English and Creative Writing Courses
ENGL 101: Writing Tutorial
An expository writing course for students identified by the Director of Writing Programs. Does not apply toward the major. Not open to upperclass students.
ENGL 110: Literary Studies
Designed to introduce prospective majors to English studies. Primarily for first-year students but also for others who wish to acquire useful skills as readers and writers by developing critical abilities in studying literature. This course offers students an introduction to specific subject areas in the literary canon and contemporary texts. (Counts as an elective for the English major, Literature Track. ) (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 111: Intro to Prof Writing
(Introduction to Professional Writing) This course introduces students to the kind of writing they may encounter in the work world by exploring the rhetorical principles, writing strategies, and information-mapping practices necessary for producing organized, readable documents - from traditional print business letters and reports to email correspondence and social-media text. This course will provide the tools to effectively gather and refine information, organize it in reader-friendly fashion, and adapt it for the appropriate audience and genre. Students will also hone an economical, direct prose style, which is standard for effective professional writing. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 112: Intro to Editing and Publishing
Introduction to Editing and Publishing. Designed to introduce students to the sorts of questions that arise in contemporary publishing. Primarily for students who wish to acquire useful skills as editors and writers for both campus and professional publications, including print and electronic magazines, journals, or books. Among the topics covered in this course: editorial workflow; copyediting, fact checking, and proofreading; contracts and copyright; working with authors; and marketing and publicity. In order to best use these practical skills, we also look at the differences implicit in various publishing environments (including print and electronic) and the fundamental relationships between author and audience that determine the shape of the text. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 135: Creative Writing
A beginning course in the art of writing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose. Literary analysis will be combined with creative assignments. Group discussions and individual conferences. (Not open to students who have completed English 235.) (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 140: Stories of Resiliency
Imaginative literature from many cultures documents challenges to the individual's personal resiliency. Whether these challenges come from antagonists, from the social norms of the community, or from nature itself, writers of poetry, drama, and fiction have studied the ways people have met, or failed to meet, challenges to their lives, wellbeing, and sanity. Focusing chiefly on American literature from the nineteenth and twentieth century, this course will engage students in discussion of resiliency struggles as they have been framed by the imaginations of great writers. This online course will research activities, threaded interactive discussion, video mini-lectures, and group projects. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 180: Religion, SciFi, and Fantasy
(Religion, Science Fiction, Fantasy) Of the literary genres, perhaps science fiction and fantasy best allow creative artists to imagine real and possible answers to the deep religious questions that have historically driven philosophers, theologians, and thinkers. Who are we? What do we want? Where did we come from? How does everything end? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? In this class we examine science fiction and fantasy short stories, motion pictures, novels, and television programs to ask how creative artists and wider society have asked and answered these questions. We also consider how science fiction and fantasy have commented on and mirrored real-world religions. No prerequisites. Intended for first-year students and sophomores only. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: RELG 180
ENGL 200: Tusitala
ENGL 200 is a practicum designed to give students an opportunity to learn about the design and production of a literary journal while earning course credit. The 0.25 credit course is graded on a Pass-Fail basis and requires enrolled students to complete forty (40) hours of work as Executive Board members contributing to the editing, production, and promotion of Tusitala, Lake Forest College's literary journal since 1935. The course is overseen by the faculty advisor for Tusitala, who will arrange for grade/credit assignments in consultation with the chair of the English Department. No prerequisites. Only one full credit (four semesters of ENGL 200) may be counted toward Lake Forest College graduation. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 201: Modern Fantasy Fiction
Magic, mystery, and the marvels of time travel. Talking cats and stranded princesses. Web-footed women and enchanted forests. If you thought you left all of that excitement behind with your childhood fairy tales, think again. Many modern fiction writers have turned more and more to the resources of fantasy literature as a fresh way to explore serious ideas for an adult audience. Seeking both to teach and delight, modern fantasy writers re-angle old fairy tales or invent their own enchanted tales to prod contemporary readers out of conventional ways of thinking and acting, using space and time flexibly to challenge ethical, political, and religious beliefs - indeed, our basic understanding of nature, society and self. In this course, we read the delightful and instructively irreverent fantasies of several important modern fiction writers. In doing so, we try to evaluate the nature of each writer's fictional innovations as well as the serious purposes each writer may have in mind for his or her fantasy. In short, we try to understand some of the many possibilities and uses of enchantment in modern fiction. Authors to be read may include Carroll, Chesterton, Mirrlees, Woolf, Lewis, Tolkien, Malamud, Beagle, LeGuin, Calvino, Rowling, Rushdie, Winterson, Okri, Pullman. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 202: The Bible as Literature
The Bible—a multi-authored, multi-faceted, and multi-vocal ancient text, which has continued to be printed at a rate of over 100 million copies a year many centuries after its first compilation—is considered by many to be the most influential text in Western literature. This course will introduce students to the Bible—the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures (Old and New Testament)—as a literary text in its own right, worthy of close reading and textual analysis. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: RELG 202
ENGL 203: Early American Literature
A survey of early American literature including Native American oral stories and trickster tales, Puritan literature, Smith and Pocahontas accounts, captivity narratives, voices of nationalism, early slave narratives, and women's letters. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: AMER 203
ENGL 204: Diverse Voices 19th-c U.S. Lit
(Diverse Voices of Nineteenth-Century United States Literature) Works of representative writers: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain. Topics of discussion include Emerson's influence on U.S. culture, developments in literary form, and themes of U.S. community and nature. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AMER 204
ENGL 205: Diverse Voices 20th-c U.S. Lit
(Diverse Voices of Twentieth-Century United States Literature) Works of diverse writers: Baldwin, Eliot, Hurston, and Frost. Topics of discussion include major traditions and schools of U.S. literature: realism, modernism, naturalism as they address questions of modernity. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AMER 205
ENGL 206: U.S. Environmental Literature
(United States Environmental Literature) An historically organized survey of the various rhetoric through which nature has been imagined by writers from the Puritans to contemporaries: the Calvinist fallen landscape, the rational continent of the American Enlightenment, conservation and 'wise use,' preservation and biodiversity. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: AMER 206, ES 206
ENGL 208: India and the Writer's Eye
India is the world's largest democracy and has more English-speakers than any other country in the world except the United States. It should not be surprising, then, that Indian authors have produced a wealth of novels, short stories, and poems written in English and concerned with issues of identity, nation, and history. In this course, we read English-language work by authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Arundati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh; learn about the major historical and political events described in these works: the Opium Wars, Swadeshi, Independence, Partition, "the Emergency," the Naxalite movement; and read postcolonial theory to better understand and interpret these works. Students are be encouraged to explore relevant cultural, political, and aesthetic issues through research or creative projects of their own. (This course satisfies Humanities and Global Perspective.)
