experience requires each student to participate in a group project. Each student should register in one of five group projects described below. Space in each section is limited.

ECO 495A:  Tax System Design for Peru

Group Advisor: Baker

Students will have the opportunity to develop a system of taxation for a country.  You will start with a clean slate.  It is incumbent upon your group to design a system of taxation that you feel is equitable and has a realistic chance of functioning. You will use Peru as your subject country.  You have been hired as consultants by the Peruvian government to propose a revised system of taxation.  You will research the country to learn about its history, culture, national budgets/priorities, and economy.  You will determine the level of funding needed by the country to meet the goals established by its government. You will research various systems of taxation from which you can choose. 

ECO 495B:  Effective Altruism

Group Advisor: Fitz

Effective altruism acknowledges that many individuals want to help others while emphasizing the importance of finding the most effective ways to do good.  As a result, this growing movement draws heavily upon the empirical findings of development economists.  Through a debate of various causes (including, for example, direct cash transfers, deworming, malaria prevention, women’s empowerment, or even asteroid prevention), this Senior Session will determine which charities are the best recipients of our marginal charitable donations.  

ECO 495C: Greek Debt Crisis & the Euro

Group Advisor: Kumar 

Our task will be to assess the future of the Euro. We will examine the lessons of the Greek debt crisis of 2015 and the vulnerabilities it has created for the Euro to serve as a common currency for nineteen Eurozone countries. We will explore these issues in sub-groups representing the Greek government, its troika of lenders, and the economists advising them. We will compile a report that addresses the problems of political economy, governance, and macroeconomic adjustment in the optimum currency areas framework, and present our findings to the class.

ECO 495D:  Presidential Politics & Economics

Group Advisor: Ross 

This group will identify three to five promising presidential candidates and study their proposed economic programs. In subgroups, we shall identify their policies in critical areas: macroeconomics, microeconomics (including migration), and equity. We will assess the consistency of each candidate’s economic program and research any recent historical experience with their stated policies. Our work will conclude with presentations to the entire senior session (and invited guests) and a secret ballot indicating preference for the soundness of the candidates’ economics.

ECO 495E: Boards of Directors, Information & Shareholder Value

Group Advisor: Stroup 

How can shareholders induce CEOs and managers to act in their interests? This project will study policies aimed at improving corporate governance in America’s public corporations. To do this, we will break into groups that will study corporate directors’ dual role as strategic advisors and as monitors of the CEO and management. We will ask how several proposed policies affect the board’s ability to create value in the merger and acquisition (“M&A”) market by examining the details of recent takeover negotiations in which CEOs bargained over the price at which one company would be sold to another.

EDU 121 - History of Educational Theory and Practice

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Fall and Spring)

EDU 131 - Schools, Cinema, and American Culture

This course explores how “school films” have become authoritative texts on what counts as good education.  We will examine how students, educators, and school communities are represented in film, particularly in regard to race, nation, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.  We will interrogate implicit assumptions and hidden messages in cinematic portrayals of school life with a focus on teachers’ lives, work and careers.  We will re-imagine the cinematic role in shaping educational practices, policies, and law.  Students will write analytical papers and complete a major research project.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

EDU 141 - Introduction to Philosophy of Education

A study of classic and contemporary documents in Philosophy of Education. Includes readings, discussions, and analyses of approximately twenty different philosophers from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century.

Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

EDU 221 - Schools and Society

EDU 234 - Child Psychopathology (=MHU 244/PSY 234

 An overview of the psychological disorders of childhood, including their description, classification, etiology, assessment and treatment. Emphasis will be placed on the theoretical and empirical bases of these disorders, focusing on relevant research methods and findings as well as case history material.

Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Educational Studies minor credit.

Medical Humanities interdisciplinary minor credit.

Psychology Major credit (Clinical column)

Prerequisites & Notes
PSY 101

EDU 241 - Child Development (= PSY 241)

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement. 
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Psychology 101. (Fall)

EDU 242 - Educational Psychology (= PSY 242)

Students entering 2012 or later: satisfies Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered 2015-16.)

