Fall 2024 Courses: English, Department of: ÁùºÏ±¦µäappChicago (2024)

Class information onLOCUStakes precedence over information posted here.

UCLR 100E Interpreting Literature

ENGL 210 Business Writing

ENGL 211 Writing for Pre-Law Students

ENGL 220 Theory/Practice Tutoring

ENGL 271 Exploring Poetry

ENGL 272 Exploring Drama

ENGL 273 Exploring Fiction

ENGL 274 Exploring Shakespeare

ENGL 282C African-American Literature Post-1900

ENGL 283 Women in Literature

ENGL 284 Asian American Literature

ENGL 288 Nature in Literature

ENGL 290 Human Values in Literature

ENGL 293 Advanced Writing

ENGL 294 Writing in/with New Media

ENGL 313 Border Literature

ENGL 317 The Writing of Poetry

ENGL 318 The Writing of Fiction

ENGL 319 Writing Creative Nonfiction

ENGL 323 Studies in Medieval Literature

ENGL 326 Plays of Shakespeare

ENGL 335 Romanticism and the Age of Revolution

ENGL 344 Studies in Modernism

ENGL 354 Contemporary Critical Race Theory

ENGL 372C Studies in Fiction Post-1900

ENGL 381B Contemporary American Literature 1700-1900

ENGL 384CStudies in African American Literature Since 1900

ENGL 390 Advanced Seminar

ENGL 393 Teaching English to Adults: Internship

ENGL 394 Internship

ENGL 397 Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry

Interpreting Literature (UCLR 100E)

Section: 001 #2754
Instructor: N. Karatas
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 8:15 – 9:05 AM

We all witness losses in our lives in various ways; are we mourning for them or merely repressing these agonies to survive? Amidst such chaos, can there be room for hope and healing? If yes, how much of a role can writing play? This course aims to explore literary texts in the light of our contemporary world that, unfortunately, is filled with losses. By focusing on different genres, we will explore various objects of mourning in these literary texts, especially on digital platforms. In doing so, we will explore how the damaged mind and soul work and if writing can become a therapeutic tool.

Section: 002 #3447
Instructor: C. Garvey
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 8:15 – 9:05 AM

The foundational course in literary studies will require students to read closely and analyze carefully a representative variety of fiction, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. This course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature and its study. What is literature? Why does it matter? How has it been conceived in different times and places? How do we envision the relationship between author, text, and reader? What is the difference between reading a literary work in its historical context and in the light of our own contemporary time? Where does meaning come from in literature? What is literary interpretation and what role does it have in the production of literary meaning? How are literary works related to culture and society and how do they reflect – and reflect on – questions of value and the diversity of human experience? Exploring these questions will help students develop the skills of analysis and interpretation needed to approach literature in a sophisticated manner.

Section: 003 #3448
Instructor: E. Bayley
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF10:25 - 11:15 AM

This is a foundational course that explores a variety of critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. In particular, we will be looking at the concepts of vulnerability in the midst of illness or a pandemic. We will discuss how these concepts are depicted in a number of different poems, plays and short stories. These topics are often difficult topics to discuss and yet, they are inevitable realities in each of our lives. Thus, we will use texts, by a number of different American authors, such as Amanda Gorman, Mary Oliver, Annie Proulx, Moises Kaufman, Essex Hemphill and more. The method of assessment will include pop quizzes, classroom participation, in-class writing opportunities, an in-class writing on poetry and prose, and a final reflection on drama.

Section: 004 #3449
Instructor:K. Quirk
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF10:25 - 11:15 AM

Crime and Punishment

This is a foundational course in literary studies in which we will read works that are particularly concerned with the themes of crime and punishment, as well as related topics of guilt, revenge, justice, and the law. Our goals will be to develop a better critical vocabulary and analytical approach to the three genres of poetry, drama, and fiction. The course assignments will include a midterm, final, and short writing exercises that will emphasize literary analysis but will also seek to improve general writing skills. More broadly, however, I hope we will all learn to approach literature in a more attentive, engaged, and ultimately pleasurable manner. Ideally, we will not only learn about literature and literary techniques but will also try to relish the pleasure of reading literature.