cross listed: ASIA 208
ENGL 209: Storytelling and STEM
(Storytelling and STEM: Writing About Science.) A writing-intensive course focused on using the tools of narrative nonfiction to communicate scientific discovery to the public. Students will read the work of scientists and scientific communicators such as Stephen Hawking, Rebecca Skloot, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Atul Gawande, and Steven Pinker to discover the storytelling principles they employ to inform and entertain their readers. We will explore the science of story, the cognitive and evolutionary source of its power, and the art of scientific journalism, and students will draft and workshop their own essays about "popular science." No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 210: Gods, Monsters, & Questing Humanity
(Gods, Monsters & Questing Humanity: Ancient and Medieval Literature.) If you love stories of gods and demons, questing heroes and mythic monsters, you'll find a plethora of these fascinating figures in the great tales of ancient and medieval writers such as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Marie De France, Dante, Chaucer, and many more. This survey of ancient and medieval literature traces the origins of the Western literary tradition by exploring how writers from this delightfully distant period have imagined the gods, how they have understood themselves and their relationship to the cosmos, and how questing human beings have sought to answer problems of meaning and value that still have resonance for us today. (This course satisfies Humanities and Global Perspective.)
ENGL 211: From Fairyland to Flying Islands
(From Fairyland to Flying Islands: Renaissance to Enlightenment English Literature.) This course explores British literature from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, an era of revolutionary new encounters, from discovered moons to newly-charted territories. Writers imagined the freeing power of "golden worlds" created by their verse just as experimental literary forms brought into being some of the most esteemed works of literature in Shakespeare's Globe and the newfangled "novels" of Swift and others. Yet it was also a time of profound tumult, from the stake-burning religious upheavals of the Reformation to the monarchical beheadings of the Civil War. How did the writers of the era make sense of both the discoveries and disruptions of their own time? What happens as we move from an "early modern" era into one that feels more distinctly "modern"? Making our way through some of the most well-known pieces of the era - Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and Gulliver's Travels - we explore how early writers shaped freedom and constraint, love and cruelty, and the discoveries of new worlds and crumbling texts. Prerequisite: English 210 or permission of instructor. (This course satisfies Humanities and Global Perspective.)
ENGL 212: Romantics, Rebels, and Bohemians
(Romantics, Rebels, and Bohemians: English Literature in the Long 19th Century.) Change came more quickly, and more dramatically, to England during the long nineteenth century - the period between the French Revolution and the First World War - than in any era before or since. The growth of cities, of democracy, of women's rights, and of empire haunted the imagination, spawning images of rebel outsiders, dreams of art for art's sake, and some of the best monsters - Frankenstein's creature, Count Dracula, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - in all of literature. We follow the evolution of England's imagination in this most turbulent age. The third course in the Classics of Literature sequence. Prerequisite: English 210 and English 211, or permission of instructor. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 214: James Baldwin
In his powerful and moving novels and essays, James Baldwin confronted the lies America told itself about race, exposing the roots of social and political and cultural systems that superficially boasted of improving race relations but that instead continued to marginalize Black and brown bodies. This course offers a close reading of Baldwin's fiction and his essays, probing the ways that he provides a critique of the politics of race, sexuality, and nation in his own time and in ours. The course also includes readings and discussions of critical analyses of Baldwin's writings. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Domestic Pluralism and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AFAM 214
ENGL 215: Afrofuturism
What is a black future? The term "Afrofuturism" has been used to describe the recent cultural creations of black writers and artists who vividly envision futures of and for people of African descent. Afrofuturism, which aesthetic gained momentum in the work of science fiction authors Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, as well as in the jazz and poetry of musician SunRa, and which can be found thriving in works like Black Panther, is the subject of inquiry for this course. This survey is an introduction to the literary works produced within the movement from its modern manifestations to its present-day expansions. In his landmark essay on the topic, Mark Dery asks, "Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?" The wealth of literary and artistic production of works in the aesthetic provides a diverse and emphatic "yes." This course seeks to position Afrofuturism as an alternative means of (re)interpretation, back-talk, and as an avenue for imagining a future in light of (and in spite of) the experiences of the past and present. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Domestic Pluralism.)
cross listed: AFAM 215
ENGL 216: African American Literature I
This course is an introduction to the writings of African-Americans before the Civil War. These diverse documents tell tales of faith, perseverance, rebellion, suffering, freedom, independence, cunning, and patriotism that are an integral part of the American literary canon. We read a collection of classics together, compare and contrast the voices represented, and consider the diversity of responses to finding oneself in chains in one of the most brutal forms of chattel slavery the world has ever known. Voices studied include Douglass, Wheatley, Jacobs, Brown, Wilson, Walker, Turner, and Thurman. (This course satisfies Domestic Pluralism and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AFAM 216, AMER 216
ENGL 217: African American Literature II
What does it mean to be a Problem? This course is a sister course to African-American Literature I, and will cover African-American literature written after the American Civil War. In this part of the one-year survey, we examine narrative attempts by African-American authors to define blackness and the black experience on their own terms in the period before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance. We read a collection of classics together, compare and contrast the voices represented, and consider the development of African American literary self-representation in the century following Emancipation. Voices studied include Wells, Washington, Hughes, Johnson, Baldwin, and Morrison. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Domestic Pluralism and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AFAM 217, AMER 217
ENGL 219: Malcolm & Martin
(Malcolm & Martin: The Literature of Peace & Resistance.) Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., two prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement so often put into conversation with each other, have left us a legacy for how we think about social struggle—whether it be through the message of non-violence and Christian love that Martin Luther King, Jr. preached, or through the message of fearless self-defense and resistance "by any means necessary" for which Malcolm X came to be known. Both leaders were prolific authors whose works, singular in style and rich in rhetoric, comprise a seminal part of the American literary canon, and have been regularly featured by authors of creative works in fiction, drama, poetry, etc. since their publication. This course is an opportunity to delve deeply into the words of both men, long considered the authors of two disparate ways of viewing and engaging in civic struggle in America. We look at the creative activist writings of each-speeches, letters, interviews, autobiographical material—and complicate what at first seems a simple battle between "violent" and "non-violent" approaches to liberation. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Domestic Pluralism.)