EDU 243 - Adolescent Development (= PSY 243)

Students entering 2012 or after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Psychology 101

EDU 250 - Multicultural Education

This course examines the ways in which schools and society in the United States engage with diverse individuals and groups, as well as how obstacles to ever-increasing multiculturalism are rooted in behaviors, assumptions, values, thinking and communication styles.  The course will be taught using the intergroup dialogue model where two facilitators of differing social identity groups encourage dialogue among students about persistent social issues and conflicts related to race, racism, and the intersections of class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and immigration/migration background.  The intergroup dialogue approach to teaching multicultural education is pedagogically unique.  The class is balanced with approximately half of the students self-identifying as White and the other half identifying as Students of Color or racial minorities in the United States and at Davidson College.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Provides credit toward the Ethnic Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement. 

Prerequisites & Notes
This course is by permission only and a pre-registration survey must be completed before the instructors determine the final class roster.
 

EDU 260 - Oppression & Education (=SOC 261)

(Cross-listed as SOC 261.) This course examines various manifestations of oppression in the United States and the questions they raise about inequality and social justice within educational institutions.  We will apply methods of critical analysis drawn from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and psychology to an examination of social issues in the United States educational system.  We will examine education as a central site of conflict over the gap between the United States’ egalitarian mission and its unequal structure, processes, and outcomes.  Students will rethink contemporary solutions to social diversity in education, develop a social justice framework which emphasizes inequality, and design an institutional ethnographic project as a critical intervention in schools and society.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Provides credit towards the Educational Studies minor and the Ethnic Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.

EDU 270 - Democracy and Education

Democracy and Education examines philosophical and theoretical positions which contend that education is a public good and is essential to the cultivation of a democratic civil society. Through critical analysis and scrutiny, students investigate the notion that public schooling in the United States should be based on principles of equitable access and that every individual has a right to educational opportunities which are just, fair, and democratic.  

Provides credit towards the Educational Studies minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

EDU 300 - Seminar: Special Topics in Educational Studies

EDU 301 - Independent Study in Education

EDU 302 - Field Placement in Education

EDU 320 - Growing up Jim Crow

Examines how a generation learned race and racism in the Age of Jim Crow.  Through multiple and intersecting lenses, students will examine texts, such as oral histories, literary narratives, and visual representations of various topics.  Topics will include Jim Crow schooling, white supremacy, disenfranchisement, lynching, rape, resistance, interracial harmony, and desegregation.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Provides credit toward the Educational Studies Minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Historical Thought distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.

EDU 330 - Sociology of Education (=SOC 330)

(Cross-listed as SOC 330.) An introduction to the sociological study of education in the United States, including an examination of the school as an organization within a larger environment. Explores the link between schools and social stratification by analyzing the mutually generative functions of schools and considers how processes within schools can lead to different outcomes for stakeholders.

Provides major credit in Sociology and satisfies a requirement in the Educational Studies Minor.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Fall)

EDU 340 - Education in African American Society (=SOC 340)

EDU 350 - Latino(a) Education in the United States

This course will examine the schooling experiences and educational attainment of Latinos & Latinas in the United States.  We will explore the impact of culture, gender, class, and immigration on Latino/a educational experiences, as well as the impact structures and settings, activism and advocacy, and politics and economics can have on educational attainment.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

EDU 360 - Seminar in Second Language Acquisition

This course provides an introduction to second language acquisition theories and research, exploring the limits and possibilities of instructed and natural contexts. Topics include the nature of language, the role of the native language, second language acquisition universals, theoretical and pedagogical approaches, nonlanguage influences, instructed second language learning, and linguistic data analysis. Students will engage in critical discussions of the readings and observations of foreign/second language classes, and either produce a research-based instructional intervention or linguistic fieldwork analysis.

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Educational Studies.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Students must have fulfilled Davidson’s foreign language requirement or its equivalent before enrolling in the course.

EDU 370 - War, Peace, & Education

War, Peace, and Education confronts the complex relationship most Americans have with war by detecting components of the hidden curriculum in schools that serve to endorse war.  The course will focus on five such components:  masculinity and hero worship, patriotism, hatred, religion’s frequent support of war, and war as an arena for supplying existential meaning.

