ENG 110 - Course list for Introduction to Literature

Spring 2022

ENG 110 Contemporary American Fiction
Instructor
Sample

This course in 21st century American fiction will concentrate on new novels, short stories, and graphic narratives. 

The study of fiction includes the story itself as well as how the story is told; as a result, the work of “Contemporary American Fiction” will also concentrate upon formal analysis using literary terminology. Access to many of the writers will be afforded: the class will either meet in person or videoconference with many of the authors whose works are read. Two essays, one digital project, and some shorter writing exercises will be required; a midterm and final can be expected.

Satisfies a major requirement in English
Satisfies a CIS major requirement in Global Literary Theory
Satisfies a minor requirement in English
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

ENG 110 Graphic Med: 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, deafness to end-of-life issues, possible course works may include Rx, Cancer Vixen, Stitches, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, and Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michaelangelo, and Me.  Students will also make their own comic!

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies a Public Health Minor Requirement
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement
Satisfies a major requirement in English
Satisfies a minor requirement in English

ENG 110 Literature & 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.

Satisfies the Public Health Interdisciplinary Minor

Fall 2021

ENG 110 Video Game Talk
Instructor
Jung

In this course, we will consider audio-visual-interactive media known as video games as primary texts to explore the art of storytelling, poetry, and essay. Students will be required to analyze themes, motifs, and the intersection between mechanics and contents of this relatively new media, which has quickly matured into a major form of human expression. Some, but not all, of the video games we will talk about include: Legend of Zelda series, Dark Souls, Red Dead Redemption II, God of War, Disco Elysium, Undertale, Kentucky Route Zero, and others. Furthermore, the class will engage in discussing the culture surrounding video games by reading and watching video game journalism and criticism. We will also read relevant texts from older literary forms to explore how they have influenced the art of video games. For example: what is the thematic connection between Hidetaka Miyazaki’s fragmentary storytelling in Dark Souls and T.S. Eliot’s fragmented poetry in The Waste Land? Throughout the course, students will also get a chance to critically and creatively express their experiences playing video games.

Satisfies a major requirement in English
Satisfies a CIS major requirement in Global Literary Theory
Satisfies a minor requirement in English
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

OTHER TOPICS (not offered in current academic year):

ENG 110 Literary Monsters
Instructor
Ingram

This course examines monsters in widely varied texts.  Some are influential classics, such as Beowulf, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Some are recent works by prominent writers, such as Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and short fiction by Margaret Atwood and Karen Russell.  Some are bestsellers, such as Stephen King’s The Outsider; films, such as Nosferatu and Night of the Living Dead; and television shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Penny Dreadful.  One is a graphic novel with a topic and a title to suit this course, Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.  

Each text will be contextualized, so that students will discuss each monster as a response to distinct fears.  Students will also discuss the unstable place of monsters in cultural history, so essential to ancient and medieval texts at the core of the canon, yet later associated with popular entertainment.  Like all who survive encounters with monsters, the students of this section will come away with new questions and new ways of reading.

ENG 110 Shakespeare & Sports
Instructor
Lewis

Contemporary sports and Elizabethan theater have much in common. Both present spectacles, before a rowdy audience, in an arena. Both involve rehersal and scripted performance. Both require guides, whether a director or a coach. Both create rivalry, whether between teams or acting companies. Most important, both center on stories that thrive on the essential, exhilarating, and painful human experience. Like Shakespeare’s plays, sports history yields instances of extraordinary heroism and of heart-breaking mistakes. Real athletes find reflection in many of Shakespeare’s best known characters. Take, for instance, Dale Earrnhardt, Jr., whose larger-than-life father haunts him as King Hamlet’s ghost haunts his son. Andre Agassi’s second chance at tennis recalls The Tempest’s Prospero, who is exiled from and returns to dominate another court. This class explores how such moments and people in sports find reflection in Shakespeare’s works.

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.

ENG 110 - Media & 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. 

Satisfies a Media & Community topic requirement of the Digital Studies interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 110 Growing Up in America
Instructor
S. Campbell

In this course, we will consider young adult fiction both from various critical perspectives and within various readerly contexts.  Over the semester, we will:

• Review a brief history of the genre from 1860 to 2000;
• Explore shifting perceptions of gender, sexuality, and coming of age in the United States;
• Discuss in what ways ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic status impact expectations about maturation;
• Consider how reviews of and responses to young adult texts reflect contemporaneous assumptions about the purposes of literature.

Satisfies an elective requirement in the English major.
Satisfies an elective credit in the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor.
Satisfies a Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

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

(Cross-listed as Environmental Studies 210.)  An introduction to global environmental literature.  We’ll focus primarily on short fiction, novels, and non-fiction prose.  The course will introduce students to environmental justice issues as well as contemporary trends in global literature.  Literary and environmental topics include toxicity, waste, food, inequality, the idea of “wilderness,” and activism.  No prior experience studying literature is required.

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

ENG 110 Literature & 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.

Satisfies the Public Health Interdisciplinary Minor