cross listed: RELG 219, AFAM 219
ENGL 220: Shakespeare
Selected plays to show Shakespeare's artistic development; intensive analysis of major plays. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: THTR 236
ENGL 221: Literature and Medicine
Medical literature impacts everyone: we are all dual citizens of the kingdoms of health and sickness, of the everyday and the "night-side of life" as Susan Sontag puts it. Yet, throughout our varied stories about medicine, writers confront again and again the profound isolation and invisibility of the sick. What is it about physical pain that breaks down our language to describe it? How do medical narratives represent illness, giving structure and voice to this night-side of life? In this course, we explore medical texts by reading radically different writers across time, including Tolstoy, Shelley, and contemporary physicians. Throughout, we examine the myriad ways artists represent illness, through novels, poetry, short stories, autobiographies, films, guidebooks, and more. We work to unpack the binaries of sickness/health, normal/diseased, patient/doctor, and even life/death, in these stories about doctors, patients, epidemics, and mortality. After learning to "read" narratives of disease, students "write" disease, creating their own disease through an archive of texts. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 222: Plagues in Literature: Now and Then
Angelic hand prints splayed across plague bodies. Thrillers on futuristic, mutant viruses. Stories of plagues from past and present startle us with their imaginative variety. In fact, many readers have questioned why these narratives so often push the limits of the "real" in their representations. Why do writers represent plagues experimentally? Is contagion inherently dangerous to represent, even fictionally? We explore representations of epidemic diseases across a wide expanse of time, from antiquity to the 21st century, encountering along the way common tropes and stock figures of the genre: the plague-pits, enterprising tricksters, and well-poisoners, among others. Across varied stories, including Oedipus and Romeo and Juliet, we track how writers and film-makers use medical disasters to conjure the deepest spiritual crises of societies-gone-wrong, calling on the plague to search for divine meaning and patient zeroes. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Global Perspective.)
ENGL 224: Literature of the Vietnam War
This course examines the Vietnam War as refracted through various literary genres. The readings for the course include Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and Truong Nhu Tang's Vietcong Memoir. (This course satisfies Humanities and Global Perspective.)
cross listed: AMER 224, ASIA 224
ENGL 225: Remixes in a Post-Burroughs World
This .5-credit seminar will explore the legacy of cut-ups, remix, and avant-culture strategies connected to the legacy of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and his collaborators. While the course will pay particular attention to the outsized influence of Burroughs in contemporary aesthetics, we will freely investigate cut-ups, mash-ups, remixes, dj culture, user-generated content, conceptual literature, crowdsourcing, social media, and related strategies in publishing and aesthetics that together produce a collaborative critique of Romantic definitions of authorship and genius. In these domains, we will cover everything from Girl Talk to "Auto-Tune the News" to Star Wars: Uncut to what's happening tomorrow, all through the lens of user-based textual interventions. Lecture, discussion, and appropriation-based responses in hard copy and digital forms. No prerequisites. Course begins on the first day of classes after mid-semester break. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 226: Introduction to Virtual Reality
(Introduction to Virtual Reality: Culture and Technology). In recent years, virtual reality technology has made major advances, making it possible to do things and go places that were previously impossible. In this course, we'll explore - through readings, discussion, and experiential learning in the Lake Forest College Virtual Space - some of VR experiences in areas including gaming, science, art, research, education, storytelling, and socializing. We'll look at the way culture has thought about VR in the last few decades in novels by authors such as William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Ernest Cline, and in film and television programs like Strange Days, eXistenZ, and Black Mirror. In all cases, we will focus on the way narrative storytelling is impacted by virtual culture. This class will give us a chance to think together about how space works differently in VR, how "real" VR experiences are and what the future of VR might hold. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 228: Women Writing Women
This course surveys selected women writers, in diverse genres past and present, with a focus on American women writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. As we read selected literary texts, we explore how they "write women," in other words, how they deconstruct and reinvent the meanings of "woman" in their work. (This course satisfies Domestic Pluralism and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AMER 228, GSWS 228
ENGL 229: Selfies and Drones
This .5-credit seminar will explore these two interrelated contemporary topics, with particular focus on ideas of automation and remote control. We will explore "drone" as an umbrella term not only for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), which run from children's toys to weapons of war, but also as technological "noise" that increasingly confronts us in our daily lives. In this, we will look to representation of automation in literature, in texts such as Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. Similarly, the "selfie" is not only the picture one takes on a smart phone, but also a current mode of representation that has significant literary and visual antecedents in portraiture and autobiography. Accordingly, course "texts" may include everything from The Picture of Dorian Gray, to a selfie stick, to industrial drone music, although the dominant lens of the course will be literary. No prerequisites. Course begins on the first day of classes after mid-semester break. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 230: World Performance I
This required course for theater majors provides a wide ranging and inclusive survey of the history of theater and performance from ancient Greece to the 17th century. It includes such developments as ancient Greek drama, Yoruba and Hopi ritual, Japanese noh drama, the medieval morality play, and the English high renaissance, culminating in Moliere’s Paris. In addition to in-depth study of plays, emphasis is placed on viewing ritual as performance, acting styles, production techniques, and the socio-political milieu that formed the foundation of the theater of each culture and period. Offered yearly. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Global Perspective and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: THTR 230
ENGL 231: Revenge and Justice in Literature
The dismemberments, squeaking ghosts, and poisoned pharmacies of literary revenges never cease to thrill and disgust audiences with their bittersweet paradoxes. How can we distinguish revengers from villains if their killings are virtually identical? Why does the sober promise of an eye-for-an-eye requital of one body for another become a frenzied massacre of innocents and not-so-innocents? Can justice ever be restored by going outside the law, or a lost past ever be re-found in a sordid present? In this course, we consider some of the central paradoxes and themes of revenge by reading radically-different writers from the first to twenty-first centuries, including Seneca, Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Gillian Flynn. All the while, we watch classic revenge flicks to explore how directors from Tarantino to Park Chan-wook translate these narratives onto the screen. Throughout, we examine the ever-changing meanings of revenge across culture and time. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Global Perspective.)