Provides credit toward the Educational Studies minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Philosophical & Religious Perspectives distribution requirement

EDU 371 - Critical Race Theory (=SOC 371, =AFR 371)

Introduces students to the development of critical race theory as a specific theoretical framework to explain or to investigate how race and racism are organized and operate within the United States.  The course will have a sociological focus with emphasis on critical race scholarship that includes, but is not limited to, an analysis of double consciousness, colorblindness, intersectionality, whiteness as property, racial microaggressions, and structures of power.  Students will also explore central tenets and key writings advanced in the 1990s primarily by African American, Latino/a, and Asian American scholars in law, education, and public policy.  The course is both reading intensive and extensive with a major writing assignment that addresses a theoretical problem that grows out of the course topics and discussions. 

Satisfies a major requirement in Sociology and Africana Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies.
Satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

ENG 110 - Course list for Introduction to Literature

ENG110 Graphic Medicine:  Drawing Disability
Instructor
Fox

Why is the graphic novel literary? And why has it become an immensely popular site for the representation of illness, disability, and medicine?  In this Introduction to Literature class, we’ll start with the premise that the unique intersection of word, color, image, text, and juxtaposition offered by the graphic novel offers authors singular opportunities for storytelling. We will further ask: what do comics, zines, and graphic novels have to teach us about our varied kinds of embodiment, particularly about disabled bodies? We will consider how these visual texts teach us about how bodies engage with the social and medical contexts surrounding them. Encompassing everything from bipolar disorder to cancer, depression to HIV/AIDS, epilepsy to deafness, and end-of-life issues to amputation, possible course works may include Epileptic, Cancer Vixen, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, and Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michaelangelo, and Me. 

ENG110 Introduction to Comedy
Instructor
Ingram

This course offers an overview of the comic tradition in English, from the Middle Ages to the present, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Arrested Development.  Although humor will be a recurring feature of some texts and of most class meetings, this course traces how comedies respond to inescapable challenges of human life:  social and political structures as apparent obstacles to the desires of individuals; the body and its failings, to the point of death; art, particularly comedy, as a reassuring (or maybe deceptive) refuge of happy endings that can seem elusive in life.  Different eras respond differently to those challenges, so the course offers a broad survey of literary and cultural history.  Over the semester, students and professor alike will look for comedy in surprising places, including in the form of the course itself, certain to end happily, before it has even begun.
 

ENG110 Introduction to Environmental Literature (=ENV 210)
Instructor
Staff

(Cross-listed as Environmental 210.)  An introduction to environmental literature covering poetry, short fiction, novels, and non-fiction prose.)  Topics include nature and wilderness, justice, place, food, and activism, with particular attention to literary responses to significant environmental issues.

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

ENG 110 Introduction to Environmental Literature: Food Literature (= ENV 210)
Instructor
Merrill

(Cross-listed as Environmental 210).

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 depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 110 Introduction to Shakespeare
Instructor
Ingram

This course is designed for students who have encountered at least a little Shakespeare-in a book or on a stage or on a screen-and who have enjoyed those encounters. It surveys a selection of Shakespeare’s plays, including comedies (Much Ado about Nothing), histories (Henry V), tragedies (Othello), and hybrids of several genres (The Tempest). We will approach the plays primarily through close-reading and spirited conversation, but also through in-class performances, film adaptations, and occasional critical texts. At the end of the semester, students enrolled in the course will choose our final play, as a step out of the classroom and toward a lifetime relationship with the writer who most shaped our words and still shapes our world.

ENG 110 Literature of Celebrity
Instructor
Staff

An introduction to literary thought, including attention to the tasks of close reading and of building sustained arguments in written form about texts. Focuses on writing about the idea of fame, both in the contemporary world and throughout the past. Includes attention to a variety of literary forms, including novels, short stories, poetry, drama, film, and creative nonfiction. Major credit.
Grading: 25% papers, 25% tests and quizzes, 25% final exam, 25% consistency and thoughtfulness of class participation and discussion.

ENG 110 Literature and Medicine
Instructor
Vaz

Science and medicine have indelibly influenced how we understand and respond to the physical and mental state of being human.  We will consider how an appreciation of literary texts and the questions they broach give us a different insight into the human condition and affect our awareness of health, addiction, illness, disease, suffering, recovery, and death.  In doing so, we will also pay close attention to the cultural coding of these issues, as we examine how gender, class, race, sexual orientation, or other cultural biases color our perceptions of health, disease, suffering and death.

ENG 110 Literature & Social Change
Instructor
Parker

An exploration of the ethics of art-making amid current social issues, in conversation with the authors studied-all of whom will either visit class or video-conference with the class.