Section: 005 #3450
Instructor:TBA
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF11:30 AM - 12:20 PM

Section: 006 #3451
Instructor:S. Sleevi
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF11:30 AM - 12:20 PM

This foundational course introduces students to the study of literature through the close reading and analysis of fiction, poetry, and drama. We will gain familiarity with key literary terms and approaches as we read novels, short stories, plays, and poems, examining their thematic content and formal features in relation to the unifying theme of “perspective.” The course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature and its study—including how literary works reflect (and reflect on) culture, society, and human experience—that will help students develop the skills of analysis and interpretation needed to approach literature in a sophisticated manner. Work for the course will include reading quizzes, written response and analysis assignments, and a final exam.

Section: 007 #3452
Instructor: L. Goldstein
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF12:35 - 1:25 PM

Living Literature: The Value of Literature in Community

In this course, we will read and discuss contemporary literature that has created crucial new forms that provide space for historically marginalized voices. In our sessions, we often watch videos of performances alongside published pieces and spend time analyzing the impact of a work as well as its components. The units in the course have a special focus on innovations that respond to social ecologies based in racial and gendered hierarchies, and that strive to give us an awareness of the conditions of our modern world. You will encounter short stories, all types of poetry, and some film and art that incorporates language and crosses generic boundaries. You will be introduced to multiple strategies to approach and interpret challenging texts through lectures, class discussions, group work, and short responses. Materials include short stories by Octavia Butler and Nam Le, the poetry of Khadijah Queen, Douglas Kearney, Hala Alyan and Timothy Yu, visual artists Glenn Ligon and Lauren Halsey, and a film by Saul Williams.

Section: 008 #3453
Instructor: O. Brici
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF12:35 - 1:25 PM

The foundational course in literary studies will require students to read closely and analyze carefully a representative variety of prose, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. This course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature and its study. What is literature? Why does it matter? How has it been conceived in different times and places? How do we envision the relationships among author, text, and reader or audience? What is the difference between reading a literary work in its historical context and in the light of our own contemporary time and politics? Where does meaning come from in literature? What is literary interpretation and what role does it have in the production of literary meaning? How are literary works related to culture and society and how do they reflect – and reflect on – questions of value and the diversity of human experience? Exploring these questions will help students develop the skills of analysis and interpretation needed to approach literature in a sophisticated manner.

Section: 009 #3454
Instructor: E. Bayley
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF1:40 - 2:30 P

This is a foundational course that explores a variety of critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. In particular, we will be looking at the concepts of vulnerability in the midst of illness or a pandemic. We will discuss how these concepts are depicted in a number of different poems, plays and short stories. These topics are often difficult topics to discuss and yet, they are inevitable realities in each of our lives. Thus, we will use texts, by a number of different American authors, such as Amanda Gorman, Mary Oliver, Annie Proulx, Moises Kaufman, Essex Hemphill and more. The method of assessment will include pop quizzes, classroom participation, in-class writing opportunities, an in-class writing on poetry and prose, and a final reflection on drama.

Section: 010 #3455
Instructor: N. Karatas
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF1:40 - 2:30 PM

We all witness losses in our lives in various ways; are we mourning for them or merely repressing these agonies to survive? Amidst such chaos, can there be room for hope and healing? If yes, how much of a role can writing play? This course aims to explore literary texts in the light of our contemporary world that, unfortunately, is filled with losses. By focusing on different genres, we will explore various objects of mourning in these literary texts, especially on digital platforms. In doing so, we will explore how the damaged mind and soul work and if writing can become a therapeutic tool.

