English

Links In This Section English

Home
English

Undergraduates in English may pursue majors and minors in literature and creative writing; at the graduate level, we offer a PhD in literature and an MFA in fiction and poetry. The Department of English also houses the Writing Center, which offers tutoring in writing at all levels and provides multiple other services to the community, including workshops and Writers’ Salons. In a given year, English typically has nearly 100 undergraduate majors and minors, 36 fully funded PhD students, and 13 MFAs. Approximately 4,000 students on average take our composition classes every year, and our Writing Center holds more than 5,000 appointments for more than 1,300 undergraduates, graduates, faculty, staff, and alumni.

There are currently no Majors or Minors.

Courses

ENG 102 - Eco Literature (3 Semester Hours)

Full course for one semester. This course explores the vital relationship between American literature and environmental values, and traces the origins of the America's understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. The class will focus upon Transcendentalist and Utopian movements of the mid-nineteenth century and will include authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Fuller. We will pay special attention to changes in the New England landscape during this era, including the rise of industrialization and urban centers. Special attention will be paid to the sublime, tourism, urban planning, utopian communities, and sustainable farming. Genres covered include essays, short stories, novels, and travel literature. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing.

ENG 202 - Introduction to Narrative (3 Semester Hours)

Full course for one semester. In this course we will consider the historical development of the genre and techniques of the graphic novel in America. Our reading of the graphic novel will be contextualized within postmodernism and the changes in the notions of childhood, heroism, and evil in twentieth and twenty-first century American culture. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of narrative and will include analysis of genre, panels, framing devices, layout, speech, plot, and characterization. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments.

ENG 301 - Literary and Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (3 Semester Hours)

Full course for one semester. This course is designed to introduce students to the literary and visual cultures of eighteenth-century Britain and their connections. We will read prose by Defoe, Johnson, Walpole, and Austen; poetry by Pope, Swift, Gray, Goldsmith, Blake, Collier, and Duck; and drama by Gay. We will also study discussions of aesthetics by Burke and Reynolds and the work of artists Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, and Wright of Derby, as well as the role of patrons such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

ENG 303 - Introduction to Film (4 Semester Hours)

Full course for one semester. This course focuses on questions of film form and style (narrative, editing, cinematography, framing, mise-en-scène, sound) and introduces students to concepts in film history and theory (auteurism, spectatorship, the star system, ideology, genre). We will pay particular attention to principles of film narration and film form that are instrumental across the study of literature: plot vs. story, dramatic development, temporal strategies, character development, point of view, symbolism, reality vs. illusion, visual metaphor, and so forth.

ENG 304 - The Making of the Twentieth Century (3 Semester Hours)

This course will focus on American writing produced between 1890 and 1910. Though much of our time will be spent reading novels and short stories—in particular, examples of realist, naturalist, and modernist fiction—we will approach the novel as just one of many narrative arts that played a crucial role in defining the nascent twentieth century. Other genres that we will consider include life writing, the tale, aesthetic and cultural criticism, reportage, photojournalism and the photo book, and protest writing. Our readings will be grouped into five units—"American Life, Writing, and Life Writing," "Race after Reconstruction," "Narrating City Life," "Between Asia and America," and "Modern Women"—and will be drawn from writers such as Henry Adams, Abraham Cahan, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sui Sin Far, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Okakura Kakuzo, Jack London, Frank Norris, Jacob Riis, and Gertrude Stein.