The English Department is excited to announce the special topic courses that will be offered by the department in the Spring 2021 semester. See if there is a course that you would be interested in enrolling in for the semester.
ENG 646 Victorian Literature/Victorian Sexualities
Dr. Lanya Lamouria, MW 12:30-1:45 SICL 117
This course will explore Victorian writing about sexuality and gender alongside relevant criticism and theory. Authors covered include Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lewis Caroll, Christina Rossetti, Olive Schreiner, Stevenson, and Wilde. Discussions address Victorian thinking about gender roles, sex work, and queerness, among other topics.
ENG 684: Writing About Food
Ms. Tracy Dalton, W 9:30-10:45 AM, remainder online.
We’ll dive into historical and contemporary food writing, study how it fits into other genres, and practice many formats: Blogs, Cookbooks, Descriptions, Food memoir, Instructions, Research, and Reviews.
ENG 735: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
Dr. Joel Chaston, R 5:30-6:45 ZOOM
A graduate-level introduction to the scholarly study of children’s and young adult literature. We will explore a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to studying literature for the young, applying them to specific texts. Our primary texts are influential novels and picture books featuring journeys—literal, magical, and/or psychological. They include: Carroll’sAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Cormier’sI Am the Cheese, Rowling’sHarry Potter, and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Yolen’sThe Devil’s Arithmetic, Sachar’sHoles, Sendak’sWhere the Wild Things Are “trilogy,” and Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming. Most Thursdays, we will have Zoom discussions from 5:30 to 6:45 p.m. Various materials, including supplemental readings, video lectures, and discussion boards will be available on our Course Blackboard Site. Note: 735 is a changeable topic course, repeatable with different content. From what I can tell, the actual topic, “Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature” does not appear online. In the past, the special has sometimes replaced the generic title, “Seminar in Children’s Literature” on Banner.
ENG 757 Seminar: Early American Literature
Dr. Etta Madden, Modality: BLND = Synchronous meetings three Saturdays, 9-11:45 (Jan. 23, Mar. 6, May 8) & asynchronously INET
Theme: Utopian/Dystopian Visions in 19th-Century US Literature & Culture
Building from popular European, colonial conceptions of utopian islands and America as both Promised Land and devouring wilderness, we will consider primarily nineteenth-century US literature (mostly fiction, mostly novels) as it reinforces and revises these dual views. The influences of economic, gendered, ethnic, and religious cultural divides upon utopian and dystopian visions will be central to the course. The relevance of course themes and theories to twentieth-century and contemporary cultures will be apparent throughout the semester.
Reading assignments will include: Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American, Leonora Sansay’s The Horrors of San Domingo, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Herman Melville’s Typee, Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora, August Jane Evans confederate novel Macaria, and Sutton Grigg’s Jim Crow vision, Imperium in Imperio and short stories about American utopian communities by Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.
ENG 792: Linguistics in Rhetoric and Composition
Dr. Suneeta Thomas, R 5:30-8:20 ZOOM
This course will focus in an Applied Linguistics field titled “Translinguistics & Translingualism” and will be beneficial to students interested in Composition/Writing Studies, teaching English writing to speakers of other languages, bilingual/multilingual literacies, and generally, any observer of language change who would like to teach in the future. The course introduces students to the concept of translanguaging and unpacks the several ways in which translingualism manifests itself in contexts ranging from online to linguistic landscapes, and in the classroom. Students will have the opportunity to explore linguistic elements in translinguistic productions in multilingual spaces.
ENG 793 – Seminar: Linguistics; TOPIC: Corpus Linguistics
Dr. Suneeta Thomas, W 5:30-8:20 ZOOM
Corpus Linguistics is a field that explores theories and analyses of digital, “real-world” texts (corpora) through the use of computer software and concordancing tools. The course will present an overview of the field as well as provide hands-on experience in using corpora for research. Specifically, students will have the opportunity to use AntConc software, and explore online corpora such as Corpus Of Contemporary American English (COCA), British National Corpus (BNC), Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), among others. The course is intended to equip graduate students to analyze any body of digital text (whether it be an academic paper or literary prose) for linguistic features and draw empirical conclusions on the observed linguistic data. Such a methodology once mastered can be used to tailor one’s pedagogy (if the student is an instructor or interested in teaching) or supplement one’s analysis of any type of digital discourse (if the student is an observer/reader of e-texts), based on real-world language use. ENG 793, thus, would prove to be useful for TESOL, and literature/creative writing/science students, alike.