Section: 011 #3456
Instructor: K. Quirk
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF1:40 - 2:30 PM

Crime and Punishment

This is a foundational course in literary studies in which we will read works that are particularly concerned with the themes of crime and punishment, as well as related topics of guilt, revenge, justice, and the law. Our goals will be to develop a better critical vocabulary and analytical approach to the three genres of poetry, drama, and fiction. The course assignments will include a midterm, final, and short writing exercises that will emphasize literary analysis but will also seek to improve general writing skills. More broadly, however, I hope we will all learn to approach literature in a more attentive, engaged, and ultimately pleasurable manner. Ideally, we will not only learn about literature and literary techniques but will also try to relish the pleasure of reading literature.

Section: 012 #3457
Instructor: A. Ledford
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF1:40 - 2:30 PM

This course section provides a survey of literature in the genre of Fantasy and Science Fiction, including its history, general characteristics, and special qualities. Course includes reading, analysis, and compositional elements of supplemental lecture and instruction, as needed. Readings will consist of short stories, novels, poetry, and theoretical/critical readings.

Section: 013 #3458
Instructor: TBA
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 2:45 - 3:35 PM

Section: 014 #3459
Instructor: A. Kessel
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 2:45 - 3:35 PM

Science fiction has long been a literary genre for speculating about the future or about alternative universes. But whose future? Whose universe? We often think of science fiction as the province of young white males, but a large body of this work has been produced by women and persons of color in many lands and cultures. Come explore those worlds in this course, as we read speculative fiction, poetry, drama, and view films in this course. We can boldly stretch our imaginations into fantastic places! Along the way we will learn some foundational concepts and techniques of literary analysis.

Section: 015 #3460
Instructor: S. Sleevi
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 2:45 - 3:35 PM

This foundational course introduces students to the study of literature through the close reading and analysis of fiction, poetry, and drama. We will gain familiarity with key literary terms and approaches as we read novels, short stories, plays, and poems, examining their thematic content and formal features in relation to the unifying theme of “perspective.” The course will also explore important conceptual questions about literature and its study—including how literary works reflect (and reflect on) culture, society, and human experience—that will help students develop the skills of analysis and interpretation needed to approach literature in a sophisticated manner. Work for the course will include reading quizzes, written response and analysis assignments, and a final exam.

Section: 016 #3461
Instructor: H. Kung
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 8:30 - 9:45 AM

The millennial more often elicits eye rolls rather than serious academic inquiry. Unable to hold down a stable job, buy a house, invest in a car, and reach other milestones that mark adult life, the millennial has been represented as a figure who has failed to achieve adulthood. As the butt of jokes made across memes and listicles, the millennial is understood, then, to be a slacker inept at leading a self-sufficient existence. But how might sustained attention to millennial literature – written by millennials and from the perspective of millennials – help us reconsider, complicate, and expand our understanding of this derided figure and the contemporary moment in which in this figure has emerged? In this course, we’ll explore the following questions: how might millennial literature reveal and unsettle our expectations of a normative trajectory of development, one traditionally organized around a career, marriage, and children? How might tending to race, class, gender, and sexuality change our ideas of who is the millennial? How might millennial literature provide an account of the present, one that has been defined by increasing optimization of one’s time and labor, economic vulnerability, and the erosion of the American Dream? Authors may include Raven Leilani, Ling Ma, Anthony Veasna So, Bryan Washington, and Jenny Zhang. As we take up how millennial authors imagine life in the present, we will closely read and analyze prose, poetry, and drama; develop a vocabulary of literary terms and techniques; and explore different critical approaches to literary interpretation.

Section: 017 #3462
Instructor:M. Bradshaw
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh10 - 11:15 AM

In this section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies we will focus on literature written in and about Chicago, from the 19th century to the present. We will look at how literature represents and portrays the city, helping us remember key moments in Chicago history, grapple with social and cultural issues that define it, reflect on what makes this city unique among American cities.