Major credit.

ENG 110  Media and Community
Instructor
Churchill
 
From Walt Whitman’s broad embrace of American readers in the 1860s to the digital social networks of today, this course examines how various media form communities of readers and writers. We will investigate how lyric poetry creates one kind of intimacy between author and reader, how blogs establish another, and how the NBC television comedy Community builds its own cult following. Davidson College meets Greendale Community College in a course that teaches you how to read, analyze, and respond critically and creatively to various forms of media. 

ENG 110 The Front Porch: 2x4
Instructor
Staff

This course invites non-majors interested in a literature course to enter the house of southern fiction.  During this semester, we will study two works (a novel and a collection of short fiction) by four authors from the American South.

Authors and works include the following:

     Flannery O’Connor:  Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
     Ernest Gaines:  A Lesson Before Dying and Bloodline
     Lee Smith:  Fair and Tender Ladies and Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-eyed Stranger
     Tony Earley:  Jim the Boy and Here we are in Paradise

If you like good stories filled with uncommon characters and want to experience four powerful voices from the American south, please join the class.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 115 - The Art, Science, and Fascination of Fragrance

Description: This is a new kind of course, built bottom-up from the kinds of curiosity about the sense of smell expressed by students and professors in a liberal arts college. Not all of these questions have answers, but this course strives to give you  the feeling that you are looking in the right direction as you consider the  fascination of fragrance, the science of scent, and the passion and profit of perfume.  You and professors from Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Classics, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, and Psychology will think together and think out loud about what would be the best  next step  in formalizing your own curiosity about olfaction.  So the course is really a series of investigations into the art, biology, chemistry economics, history, and psychology of fragrances.

Organizing Questions: How exactly does the sense of smell work?  Why do we have considerable numbers of olfactory receptors yet a rather small vocabulary for describing smells?  Did the sense of smell shape the human face? Are perfumes aphrodisiacs? Why are aphrodisiacs named after Aphrodite? What are nectar and ambrosia in Homer’s epics? Do fragrances alter moods?   What makes  tangerine fragrance as effective as Valium in lowering stress? Can fragrances really bring back memories?  What role do fragrances play in religious rituals? Why do skins react differently to the same perfume? How did the ancients make/use/store perfumes? Why myrrh and frankincense?  Are there always smells in the air?  Beyond inviting pollinators, of what use are fragrances to fragrant plants? How come mirror image molecules smell so different? How come some fragrances last long on me and some don’t? What is the link between fragrance and flavor? What is the Spice Road and how did it come about?  If I like perfume  X, what other perfumes might I like? Why?   How do people lose their sense of smell? Is losing one’s sense of smell predictive of certain diseases? How do dogs smell cancer? Why do men seem to pay less attention to smells than women do? Are women really 1000 times more sensitive to musk than men are?  Is there a relation between odor and morality? Can human behavior be subliminally manipulated by odors? Does aromatherapy work? Why do I love some fragrances and hate others?  How come old people’s perfumes smell so strong? Is it true that animal urine is used in perfumery? Is there really a smell of fear? Are organic perfumes better than synthetic ones? Why is there the persistent belief in human pheromones? What exactly are notes in a fragrance? How many different smells can a human nose distinguish? How big is the fragrance industry?  What does it take to succeed in it?  What’s up with celebrity perfumes? What perfumes did Cleopatra use? In what organs do human have odor receptors?  

Texts:  Rachel Herz,  The Scent of Desire;   Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy:  A Natural History of Perfume;   Patrick Susskind, Perfume;  Scent of a Woman; Essays on the art, history, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics of fragrance; Poems and stories on fragrance  themes.

This course gives English credit and fulfills the Liberal Studies core requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 116 - Gesture

From our non-verbal cues in daily conversation to our postures, gaits, facial expressions, and movements, gesture plays a significant role in our daily communications with one another. Whether we are using sign language or watching the unfolding of a graceful développé in ballet, we are tuned in to the ways in which our gestures communicate meaning. The study of gesture is a multidisciplinary effort, as scholars draw on fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, performance studies, dance, neuroscience, anthropology, linguistics, behavioral science, and literary analysis. This course will examine the interpenetrations of gesture with both speech and thought in a series of cultural artifacts, ranging from the silent film comedy of Buster Keaton in The General (1926) and the fiction of Nathanael West and Zadie Smith, to the YouTube videos of Chris Crocker (“Leave Britney Alone!”) and the documentaries Paris is Burning (1990) and Rize (2005). What does it mean to study gesture in an interdisciplinary way? What questions do theorists of gesture ask of the literary and cultural artifacts they study?  How do gestures amplify our understanding of each other and of literary characters and documentary subjects? Rooted in close reading and analysis, this class will ask students to consider how our movements create meaning and what those meanings suggest about our culture(s) and the other cultures under consideration in the course.

