ENG 110 - Course list for Introduction to Literature

Spring 2025

ENG 110 B Comedy and Satire
Instructor
Ingram

Everyday conversations tend to mix comedy and satire, but they are two distinct genres, with distinct literary histories, from ancient Greece to the present. Emphasizing texts originally written in English, this course traces the long trajectory of comedy and satire. Assignments may include literature by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Percival Everett, George Saunders, and Nafissa Thompson-Spires; films and TV shows such as Modern Times, The Princess Bride, Hairspray, Sorry to Bother You, Bottoms, The Simpsons, The Office, Reservation Dogs, and The Bear; as well as texts chosen by members of the class. By the end of the semester, students of the course will understand comedy and satire as highly durable and highly adaptable genres that they can expect to encounter for the rest of their lives, whenever artists imagine a fairer, happier, less-lonely world.

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

Fall 2024

ENG 110A Children’s Literature, Kids Reading
Instructor
S. Campbell
Children’s literature, meaning written works and accompanying illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct young people, includes works ranging from classics of world literature, picture books and easy-to-read stories written for children to fairy tales, fables, primers, and contemporary books.  In 2024, reports bemoan reading losses and struggles among children, while elementary school libraries in some states have had to purge many holdings in responsive to legislation intended to protect children and ensure parental control over content children consume. 

In this course, we will

• Review a brief history of the evolution of children’s literary genres,

• Examine a range of contemporary children’s literature,
• Discuss the purposes of and controversies about such works in elementary school libraries and classrooms,
• Explore case studies of texts impacted by state legislative decisions.

By semester’s end, students will know much about how children’s literature works-and is presumed to work-in and on contemporary American society.

ENG 110C Lyric: Sappho to Taylor Swift
Instructor
Vincent
Grounded in contemporary music, this course explores the history of lyric from Sappho to Taylor Swift. Other key authors include Kendrick Lamar, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, and Petrarch. Each week, we will examine the relevance of lyric poetry to modern music and discover how literary forms have persisted over the centuries. Students will be encouraged to study and share their own favorite songs throughout the semester, and we will receive visits from touring musicians.

ENG 110D History of Science Writing
Instructor
Norris
In this course, we will study the history of science writing in creative nonfiction, examining how writers have crafted meaningful scientific narratives across time. We’ll consider the way narrative strategies have evolved and how each text shapes readers’ understanding of themselves and the world around them. We’ll read a variety of writers, from Rachel Carson to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauret Savoy to Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and our content will vary just as widely, moving from environmental science to medicine, zoology to geology. No matter the text, we will consider the craft supporting the content and what these scientific works might teach us about our place in the world.
 

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 - 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 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 how gender, class, race, sexual orientation, or other cultural biases color our perceptions of physical and mental health.

Satisfies the Public Health Interdisciplinary Minor.
Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing 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 - whether patient or medical practitioner - engage with the social and medical contexts surrounding them. 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 English major and minor requirement 
Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.