Section: 018 #3463
Instructor: J. Chamberlin
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh10 - 11:15 AM

Form and Transformation: What Makes Us Human?

What makes us human? And what makes someone—or something—inhuman? In this course, students will investigate these questions through compelling works of literature. Drawing from a diverse body of writers from across time periods, this class will explore three genres of literature: poetry, drama, and fiction. We will read fantastical transformation stories about werewolves, vampires, and humans mysteriously turning into animals, as well as works about other types of bodily, emotional, and spiritual transformations we experience throughout our lifetimes.

This class will also explore the ways in which our understanding of humanity is complicated by race, gender, disability, and animality. We will ask questions such as: What does language and our identities as readers, writers, and speakers have to do with being human? How does transformation complicate what we understand to be the human form? Students will be assessed on a midterm and a final exam, in addition to short assignments such as reading responses and quizzes. There will also be a group project in which students will sign up to be discussion leaders for a day.

Section: 019 #3464
Instructor: S. Weller
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh10 - 11:15 AM

Section: 020 #3465
Instructor:V. O'Dea
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

The Allure of the Archives

This foundational course in literary studies will require students to read closely and analyze carefully a representative variety of prose, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. This particular course takes its title and its coordinates from Arlette Farge’s poignant reflection on the paradoxical space of the archive—a space that is both expansive and limited, revelatory and inaccessible. The archive, in the literal sense, constitutes a space of institutional power and a site of knowledge production. As a metaphorical space, though, the archive can become a place of possibility. In this class, we will explore the relationship between archives and identity—both personal identity and a broader cultural identity. Together, we will consider the ways that archives are represented in literature from the nineteenth century to the present day as spaces in which we can imagine other histories and other worlds. Readings may include works by Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Julia C. Collins, Tommy Orange, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Arundhati Roy, Natasha Trethewey, Tom Stoppard, Lauren Groff, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Section: 021 #3466
Instructor: M. Reddon
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh1 - 2:15 PM

Dreams, Visions, Fantasies

“From dreams we talk to each other about reality,” writes Jean Toomer in his collection of aphorisms Essentials (1931). Using “dreams” as a thematic bridge, this course will introduce students to poetry, drama, and prose that explores the relationship between literary representation and subjectivity. We will consider questions such as how does literature define and mediate our experiences of the world? How does fiction, like the dream, express our desire for a better future? Alternatively, how does fiction represent our ambivalence to the past and our frustration with the present? Throughout the course our class will foreground issues around gender, race, sexuality, nationality, place, and spirituality in our readings. Course texts may will include experimental poetry, plays, and prose from a range authors and historical periods. Students who take this course will be introduced to a variety of approaches for reading literature in its cultural, historical, and political contexts, develop close writing and analytic skills through literary analysis and essay writing, and gain critical vocabulary to describe figurative language and genre.

Section: 022 #3467
Instructor: M.Bradshaw
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

In this section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies we will focus on literature written in and about Chicago, from the 19th century to the present. We will look at how literature represents and portrays the city, helping us remember key moments in Chicago history, grapple with social and cultural issues that define it, reflect on what makes this city unique among American cities.

Section: 023 #3468
Instructor:S. Fabian
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 4:15 - 6:45 PM

This foundational course in literature will introduce students to three major genres in literature: fiction, poetry, and drama. This course will also introduce students to at least three historical timeframes out of which literature emerges and the cultural aspects that literature reflects. The study of literature also includes literary criticism. By reading literary criticism, students will be introduced to the scholarly conversations that take place among critics regarding important literary texts. Hence, students will learn about the various critical approaches to literary interpretation. Students will also learn to engage in close reading and analysis of literary texts, using textual evidence to support their interpretations. Students will be given various opportunities to demonstrate their learning through a number of response papers. Quizzes, a midterm exam, and a final exam may be incorporated into the course at the instructor’s discretion. Ultimately, this course will provide students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the richness and depth of literature and to enjoy the literary experience on their lifelong journey for knowledge.