ENGL 232: Stories from the Spectrum
(Stories from the Spectrum: Neurodiversity, Health, and Medicine in Literature.) A boy with a penchant for prime numbers investigates the death of a dog. A young girl is scolded for failing to look her teacher in the eye. A man in the throes of a midlife crisis returns to his nonverbal son as he spiritually finds himself. Hidden within these narratives of neurodiverse characters, one discovers a slew of cultural assumptions about cognitive and intellectual disabilities. Do neurotypical writers often turn to autism reductively, as a stand-in for a theme or metaphor? What might an authentic representation of Autism Spectrum look like? This course considers the value of neurodiversity in literature while exploring many of the troubling representations of cognitive difference across time, from earlier accounts of un-speaking children to the "rain mans" of contemporary film. This course ultimately takes seriously the bi-directional intersections between fiction and medicine, as real-life medical practices both shape and are shaped by these stories from the spectrum. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: NEUR 232
ENGL 233: Performance Art
This course will provide students with an understanding of performance art as a constantly evolving and flexible medium. The class will trace the emergence and development of performance art as a form of expression both distinct from and yet dependent upon traditional and experimental forms of theater and other contemporary manifestations of theatricality. Students will negotiate, through reading, research, discussion and planning and practical application, the blurred boundaries between performing and living, entertainment and art. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
cross listed: THTR 224, ART 237
ENGL 234: World Performance II
This required course for theater majors examines the history of drama and theater from the late nineteenth-century plays of Ibsen and Chekhov up until the present day, with an emphasis on under-represented and marginalized voices. In addition to in-depth study of plays, this course explores the conventions of acting and stagecraft and cultural conditions that influenced each period's theater. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Domestic Pluralism and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: THTR 231
ENGL 238: Literature/Culture in the Age of AI
This course explores representations of Artificial Intelligence in post-1900 American literature and culture. Students engage with various depictions of AI—from embodied androids and cyborgs to non-embodied computer systems and networked intelligence—and engage with relevant critical readings. The course examines how these texts reflect, critique, and speculate upon the evolving relationship between humans and AI. Key themes include the ethical implications of AI, the nature of consciousness/sentience in textual representation, the impact of AI technology on identity and society, and the potential for algorithmic bias and social control. Through a blend of textual analysis, class discussions, and research projects—as well as the student use of AI in their class projects to achieve the FFC Technology Tag—students critically examine how cultural texts mirror AI technology while influencing its development and perception.
ENGL 239: Shakespeare on Film
This course will focus on major cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, with attention both to the original texts and to the process of transferring them to the new medium by film directors. We will pay special attention to plays that have been filmed a number of times, so that we can develop useful comparisons: Richard III (Olivier, Loncraine), Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli, Luhrmann, Shakespeare in Love), Henry V (Olivier, Branagh), Hamlet (Olivier, Zeffirelli, Almereyda), and Macbeth (Polanski, Kurzel). Major goals will be to develop our ability to do close readings of both the original texts and the films, to do creative film adaptation projects, and to develop effective ways of expressing both our analytical and our creative ideas. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: THTR 240, CINE 240
ENGL 241: African American Drama & Theater
This course surveys the work African American theater artists from the nineteenth century to the present day. Playwrights surveyed may include Richardson, Hughes, Hansberry, Childress, Bullins, Baraka, Fuller, Wilson, Cleage, Shange, and Parks. Readings are supplemented by field trips to Chicago theaters that feature African American plays.
cross listed: THTR 241, AFAM 241
ENGL 243: Writing Literary Horror
(Vampires & Villains: Writing Literary Horror) This course teaches the art of writing gothic and literary horror. We'll look at examples of the various elements of fiction as used in the genre - voice, character analysis, plot, narration, symbolism, point of view, and theme, with a primary focus on various ways to sustain and build suspense and use those as a model for our own creative work. The course will ask students to write short stories, participate in group workshops and discussion, attend individual conferences, and revise their work. Course reading may include: Edgar Allan Poe, Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, Octavia Butler, Alvin Schwartz, Rosemary Timperley, Roald Dahl, Edith Wharton, Brian Evenson, Amelia Gray, Elizabeth Bowen, Blake Butler, Henry James, and Helen Oyeyemi. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 244: Writing Science Fiction
In this writing-intensive course, students explore the strange new worlds of science fiction and the possibilities of virtual reality. The roots of science fiction go back to 16th- and 17th-century writers like Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton, who confronted the onset of modernity with wildly extravagant utopian and cosmological imaginations. Science fiction since that time has often anticipated the developments of ever-accelerating technological transformation, asking critical questions about the nature of the human in the increasingly alien world we have created while addressing key questions of race, class, gender, and ability. Students in this course read works of classic and contemporary science fiction by such authors as Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Kathy Acker, and Ted Chiang, while studying the techniques of world-building, character development, and plot that enable them to write their own science-fictional works. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 245: Novel Writing Boot Camp
An intensive course focusing on the craft of novel writing. Students will study the novel form and the possibilities and frameworks of different genres of fiction and hybrid prose. Students will draft their own novels and develop plans for completing their manuscripts and submitting them to publishers within the framework of the course. Group discussions and individual conferences. Prerequisites: None, though ENGL 135 is recommended. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 246: Memoir Writing Boot Camp
An intensive course focusing on the craft of memoir writing. Students will consider what it means to "write your memoir," by investigating questions of how to relate dialogue (if you didn't get it on tape), how to share your work with family members, and how to trust your own memory. We will explore the line between memoir and autobiographical fiction, and the course will incorporate literature, critical theory, and creative writing exercises to determine if an author can ever write a "true" story. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 248: Writing Detective Fiction
(Tales of Murder and Mystery: Writing Detective Fiction.) This workshop investigates the art and craft of writing detective fiction. We begin by examining the case of Edgar Allan Poe's "tales of ratiocination" and move on to putting Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes under the magnifying glass. We interrogate Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and his "little gray cells," G.K. Chesterton's intuitive Father Brown, and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled and laconic Philip Marlowe, as well as contemporary examples of fictional detectives. The goal is elementary, Watson: discovering what distinguishes the genre in terms of narrative elements such as character, tension, suspense, plot, and mood. Students are asked to file their reports primarily in the form of their own stories featuring their own detectives investigating crimes of their own choosing. This writing-intensive course features discussion and analysis of short stories and short novels, writing exercises, workshops, peer feedback, and revisions of student work. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 249: Brains, Minds, and Madness in Lit
(Brains, Minds, and Madness in Literature.) Stories invite us into the minds of others. As readers, we step into another's consciousness: into fictional memories, sensations, and narratives that feel real, as the words of often-dead writers become part of our own brain-matter. Yet, how do our theories of the mind and its operations relate to literary representations of a character's interiority? And what can contemporary neuroscience teach us about literature, or about our own minds on literature? In this course, we examine stories and theories of the mind across time, exploring scientific writing about the brain alongside literary masterpieces from Virginia Woolf to Vladimir Nabokov. Moreover, we consider the close connection between sanity and insanity, examining the representations of madness and other neurological ailments in brains gone "wrong." After learning to "read" the mind in literature, students will create their own aesthetic of the brain gone "right" or "wrong", creating narratives versed in the newest neuroscientific research on the pleasures and dangers of reading the "minds" of another. No Prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: NEUR 249
