This course covers the fundamentals of academic reading and writing, including communicating clearly on the page and over the internet, both in college and beyond.

This course will explore how BIPOC thinkers have challenged the domination narratives of nationhood in the United States by studying poetry and prose by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and migrant authors. While the focus will be on more recent literatures (from the mid-twentieth century through the present), the syllabus will also include samples of earlier texts by writers like W.E.B. DuBois, or Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Other texts may include those written by Gloria Anzaldúa, Achy Obejas, Luci Tapahonso, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nnedi Okorafor, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. Students will interact with these texts through guided reading, discussion, presentations, and written analysis. They will also be challenged to expand their learning beyond the classroom by applying the concepts discussed to something they encounter in their own lives.

This course situates the critical skills and strategies of expository writing within the larger framework of academic writing. The course builds on the concepts and approaches to argumentation that students have learned from PAEN or ENGL 1010.

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Special topics in English. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Introductory to poetry writing is a workshop course in poetry writing. We will be reading and writing poetry. Students will be introduced to the writing workshop format. Classes are primarily devoted to roundtable discussion of both outside reading and student work. Close reading, in which we note structure, style, tone, and the development of individual voice and point of view, will be the insignia of the class. Through writing exercises, critical readings of both professional and peer writing, constructive reviews, forum discussions, and writing workshops, students will develop the skills necessary to write then revise their own poems. We workshop peer writing where students receive constructive feedback on their own creative writing, participate in the critique of peer work and engage fully in the processes of revision.

This course addresses skills for writing in the business environment. Students learn to differentiate various styles and voice and the documents and occasions appropriate for them.

Students will use the first season of the critically acclaimed AMC television series Mad Men as a springboard for imaginative critical analysis. Additionally, students will reflect on the larger critical issues explored within the show, such as the changing gender politics of the 1960s, the emerging sexual revolution, and the conflict that arises from the cultural expectations and identities that many Americans adopted for themselves in the early 1960s. We will also study basic cinematic elements, as Mad Men is obviously more visual than a standard literary text. Altogether, Mad Men is worth studying because it is a well-made, intricately designed piece of art that rewards in-depth analysis as it keenly attempts to document modern life in America.

This course is not a film appreciation course. Rather, students will use the assigned coming-of-age films as a springboard for imaginative critical analysis and general film study. It’s not necessary to be a fan, per se, of the assigned films; you just have to think about them, critically, from wide-ranging perspectives. We will also study cinematic elements, given the obvious visual nature of the course.

Special topics in English.

Special topics in English.

Special topics in English.

Special topics in English.