Satisfies a Liberal Studies requirement.

ENG 201 - Professional Writing

ENG 202 - Introduction to Creative Writing

This course will empower you explore your creative thoughts through reading in and experimenting with three genres: poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. So much of college life will involve sorting out the sense of self you had when you arrived from the varying identities you’ll have an opportunity to adopt. Short lectures on craft and mechanics for each genre, writing exercises, discussion of readings, and interactive peer workshops will help you navigate the creative writing and revision process and make sense of your evolving worldviews and artistic voices. Peer workshops also will help you learn the importance of respectfully giving and receiving constructive feedback on your work’s resonance with an audience. We’ll be using exercises from Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft and Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand as we explore these genres.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

Limited to first- and second-year students.

ENG 203 - Introduction to Writing Poetry

 

Prerequisites & Notes

(Offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 204 - Introduction to Writing Fiction

Practice in the writing of short fiction with some reading of contemporary fiction writers in English.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015 and Spring 2016.)

ENG 205 - Introduction to Writing Plays

This course is a workshop, where virtually everything will be based upon, work from, and be inspired by, the writing that you and others in your class accomplish.  The course is based on learning the discipline and rigors of writing daily, creating and listening to dialogue, and making individual scenes work. 

Satisfies a major requirement in English

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement

Students entering before 2012: satisfies literature distribution requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 211 - Playwriting/Screenwriting

This course is a workshop, where virtually everything will be based upon, work from, and be inspired by, the films you and others in your class accomplish.  The course is based on learning the discipline and rigors of thinking visually, daily.

Satisfies a major requirement in English

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement

Students entering before 2012: satisfies literature distribution requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 220 - Literary Analysis

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

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015 and Spring 2016.)

ENG 231 - Young Adult Fiction

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 240 - British Literature to 1800

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 241 - Medieval, Monsters & Magic

This course will explore fantasy literature that draws on medieval images, motifs, narrative traditions, and social configurations–texts that operate in the fictional mode known as “medievalism.” We will be especially interested in the possibilities opened up by the use of magic and monstrosity in these fictional worlds and will examine the ways that writers in various non-medieval contexts use monstrosity, magic, and medievalism for their own purposes. The readings will range from early modern fantasy narratives that draw on a medieval past to contemporary literary fantasy novels. These readings will be supported with selected texts from the literature of Middle Ages. By the end of the course, we will have not only read some wonderful fantasies but also outlined a literary history of medievalism. Students will be encouraged to develop projects that use the course framework to interpret the medievalisms of contemporary popular culture, including comics, genre fiction, film, television, and video games.Instructor
Ford

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 244 - Arthurian Masculinities: Queerness in the Age of Chivalry

Exploration of the Arthurian tradition with special emphasis on the construction and function of masculinity and gender in the world of King Arthur’s court. Readings will be drawn from medieval English and continental Arthurian narratives as well as medieval intellectual culture and contemporary gender theory and queer theory. The course will present medieval writers as dynamically engaged in the interrogation and reshaping of concepts gender in their own times and places. It will likewise investigate our present-day inheritance from the Arthurian tradition, with particular reference to the notions of “courtesy” and “chivalry.”

Satisfies a major requirement in English

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing & Rhetoric distribution requirement

Students entering before 2012: satisfies literature distribution requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 260 - British Literature since 1800

ENG 261 - Modern Drama (= THE 261)

ENG 271 - Disability in Literature and Art

In this course, we will explore disability as it is depicted in literary and cultural texts, from the canon to disability culture.  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.  We will reconsider disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and learn about the presence of disability culture.  Rather than trying to catalogue all the examples of disability in literature, this course 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 literature; examine how disability is a culturally constructed category like race, gender, class, and sexuality (and how it intersects with those); study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture; and consider how disability aesthetics can meaningfully contribute to the processes and products of artistic creation.  This course presumes no prior coursework in English and welcomes those from across the disciplines interested in studying the social and cultural experience of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirements

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 280 - A: American Literature to 2000 OR B: American Literature Through the Twentieth Century

Instructor
Kuzmanovich, Nelson, Staff

Designed for majors and prospective majors.  Historical survey treating the development of American letters from the beginnings through the twentieth century. Students who major in English should complete 280 by the end of the junior year. Those who cannot meet this deadline must make special arrangements with the Chair.