Section: 024 #4056
Instructor: D. Olszewska
3.0 credit hours lecture
Tu 4:15 - 6:45 PM

This section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies will focus on the portrayal of cannibalism in fiction, drama, and poetry. We will endeavor to identify and categorize the different moving parts that make up a novel, a short story, a play, and a poem. We will also interrogate the function of cannibalism in a few specific texts and analyze the authors’ intentions as well as the effect the cannibalism has on us as readers and thinkers. Our class will encounter writings by Agustina Bazterrica, Sayaka Murata, William Shakespeare, Safiya Sinclair, and Mark Twain. Although the acts of cannibalism presented in these texts are, on a whole, significantly less gory than a contemporary network TV show, reader discretion is advised given the potentially upsetting subject matter.

Section: 025 #4136
Instructor: D. Olszewska
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 4:15 - 6:45 PM

This section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies will focus on the portrayal of cannibalism in fiction, drama, and poetry. We will endeavor to identify and categorize the different moving parts that make up a novel, a short story, a play, and a poem. We will also interrogate the function of cannibalism in a few specific texts and analyze the authors’ intentions as well as the effect the cannibalism has on us as readers and thinkers. Our class will encounter writings by Agustina Bazterrica, Sayaka Murata, William Shakespeare, Safiya Sinclair, and Mark Twain. Although the acts of cannibalism presented in these texts are, on a whole, significantly less gory than a contemporary network TV show, reader discretion is advised given the potentially upsetting subject matter.

Section: 026 #6423
Instructor:I. Cornelius
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Speaking Out

What power does a voice have? In this course we study defiant, bold, despondent, and expressive voices that speak out from the pages of literary poetry, drama, and prose. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), Margery Kempe’s Book, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (book 1), Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sophocles’s Antigone, and short poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dudley Randall, among others. Topics include sound pattern, verse form, genre, convention, discursive address, footing, figurative language, character, dialogue, plot, and narration. We gain experience of varieties of English different from the modern standard and we develop heightened and sharpened powers of attention to literary creations and the “many kinds of voices” carried within them. Assessment is by quizzes, a class presentation, and midterm and final exams.

Business Writing (ENGL 210)

Section: 01W #4119
Instructor: J. Chamberlin
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Business Writing will train you to approach any professional writing task by first assessing the rhetorical situation. You will learn to analyze genres and styles of writing commonly used in business (such as job ads, memos, letters, flyers, proposals, and recommendation reports) and compose your own documents based on your assessment of audience and persuasive goals. Collaboration and working effectively in groups are skills essential to mastering professional communication; assignments and class activities therefore will test your ability to respond constructively to your peers’ work and ideas.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 02W #4120
Instructor:M. Meinhardt
3.0 credit hours lecture
Tu 7 - 9:30 PM

Business Writing is a seminar designed to build and improve effective communication practices for use in the business community. The ideas of “personal professionalism” and “priority of purposes” guide an exploration of business writing genres ranging from correspondence to memos, and from employment documents to executive summaries. Collaboration, peer interaction, and individual economy direct the creation of a series of writing projects that use revision and research as a necessary step in the writing process.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 03W #4121
Instructor:J. Janangelo
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 7 - 9:30 PM

Our course covers the rhetorical principles of effective writing, focusing on specific types of discourse practiced in business and professional settings. You will gain experience reading and writing texts pertinent to business communication including press releases, customer reviews, and resumes. Our course is writing intensive. We will use a process approach to writing, emphasizing problem-solving, prewriting strategies, and editing and revision skills. You will plan and share some of your writing with me in draft conferences. That gives you a chance to raise ideas, ask questions, get assistance, and receive feedback on your work.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 04W #4782
Instructor:H. Ackmann
3.0 credit hours lecture
MW 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Refine your skills in business writing as you explore and practice how technology, particularly generative AI, influences writing in today's business landscape. Master inclusive, accessible language choices, platform etiquette, and effective document crafting. Additionally, discover how visual design impacts and augments your message. Throughout this writing-intensive course, you'll engage in in-class exercises, individual assignments, and collaborative projects, equipping you with the tools to excel in diverse communication environments. Join this section and elevate your proficiency in the dynamic realm of business writing, unlocking new opportunities for success in your professional journey!