ENGL 250: Contemporary Literature
A study of contemporary literature in a variety of genres. Students read, discuss, and write about literature by living authors who have had a significant impact on contemporary literary culture, with an emphasis on historical developments, innovations in aesthetics, and the roles played by ethnicity, gender, nationalism, religion, and economics in the formation of literature. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 251: Grateful Dead and American Culture
More than fifty years after the band's founding, the Grateful Dead looms larger than ever. From Haight-Ashbury acid-testers to visionary entrepreneurs, the band that grew up and out of the revolutions of the tumultuous 1960s found a way to mix everything from roots music to free jazz to rock into an "endless tour" that put them in the Fortune 500. The Grateful Dead provided a cultural soundtrack for not only the 1960s, but also the paranoia of the Watergate years, the Reagan-soaked 1980s, and on to the jam-band present. This course will focus on the band's performance of authentic "Americanness" throughout its half century run. We'll listen to their music, and also to their fans, enthusiasts, and scholars. We'll understand the various subcultures that separate the sixties and now, and in doing so, offer answers to this key question: Why do the Dead survive? (Elective for English, Theater, and Music) (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: THTR 206, MUSC 222, AMER 202
ENGL 252: History & Literature of Great Lakes
(History and Literature of the Great Lakes.) The Great Lakes contain 21 percent of the world's surface fresh water. They provided a passage for exploration and still provide a passage for commerce. They are the reason Chicago exists. This course explores the history of the Great Lakes (geological, Native American, and modern) and the literature and art that arose from human interaction with these vast waters. In this interdisciplinary course we read geological and geographical descriptions, Native American literature, journals of early European explorers, poetry, short stories, and histories of social, economic, and environmental issues concerning the Great Lakes. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: ES 221
ENGL 256: Writing and The Law
This intermediate intensive writing course introduces students to substantive writing by merging basic composition with substantive content. The “and The Law” aspect of the course is the content: the law, in its most basic terms, is the mechanism for the peaceful resolution of human disputes. The machinery of the law is words, and in this course, students are instructed in methods of intermediate expository and persuasive writing, as well as a deeper understanding of genre. This instruction and practice would move them from basic academic form-focused composition to form+content composition. Students learn how to treat complex material in an accurate and thorough manner. The law, its foundation, evolution, and purpose all offer a powerful basis and rich material for students to understand how a social institution functions through written language. Through studying writings, and drafting their own various texts, students are able to better appreciate the importance of words, and the structure and format in which those words are presented.
ENGL 263: Nobel Laureates in Literature
This course surveys works of Nobel Laureates in Literature from the early twentieth century to the present day. Recipients of this award hail from all continents and their poems, plays, and prose present challenging responses to questions of class, culture, ethnicity, literature, and national origin. Central to this course is the examination of the differences between and the parallels of African, Asian, Latin American, and European writers in the aftermath of rapid (and often violent) political and social change. Readings are likely to include authors such as Alexievich, Coetzee, Kawabata, Milosz, Munro, Neruda, Paz, Soyinka, Tagore, Yan, and many others. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 264: The Beat Generation
(The Beat Generation: Influences and Legacy.) The core members of the group of writers known as the Beats- Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs- have had a profound influence on the development of postwar American literary and artistic culture. In this course students will be introduced to some of the Beats' major predecessors (notably William Blake, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams) as well as writers whose work has brought the Beat legacy into the twenty-first century (Anne Waldman, Roberto Bola, Amiri Baraka, Eileen Myles, and others). Students will read these writers with an eye toward their contributions to such topics as LGBT rights, the environmental movement, the introduction of Buddhism and Eastern philosophy to the United States, and postmodern cut-up and sampling techniques. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 265: Muggle & Magic: Rowling and Dahl
(Muggle & Magic: Reading J.K. Rowling and Roald Dahl) This course examines the work of J.K. Rowling and Roald Dahl. In reading Rowling's Harry Potter series and select Dahl novels like The Witches and Matilda, we will consider the transgressive and transformative power of children's imaginations- the serious work of mischief- in an adult world. As we engage with these fantastical texts and the criticism written about them, we will investigate themes like power and surveillance, purity and danger, abjection, and absurdity as well as formal elements like voice, plot, character, humor, and symbolism. Although we will discuss the importance of these texts for an audience of children and young adults, we will also consider their appeal for an adult readership. Students will be asked to produce analytical and imaginative work in response to our course texts. Potential assignments include reader response essays, book reviews, critiques or syntheses of scholarly articles, and creative exercises in character or plot development. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 266: The American Graphic Novel
(Reading the American Graphic Novel) This course will examine the theory and practice of the graphic novel in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The serial visual narrative, also known as the graphic novel or comic book, has had a formative influence on American literary and popular culture. Not all comics and graphic novels are written about superheroes; the form has proven flexible enough to encompass such genres as the memoir, historical narrative, and journalism. This course will have a particular focus on the work of such writer-artists as Marjane Satrapi, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Scott McCloud, Joe Sacco, Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, John Lewis, Daniel Clowes, and Lynda Barry. Students will read and discuss these graphic narratives with an emphasis on how they make difficult or marginal content accessible to readers, and will have the opportunity to try their own hands at writing comics or a short graphic novel. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: AMER 286
ENGL 267: BFFs: Female Friendship in Girls
(BFFs: Female Friendship in the Time of Girls.) "Besties" are found everywhere in contemporary anglophone fiction, television, and film. Usually placed behind romantic relationships, female friendship is now understood to be a powerful and even transformative dynamic, one that is central to female identity. Men and lovers take a back seat. Are BFFs taking over the usual unions of romantic or erotic love? How much are girlfriends the focus of these stories? In this course, we examine these contemporary representations of female friendship, from the four character "types" at the center of Sex and the City and Girls to the erotic and dangerous "besties" of Emma Cline's The Girls. We will examine how these "types" relate to, and part ways from, their literary predecessors, from Jane Austen to the present. Throughout, we discover the many sides of this complex, and contradictory, relationship. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 268: Goblins, Grandmas & Great Hearts
(Goblins, Great-Grandmothers & Great Hearts: MacDonald’s Fantasy Fiction) Step into the enchanting world of 19th-century Scottish author George MacDonald in this introduction to his fantasy fiction. MacDonald, a Christian pastor, popular public lecturer, and prolific writer, enormously influenced children’s literature, the fantasy fiction genre, and the literature of the Inklings (namely, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien). Through this course, students delve into his captivating narratives and explore the timeless themes that permeate his novels, fairy tales, and poetry. Stories to be explored range from his now-iconic fairy tale The Light Princess to complex, rich novels such as The Princess and the Goblin and Lilith, but students also examine his pastoral sermons, the scholarly literature about his work, and his impact on the Inklings and J.K Rowling. The course offers opportunity to research his distinctive, sometimes unorthodox Christian theological ideas, his female-centric ethical paradigms centered on great-grandmother archetypes, his mythopoetic technique, and the Victorian context of his work.