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

(Offered Fall 2015.)

B: American Literature Through the Twentieth Century

Instructor
Staff

(Offered Spring 2016)
 

ENG 281 - Southern Literature

ENG 282 - African American Literature: The African American Elegy– A Legacy of Protest

In this course,  we will explore a new genealogy for protest literature vis-à-vis an African American literary subgenre that few scholars have examined intently. ​We will navigate gaps in the current historicization of African American elegiac writing and its poetic elegies as we explore a centuries-long genealogy and theorization of protest in African American poetics and performance. We resituate the poetics in the prose and lineated poems of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and others through the mid-twentieth century on a continuum of protest, not as its progenitors. Rather, our genesis for protest will be in the eighteenth-century ballads of Lucy Terry Prince, the nameless toilers who birthed the Negro Spirituals, and the poems of Phillis Wheatley. As a historiography of African American poetics these women to immediate past poet laureate Natasha Trethewey unfolds, gendered readings parse the ways that black women personae serve as harbingers of post-traumatic protest in the lingering aftermath of chattel slavery and its cruel twentieth-century descendant, Jim Crow. We will interrogate how these personae allow African American elegists to make palpable the experiences that mark black women as forebears of a multi-ethnic consciousness that complicates the relationship that generations of their sons’ and daughters’ sons and daughters, conceived under duress at best and by force at worst, have with black maternity and their own sexualities. 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 283 - Short Prose Fiction

Theory and development of the short story with emphasis on 19th- and 20th-century authors. Lecture, discussion, and workshops. Some attention given to writing for publication.  

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

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.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirements.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 285 - Representations of HIV/AIDS (= BIO 263)

(Cross-listed as Biology 263). What happens when literary critics and scientists converse? In this team-taught course, we will examine texts related to HIV/AIDS through the lens of the artist and the lens of the biologist.

Students entering 2012 and after: Satisfies Liberal Studies distribution requirement. 
Students entering before 2012: satisfies either the literature or non-lab science requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 286 - Native American Literature

Literature of the native peoples of North America, including myths and oral traditions, autobiography, poetry, drama, and fiction; emphasis on 19th- and 20th-century works.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement, Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor - Native American Track.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 287 - Indian Literature in English

An overview of literature written in English by authors from India. Genres include fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, from the 19th century to the present. Includes writers from the Indian diaspora as well as those not widely-known outside India. 

Satisfies a major requirement in English. 
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Counts toward the South Asian Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Counts toward the Africana Studies major.
Students entering 2012 or after: satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 288 - 20th Century World Theatre Drama (= THE 285)

Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 289 - Environmental Literature

Overview of environmental literature, covering various time periods and genres. 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 a major requirement in Environmental Studies or in English.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies distribution requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 290 - World Literature

Designed for majors and prospective majors.  Historical survey of selected texts outside the British and American literary traditions. Students who major in English should complete 290 by the end of the junior year. Those who cannot meet this deadline must make special arrangements with the Chair.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature diversity distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

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.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 293 - Film as Narrative Art

This course explores the relationship of film video to other narrative media, with emphasis on authorship, genre, and the relationship of verbal and visual languages. Students will make a short video, but the course does not assume any production experience.

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 294 - Harlem Renaissance

Topics vary.  

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.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement. Counts toward the English Major, the Africana Studies Major, andthe Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor Africana Track.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

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.   

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 297 - Caribbean Literature

The Caribbean is key to any understanding of the New World. Caribbean Literature takes students beyond the islands’ popular music, food, and landscapes to an understanding of the formation of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India that have produced two Nobel Laureates. In novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, we see how love leads to the death of a young woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. We’ll understand, too, why and how Aime Cesaire rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest to allow for the resurrection of the spirit of Caliban’s mother, Sycorax. Students do not need to know theory to take this course.  