Note: Description was edited with ChatGPT 3.5.

Writing for Pre-Law Students (ENGL 211)

Section: 01W #5963
Instructor:J. Hovey
3.0 credit hours lecture
MW 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Writing and research are essential for lawyers no matter what area they decide to practice in. Lawyers must be able to write well in order to communicate effectively with their clients and argue for them in court. This course focuses on the rhetoric of law and the ways that legal texts create a culture and establish relationships through the language and arguments they employ. This course provides an opportunity for you to work on your writing as you select a Supreme Court Opinion to analyze over the course of the term. We will be especially interested in how American legal opinions create "justice" (or don't!), and how they define important terms like “evidence” or “rights.”

Outcomes: Students will write a long paper where they look at the rhetorical devices that help construct a legal opinion, and you make arguments about those devices and the effect they have on fairness and justice.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 02W #4059
Instructor: D. Gorski
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 7 - 9:30 PM

In this course, students will learn to develop the writing skills used by law school students and attorneys to prepare case briefs, office memoranda, and pre-trial motion memoranda. Students will also learn how to answer essay examination questions of the type given in law school and on a state bar examination. In class, students will develop the verbal abilities necessary to take a legal position and defend it with statements of fact and conclusions of law. Realistic hypothetical fact patterns will be analyzed using the IRAC method: issue, rule, application, and conclusion. Learning how to cite to legal authorities is a central part of the course. Readings include judicial opinions, state and federal statutes, and law review articles. The course is taught by a practicing attorney, and assumes no prior legal studies by the students.

This is a writing intensive course.

Theory/Practice Tutoring (ENGL 220)

Section: 1WE #1742
Instructor: A. Kessel
3.0 credit hours seminar
MWF 9:20 - 10:10 AM

English 220 is a seminar designed to prepare students to serve as tutors in the ÁùºÏ±¦µäappChicago Writing Center. This course is open to students from all majors who have a passion for clear written communication. We will explore the theory and practice of peer tutoring through reading and discussion of research as well as through practical experience. In this course you will learn how to help others become better writers while improving your own writing and critical thinking skills. You will become part of a community of fellow peer tutors and gain experience that will benefit you in a variety of careers. The service-learning component consists of approximately 20-25 hours of observation and tutoring in the Writing Center. The writing intensive component includes several short essays and a group research paper. Students who wish to be enrolled in this course must obtain a short recommendation from a faculty member who can speak to the student’s writing ability and interpersonal skills. Recommendations should be emailed to Amy Kessel (akessel@luc.edu). Those who excel in the course will be eligible to work as paid writing tutors.

This course fulfills the writing intensive and engaged learning requirements.

Exploring Poetry (ENGL 271)

Section: 001 #4060
Instructor: J. Stayer
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

This is a second-tier literature course, building on the interpretive moves learned in UCLR 100. Entirely devoted to the glorious genre of poetry, we will focus on British authors: Shakespeare, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, William Wordsworth, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, and others. The contemporary poetry we read will consider the experience of Black British authors: Raymond Antrobus, Warsan Shire, and others.

Instead of granting poems a special status beyond language or normal human communication, we will look at poems as instances of a rhetorical occasion: who is speaking, to whom, and to what purpose? Once we see how poems act like ordinary speech genres (curse, blessing, invitation, warning, cry, lament), we no longer need to fear poetry as an arcane game of hide-and-seek with meaning. It will change your life.