ENGL 269: Writing Fantasy
(Writing Fantasy: Fantasy Worlds and How to Build Them.) Fantastic fiction such as the Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland allows readers the illusion of escape. These works carry us on journeys to lands of myth and magic, stretching our imaginations and challenging us to reimagine the very foundations of our own world. Though fantasy embraces adventurous escapism, it is also a genre dependent on intricate world-building, rule-making, and a careful consideration of cultural systems and political hierarchies. In this writing and reading-intensive course, students seek to view our own world through the looking glass as they construct their own long-form fantasy project. Course reading may include classic and contemporary fantasy by such authors as Angela Carter, Lewis Carroll, H. Rider Haggard, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, Nnedi Okorafor, and Margaret Atwood. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 270: The Beatles
(The Beatles: Their Words, Their Legacy.) This course examines the lyrics and themes of The Beatles' songs and compares them to those of classical poems from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It explores The Beatles and their impact upon contemporary culture through their movies, concerts, and television appearances. It also includes analysis of their individual biographies, rare interviews, and critical essays about their works, and their profound influence on world literature, music, and current society. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 271: Writing Down the Songs
(Writing Down the Songs: Writing Music Criticism.) The course surveys the history of writing about popular music as a way of learning how to write critically about any genre of music. Students read essays from legendary writers such as Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis and others as models for writing about music. Students in the course write various forms of music criticism ranging from short reviews of singles and albums to longer reviews about albums and artists; they also learn how to conduct interviews with artists and how to write up the interview in a long-form feature article and how to write concert reviews. The course also covers practical issues such as how to pitch pieces to publications and how to get published. No prerequisites. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 280: Slam Poetry and Spoken Word
This workshop course will combine the study of the history of spoken word and slam poetry performance with the practice of these traditions. Students will learn both the written and oral components of spoken word composition and performance, focusing on such the generation and revision of material, the varieties of performance style and oral delivery, and the relation of performer to audience. Generative exercises, small group workshops, collective feedback, and performance opportunities all form part of the curriculum. Chicago, a longstanding center of spoken word performance and the place where slam poetry was invented, provides many opportunities for field trips, conditions permitting. No pre-requisties. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts and Speaking Intensive.)
ENGL 285: Creative Arts Entrepreneurship
Creative Arts Entrepreneurship will offer an overview of the processes, practices, and decision-making activities that lead to the realization of our creative ideas. Students from across the humanities, arts, sciences, and business will learn the unique contexts and challenges of creative careers, with an emphasis on collaborative projects. The course will help students understand the nature and structure of arts enterprise while cultivating their own career vision and creative goals. Creative Arts Entrepreneurship is designed for students interested in developing, launching, or advancing innovative enterprises in arts, culture, and design, and those who love the initiative, ingenuity and excitement of putting creative ideas into action. The course combines readings and in-class discussions with site visits, case studies, guest lectures by working artists and creative professionals, and student-driven projects. No prerequisites.
cross listed: MUSC 285, ENTP 285, ART 285, THTR 285
ENGL 303: Psychics, Spiritualists & Mystics
(Psychics, Spiritualists, and Mystics: Adventures in Edwardian Fiction.) Early 20th C. England saw an explosion of spiritual seekers who wrote stories about contacting the dead, communicating telepathically, levitating, reading Tarot cards, experiencing ghostly visions, and participating in occult or spiritual societies. While these writers were enormously popular in their own day, they are historically underrepresented in conventional narratives about the canon of modern British literature. This course aims to recover some of these long-forgotten stories, as we sort through this Edwardian-era "attic" of dust-covered tales, seeking the gems that still puzzle, challenge, or inspire. Our goal will be to understand this "spiritual renaissance" and its prime movers; explore the ambiguous borderland between the occult and the mystical and their relation to orthodox religion; and assess the legacy that this original "alt lit" has left for today’s spiritual seekers. Fiction will be drawn from writers like George MacDonald, Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie Corelli, Evelyn Underhill, and May Sinclair. Prerequisite: ENGL 210 or permission of the instructor. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
cross listed: RELG 303
ENGL 304: Romantic Period
Key works, both poetry and prose, of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Exploration of themes and ideas of a revolutionary era. Prerequisite: English 212. (This course satisfies Global Perspective.)
ENGL 305: Victorian Literature
Masterpieces of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Arnold, Hardy, Wilde, and others. Prerequisite: English 212. (This course satisfies Global Perspective.)
ENGL 306: Happiness & the 19th C. Novel
(Happiness, Human Life, and the 19th Century Novel.) What constitutes human happiness? Biologists may offer their answers by asking why zebras don't get ulcers; psychologists by studying the psychological responses of lottery winners. But long before such scientific inquiries, nineteenth-century novelists sought to solve the problem of human happiness in their own way, pursuing a very old philosophical topic through nuanced narratives and gripping descriptions of fictional human lives: Emma's as she tries to engineer the happiness of her good friend, Pip's as he ventures into the high life of London, Dorothea's as she apes the life of an old-time saint, and Anna's as she tries to live out the romances she has absorbed from novels. In this course, we'll read some of the best novels of the nineteenth century, justly famous because they shed so much light on the good life. We'll ask how these novelists defined a life of full flourishing (eudaemonia), what brings human beings closer to or farther away from happiness, how these questions get embedded within nineteenth-century cultural concerns, and what the novel as a genre of imaginative literature can uniquely contribute to our understanding of the good life. Novelists will include Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Tolstoy (who both influenced and was influenced by his British peers). Novels may also be paired with contemporary or classic nonfictional readings on the nature of human happiness. Prerequisite: Any 200-level English course or permission of instructor. (This course satisfies Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 308: Murdoch: Truth, Beauty & Goodness
This course explores the oeuvre of one of the most important British novelists and moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Writing novels like philosophy and philosophy "novelistically," Murdoch plunges us into major twentieth-century intellectual debates to explore what it means to be good. We read her novels side by side with her philosophical work, paying special attention to how her early career was influenced by Sartre and Freud and her later writing by Dostoevsky, Plato, and Simone Weil, tracing her shift from Existentialism to mysticism. Novels may include An Unofficial Rose, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Nice and the Good, Message to the Planet, and The Green Knight. Other readings are drawn from Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues, The Sovereignty of Good, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artist, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Prerequisite: One English literature or Philosophy course. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 309: Deceit, Desire, Chaucerian Fiction
(Deceit and Desire in Chaucer's Fiction.) Travel back to the Middle Ages to study Chaucer's delightful tales of sex, deception, and disordered desire. In this course, students have a chance to read some of Chaucer's most famous Canterbury Tales, his riveting philosophical romance Troilus and Criseyde, and selections from the Legend of Good Women, which is his comical riff on the medieval saints' life tradition. In each case, we explore how problems of deceit or desire drive his tales and create a narrative framework for exploring provocative social, philosophical, religious, and even cosmological questions. Attention will also be paid to those medieval writers who influenced Chaucer, including Augustine, Boethius, Jean de Meun/Guillaume de Lorris, and, above all, his bawdy Italian inspiration, Boccaccio. Prerequisite: English 210. (This course satisfies Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 310: The Arthurian Tradition
This course will explore the medieval tradition of Arthurian literature. The first half of the course will be devoted to the medieval roots of the Arthurian legend, from chronicle history to courtly romance, with readings ranging from Gildas to Malory. The second half of the course will consider the reception of this medieval mythic tradition by later British writers from the Renaissance to the present. Writers representing that tradition of medievalism might include Spenser, Tennyson, Morris, T.H. White, Murdoch, and Winterson, among others. Prerequisite: English 210. (Not open to students who have taken ENGL 300: Medieval Studies: The Arthurian Tradition.)