Students may retake this course for credit when the topic/readings change with instructor’s permission.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature and the Cultural diversity distribution requirement.
Counts toward the English Major, the Africana Studies Major, and the Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor Africana Track.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Springi 2016.)

ENG 301 - A: Advanced Nonfiction or B: Creative Nonfiction

301A Advanced Nonfiction

Instructor 
Campbell, Miller

This workshop-driven course pursues the advanced study of nonfiction in a variety of genres in the arts and sciences (e.g. science/nature writing, the review, food writing, travel writing). In each genre studied, students read professional model essays, write an essay in the genre, and respond to one another’s work. For the final independent project, students submit an article for publication.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

301B Creative Nonfiction
Lewis

In preparation for writing in a variety of nonfiction modes–including describing people and places, narrative, analysis, and memoir–students read notable essays as models.  The class centers on writing workshops, in which students critique one another’s drafts.  At theend of the semester, each student proposes and crafts a final, longer essay.

(Offered Fall 2015.)

 

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

ENG 303 - Advanced Poetry Writing

Satisfies the Distribution Requirement for Literature and Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

Permission of the instructor required. Course may be repeated for credit.

ENG 304 - Advanced Fiction Writing

Advanced work in writing fiction.  

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

Permission of the instructor required. Course may be repeated for credit. 

ENG 305 - Advanced Playwriting

ENG 306 - Filmmaking

ENG 310 - The English Language

ENG 340 - Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Special topics in a selection of Medieval and Renaissance texts (to 1660) with attention to critical approaches.

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 342 - A: Medieval Women or B: “Others” in the Middle Ages

ENG 342B - Crusade, Violence, and Literature
Instructor
Ford

This course examines the medieval literary representations of religious violence. We will focus primarily on narrative texts depicting the complex, multi-stage military encounters in the Levant and Asia Minor from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, known collectively as the Crusades. The famous, infamous, and fictionalized figures at the center of these conflicts-Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Saladin, and Bevis of Hampton-will occupy much of our attention. We will also encounter several texts that read Crusades patterns of religious violence into other contexts: the “Matter of Britain” material (Arthurian narratives) and the “Matter of France” material (Carolingian narratives) primarily but also a provocative medieval retelling of the life of Buddha in which Buddha becomes a Christian Crusader king. We will also read Jewish and Islamic accounts of Crusades violence and attempt to make sense of the vast range of perspectives on this international conflict. Throughout the course, we will pursue such questions as: How do medieval Christians (or medieval Muslims or Jews) depict their ideological and military opponents? What justifications-assumed or articulated-are offered in support of violent actions? What condemnations are leveled against violent enemies? Where are the boundaries between the Christian and the (Jewish or Muslim) other? Between heretic and infidel? Between fellow citizen and enemy? Are these boundaries permeable? If so, to what extent? The Crusades raise questions like these in medieval readers and writers. Consequently, the Crusades narratives become fascinating windows into the culture and worldview of the Middle Ages as well as useful tools with which to think about the rhetoric, ideology, and iconography of geopolitical tensions in our own time.

(Offered Spring 2016.)

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

 

ENG 343 - Chaucer

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor. (Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 352 - Shakespeare and the Problem of Evil

Instructor
Lewis

Shakespeare’s plays dominated the stage during an era when theologians were struggling to account for human evil and disagreeing as to its origins and nature.  If all creation stemmed from God and if God was absolutely good, how could God be responsible for bringing evil into the world?  If an all-knowing God could foresee the fall of Adam and Eve, why, with His infinite power, didn’t he stop it?  And what are the boundaries of their original sin?  Is it inherited or, rather, inevitable after birth?  Can a baby be free of it-innocent?  Although discussions in this class won’t be confined to such questions alone, we’ll focus on Shakespeare’s villains and the mixed goodness of his heroes, with an eye to his ever-evolving exploration of what motivates human behavior.  Titles may include Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Henry V, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Cymbeline, The Tempest.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 353 - A: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries or B: Studies in English Renaissance Literature or C: Donne

353A  Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Instructor
Lewis

Although Shakespeare tends to overshadow all other writers of his age, he was actually but one of many working, accomplished dramatists of the period who influenced and competed with one another.  By exploring a series of pairings between a Shakespeare play and a play by one of his contemporaries (for example, The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta), this course surveys not just Shakespearean drama, but, more broadly, early modern drama.  A discussion-based class that explores Shakespeare in his network, the course also attends to original staging conditions of the plays and to some of the most pressing questions about performance.  A guiding principle of the class is that all of the plays, now neatly presented by editors and publishers for study in the classroom, were originally conceived of as living, malleable scripts for actors.