ENGL 312: Black Metropolis
(Black Metropolis: A Study of Black Life in Chicago.) This course is a study of race and urban life in Chicago. From the founding of Chicago by a black man to the participation of blacks in the rebuilding of the city following the Great Chicago fire, and into an exploration of Bronzeville, 'a city within a city,' this course will highlight blacks and their contributions to this great city. Study of landmark texts, documentaries, novels, and photography, along with at least one field trip to the Chicago area, will reveal the impact of the Great Migration on the city; contributions of talented musicians, writers, and photographers involved in the Chicago Renaissance; and the origins of the famous black Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Defender, including its regular column by Langston Hughes.
cross listed: AFAM 312, AMER 312
ENGL 316: Voices of Reform
A study of African American literature and theory published immediately before and following the Civil War. Readings will focus on identity (re)formation, social order, morality, Northern neo-slavery, institution building, women's rights. Authors will include Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Wilson, Frances E.W. Harper, William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, Charles Chesnutt, and Frederick Douglass. English 216 is the prerequisite for first-year students and sophomores; no prerequisite for juniors and seniors.
ENGL 321: Modern Fiction
An exploration of modern fiction as it developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including such writers as Dostoevsky, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, and Hemingway. Prerequisite: any 200-level literature course. (This course satisfies Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 326: Postmodernism
An interdisciplinary study of postmodernism as a literary and cultural phenomenon that redefines both local and global communities. The course will investigate aesthetic production during the post-WWII period by American and world writers and artists, with an additional focus on the theoretical basis of postmodernism. (This course satisfies Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 327: New, Black, and Lit: 21st Century
(New, Black, and Lit: 21st Century Black Authors.) African American authors have responded in new and compelling ways to the dynamism of racial promise and constriction in the 21st century. These literary voices, often newly proliferate in the national cultural consciousness, are the subject of this course, which explores the works of Black authors writing after 2000 and will pay particular attention to works written in the post-Obama era. Texts considered include works by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, Yaa Gyasi, Zadie Smith, Angie Thomas, Roxane Gay, and Jacqueline Woodson. (This course satisfies Humanities and Domestic Pluralism.)
cross listed: AFAM 327
ENGL 329: Advanced Publishing
This course provides students with hands-on experience in all stages of the editorial and publishing process from project selection to production to publicity as they develop print and online publications in coordination with campus organizations such as Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. The course permits students to work in small, entrepreneurial-focused groups as they explore traditional publishing areas as well as marketing, communication, web presentation/design, blogging, and social media. Prerequisite: One of the following: JOUR 120 (formerly COMM 120), ENGL 111, 112, 135, any 20th-century focused literature course, or permission of the instructor. (This course satisfies Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 336: British Women Writers
This course will focus on British women novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studying them within their historical and literary context, we will explore the following topics: 1) how women writers address questions of female authorship and authority, 2) how they define their female identity in relation to society, nature, and/or the divine, and 3) how they navigate economic, social, religious, and cultural constraints. British writers to be studied might include Jane Austen, Anne and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, and Zadie Smith. Prerequisite: English 210, or permission of instructor. (This course satisfies Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 341: Existentialism and the Modern Novel
Who am I? What is my place within the universe? Do human beings find or make meaning in their lives? Is meaning even possible in the face of life's absurdities? If so, what constitutes a meaningful life? This course explores these and other big existentialist questions through the lens of the novel, focusing especially on novelists from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Within the course, we compare and contrast major existentialist perspectives as well as examining significant critiques of existentialism. We also consider the unique possibilities afforded by the genre of the novel in exploring philosophical questions. Possible authors include Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, and Murdoch. Other readings are drawn from shorter fiction by these and other writers as well as major nonfiction essays on existentialism. Prerequisite: A 200-level literature course or permission of the instructor. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
cross listed: PHIL 341
ENGL 342: Playwriting
This course focuses on the collaboration between director, designers, and playwright in the creation and production of new works for the stage. Projects will include writing, script analysis, casting, and presentation of original student works and/or student-adapted works by professional authors. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
cross listed: THTR 370
ENGL 346: Jewish-American Literature
An historically organized reading of Jewish-American writers from Mordecai Noah and Emma Lazarus to Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander, the course will consider themes of assimilation, tradition, capitalism, and anti-semitism in texts in English, as well as translations from Yiddish and perhaps Ladino. To what extent is Jewish-American literature an intact and coherent tradition? How have these texts registered a narrative of American history, and how have they defined, and perhaps reified, a version of Jewish-American identity? The chief texts of the class will be novels, but there will be readings in poetry and memoir as well. Prerequisite: English 204 or English 205 or permission of instructor. (This course satisfies Domestic Pluralism.)
ENGL 347: Woolf Joyce Beckett
(Modernist Masters of Consciousness: Woolf, Joyce, Beckett). The modernist novel in English reached its apex in the twentieth century with the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, each of whom explored the minute movements of human consciousness in prose of unparalleled richness, complexity, and sometimes stark beauty. Woolf's writing, in both her fiction and nonfiction prose, was particularly concerned with the inner lives of women; Joyce developed his theory of the prose epiphany and found mythic underpinnings for stories of ordinary Irish life; Beckett's fiction and plays pursued the very limits of language itself. In this seminar-style course, students discuss the work of these three major authors and consider its implications for feminist thought, postcolonial theory, and psychology and cognitive science. Prerequisite: ENGL 212 or permission of the instructor. (This course satisfies Humanities and Writing Intensive.)
ENGL 360: Fiction Writing
An intermediate course in the craft of the short story. Group discussions and individual conferences. Prerequisite: English 135. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 361: Poetry Writing
An intermediate course in the craft of poetry. Group discussions and individual conferences. Prerequisite: English 135 or 235. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 364: Creative Unwriting & Remix Workshop
This intermediate writing course explores the principles behind a broad range of contemporary innovative writing methods and styles including remix, mash-up, conceptual, uncreation (a la Kenny Goldsmith), and cut-up techniques. The course starts from the principle that writers do not start with a blank page. Rather, all writing is created from the substance of preexisting artworks. For a generation more familiar with turntables and text messaging than the traditions of classical poetics, this course will explore the former in the context of the latter, offering a philosophical base from which to create, or uncreate, works that respond most deftly to contemporary aesthetics. Prerequisite: ENGL 235 or permission of the instructor.
ENGL 365: Poetry and Nature
This course explores the relationship between poetry and the natural world, from its roots in Classical Asian and European poetry to its postmodern manifestations. Understanding natural processes that served as inspiration and subject matter of nature poetry will enrich student understanding of the poem and the processes of both poetry writing and nature observation. Particular attention is paid to the poetry of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. Prerequisite: One 200-level English course or 200-level Environmental Studies course. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
cross listed: ES 365
ENGL 367: Environmental Writing
This course focuses on writing about the environment. Students will explore different approaches to the environmental essay, including adventure narrative, personal reflection, and natural history. Poetry and fiction will also play a role as we explore the practice of place-centered writing. We will also use the immediate surroundings of the Chicago area as an environment for our writing. Prerequisite: English 135/235 or a lower-level Environmental Studies course. Not open to students who have completed ENGL 332.
cross listed: ES 367
ENGL 368: Advanced Nonfiction Writing
An intermediate course in the craft of creative nonfiction that may include the memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, lyric essay, visual essay, and digital essay. Group discussions and individual conferences. Prerequisite: English 135. (Not open to students who have completed ENGL 330.) (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 369: Professional Writing
(Professional Writing in the Digital Age). This course will focus on the development of creative and effective digital personas for websites, resumes and blogs, with special emphasis on the application of these personas in publishing and literary-based careers. Writing these personas will prepare students for the larger post-baccalaureate world of applications, interviews, and career building. In a dedicated writing workshop environment, students will design and maintain a blog, establish and develop an online identity, construct a professional portfolio, practice job hunting, engage in the interview process, learn about grants and scholarships, and generally develop the public writing skills needed to enter the twenty-first century professional and publishing world. Prerequisites: English 111, English 135 or permission of instructor.
ENGL 370: Emoji and Image Writing Workshop
This intermediate writing course explores the role of the image in writing, with particular attention to the phenomenon of emoji and other image-based creative practices. Student will engage with the history of image/text production, starting with the pictorial/ideographic language histories of the ancient world; extending through medieval illuminated manuscripts, 20th- and 21st- century avant-garde practices, and landing in the present moment with the study of the history, development, and widespread adoption of emoji. The emoji section will find students exploring globalization through the Japanese origin of emoji, the history of emoticons and its antecedents in Victorian-era Morse code, and the computer science and AI-aspects of the technology. Student will read and produce innovative works as they integrate the pictorial into their writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 135 or permission of the instructor. (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
ENGL 380: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings
(J.R.R. Tolkien and the Literature of the Inklings.) This seminar will examine the literary legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien and his fellow writers C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield - all pioneers of the twentieth-century fantasy fiction genre. This course will involve close reading of major works by each author as well as opportunity to discuss the fascinating biographical, historical, aesthetic, and mythic underpinnings of their works. The seminar will pay especial attention to the Inklings' intellectual and artistic indebtedness to the medieval past, to their discourses about religion, politics, and ethics, to their eccentric relationship with "literary modernism," and to the way their fiction refracts major twentieth-century events, particularly World Wars I and II. Prerequisite: ENGL 210 or permission of the instructor.
cross listed: RELG 380
ENGL 391: Tutorial
In this writing-intensive course, students exercise their interviewing, investigative and story-telling skills to produce a variety of magazine articles that will be posted - along with digital photos - on their own journalism blogs. Prerequisite: English 231
ENGL 392: Publishing Practicum
(Publishing Practicum: Theory/Design Production) This practicum allows a student to study print and digital design through the completion of required readings, response papers (in electronic media), and weekly meetings with the supervising faculty member. Beyond this, the student engages in a practicum component of ten hours per week in Visual Communications as a supplement to the course's theoretical work. In this capacity, the student engages in targeted design projects that reinforce the academic aspects of the practicum. The student benefits from the professional mentoring of our graphic design staff, and uses the Adobe Design Suite, in preparation for a publishing-industry career. Readings may include The Books to Come by Alan Loney, and From Gutenberg to Opentype by Robin Dodd. Prerequisites: ENGL 112, ART 142, and either ENGL 323 or ENGL 324, and permission of instructor. (This course satisfies Humanities.)
ENGL 399: Inter-Text Journal
(Inter-Text Undergraduate Journal for Social Sciences and Humanities.) This course is a practicum aimed at engaging students in the process of scholarly peer-review, academic journal production, and print and digital publishing. Students learn how to use InDesign, an important software suite for visual communication. This 0.25 credit course is graded on a Pass-No Pass basis and requires enrolled students to complete forty (40) hours of work as Editorial Board members while contributing to the production and selection of feature essays, peer review, editing, layout and formatting of the journal, and release of the journal at the annual publication party. Inter-Text aims to publish exceptional student work and foster community among students inside and outside of the classroom in the humanities and social sciences.
cross listed: HIST 399, POLS 399, ART 399
ENGL 403: Emily Dickinson
An advanced seminar on the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson. Emphases on the cultural context of Dickinson's work and its critical reception.
cross listed: GSWS 403
ENGL 404: W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats, one of the most significant poets working in English, writes from a complex cultural situation. His work is deeply connected to Irish nationalism and its cultural manifestation, the Celtic Twilight, as well as to international literary modernism and to a deeply idiosyncratic mysticism. In this course we will study his poetry, prose, and dramatic works in the context of his life and in the context of the literary, cultural, and political movements of his time. In addition, we will read works by some of the writers Yeats influenced, and those who influenced his work, including Ezra Pound and J.M. Synge. Prerequisite: English 212.
ENGL 440: Advanced Writing Seminar
An advanced course in which each student completes a Senior Writing Project (This course satisfies Creative & Performing Arts.)
cross listed: AMER 440
ENGL 450: Theory of Literature
Important critical modes and approaches to literature; an integrating experience for the senior major.