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

353B Studies in Renaissance Literature

Instructor 
Ingram or Lewis

Topics in Renaissance literature such as Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Renaissance schools of poetry, and Northern humanist culture.

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)


353C Donne

Instructor
Staff

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

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

ENG 355 - Seminar: 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.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 360 - A: Desire or B: British Literature Since 1945 or C: Trad/Originality

360A - Desire

Instructor
Fackler

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 Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

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

360B -  British Literature Since 1945

Instructor
Fackler

An analysis of the novels, short fiction, drama, and poetry of the postwar years in Britain, up to the present moment, with special attention to both historical context and the stylistic innovations of the period.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

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

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

360C - Tradition and Originality
Instructor
Ingram

This course charts the shifting definitions of both “tradition” and “originality” in British literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.  The course will consider these shifting definitions in three overlapping contexts:  literary (how can a text so obviously and deeply indebted to other texts as Milton’s Paradise Lost claim to accomplish “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”?  how do literary artists respond as the list of “things unattempted yet” shrinks?); historical (how did changing concepts of authorship and of intellectual property both shape and reflect British literature of the period?); theoretical (who or what defines “tradition”?  to what extent is “originality” possible-or desirable?).  In a series of case studies, the course examines some origin stories, such as where the novel came from and how some writers became celebrities.  It follows those stories to the present day, with the awareness that issues of tradition and originality extend beyond any course.

ENG 361 - Eighteenth Century Pop Culture

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

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

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

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.
 

(Offered Spring 2016.)

 

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. 

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 370 - Davidson Summer Program at Cambridge University

ENG 371 - Victorian Literature

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

Selected British and Commonwealth fiction from 1800 to 2000. 

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 373 - Transatlantic Poetries

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

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.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirements.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 380 - Studies in American Literature

Special topics in American literature with attention to critical approaches. 

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 381 - American Fiction: 19th Century

Historical and theoretical understanding of romanticism, realism, and naturalism, with attention to Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Crane, and others. 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015. )

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 382 - Ethnic American Literatures: Black Literature Since 1953– The Poetics of Black Beauty

ENG 383 - Ethnic American Literature-Black Poetics and “the Queer”

Predating the nation’s founding, African American literature has been marked since its inception by its writers 1) affirming their equal humanity under the auspices of divine forces while being treated as subhuman property; 2) staking claim upon and expanding the ideals of what constitutes American identity and culture; and 3) reflecting on their state of being as those living with what preeminent scholar W.E.B. Du Bois terms a “double consciousness,” a keen, spiritual awareness of a dual citizenship and ancestry in these United States and in a continent that has always been at once reviled for its link to dark skin and religious and cultural difference and revered for its wealth of natural resources. This course will explore that journey of discovery, mourning and protest-subtle in its nuanced critique in the eighteenth century and at times scathing in its nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century manifestations-in the poetics of African American writers. Primarily, we will be studying lineated poetry, but we will also ponder the ways these writers blur and expand genre boundaries in poetic fiction, nonfiction prose, spoken word, and song and in the ways that gender and sexuality further complicate what it means to be non-white and American. This course will close by mining the poetics of writers of color of other ethnicities who have arrived on these shores experiencing similar ostracism and oppression and have adapted African Americans’ creative, rhetorical modes to serve their own poetic (re)visions and expansions of American, non-white identities. In this course, we’ll explore the possibilities of the word “queer,”  as it is used by the writers themselves, both in the classical sense of odd and striking deviation from a norm and for its contemporary theoretical utility in exploring representations of non-heteronormative sexuality and gender performance.​

ENG 385 - Philosophy and the Narrative Arts (= PHI 385)

(Cross-listed as Philosophy 385.)  This course explores philosophical themes in literature and film as well as philosophical questions about the study of narrative arts.  Topics vary and have included freedom and determinism, ethics, authorial intentions, materialism, genre, medium specificity, and realism.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered or not Fall 2015.)