Section: 002 #5964
Instructor: B. Molby
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh1 - 2:15 PM

Poetry is a foundational literary form with its own traditions and expectations, and is continually being shaped by innovative authors and artists who challenge its creative conventions. Beginning in the 19th century, authors and artists pushed the boundaries of what poetry could be by incorporating illustrations and decorations into the text of their published works. This class will give students a set of tools for reading, interpreting, and writing about poetry, and we will also explore how merging visual and material elements enhances the range of meanings and the reader’s own experience of these illustrated and decorated texts. Through an examination of works such as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the class will empower students to demystify, analyze, and enjoy poems in English from a diverse range of poetic styles, forms, and voices.

Section: 01W #4061
Instructor:J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh10 - 11:15 AM

Why should we care about poetry—and how should we care about it? We’ll start historically—who before us cared about poetry, and why? We’ll study the pressure poems put on their historical moment, and how they’re shaped by it in surprising ways: for example, our discussion of Shakespeare will start with the formation of “Shakespeare” as a figure, often at odds with the “evidence” of the poems, of canonical standards throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a program that affected even the spelling of his poems. Many of the authors we’ll read were white, male, and rich—how has literature been used to promote a series of questions and assumptions that they may have shared (sometimes called “the canon”), and how has it, even in some of these same authors, blown apart (some of) the stereotypes and orthodoxies we’d expect to find? We’ll watch the invention not only of English-speaking cultures, but of the English language itself, its twists and triumphs, detours and degenerations—and most importantly, we’ll watch as language, especially literary language, is fashioned into a vehicle of social (as well as aesthetic) contest. Readings in genres epic, lyric, dramatic, and p*rnographic, from many hundreds of years. We (well, you) will also write papers, take exams, and mix metaphors—the entire range of academic abjection, in one convenient course.

Section: 02W #4062
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Why should we care about poetry—and how should we care about it? We’ll start historically—who before us cared about poetry, and why? We’ll study the pressure poems put on their historical moment, and how they’re shaped by it in surprising ways: for example, our discussion of Shakespeare will start with the formation of “Shakespeare” as a figure, often at odds with the “evidence” of the poems, of canonical standards throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a program that affected even the spelling of his poems. Many of the authors we’ll read were white, male, and rich—how has literature been used to promote a series of questions and assumptions that they may have shared (sometimes called “the canon”), and how has it, even in some of these same authors, blown apart (some of) the stereotypes and orthodoxies we’d expect to find? We’ll watch the invention not only of English-speaking cultures, but of the English language itself, its twists and triumphs, detours and degenerations—and most importantly, we’ll watch as language, especially literary language, is fashioned into a vehicle of social (as well as aesthetic) contest. Readings in genres epic, lyric, dramatic, and p*rnographic, from many hundreds of years. We (well, you) will also write papers, take exams, and mix metaphors—the entire range of academic abjection, in one convenient course.

Section: 03W #5965
Instructor:N. Salama
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 AM - 12:20 PM

Poetry, generally considered the oldest form of literature and once a central mode of communication, now often plays very little role in a person’s daily life. Common contemporary perceptions of poetry insist that the form is outdated or unintelligible. In this course, we will examine a wide array of poems to consider whether these claims possess any merit. Central to our course will be an exploration of the evolution of poetic forms in the 20th and 21st centuries, with occasional consideration of earlier poetic forms. 20th century poets witnessed and experienced an astounding array of global and personal traumas, compelling them to reinvent poetic forms in order to express the inexpressible. In our readings of these poems then, we will engage with both their subject matter and their innovative forms. Poets are likely to include T. S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Leila Chatti, among others.

Exploring Drama (ENGL 272)

Section: 01W #4063
Instructor:R. Peters
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 1 - 2:15 PM

English 272 focuses on the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of drama; extensive readings and several critical analyses are required in this class. This section of English 272 offers a rigorous study of numerous significant 20th and 21st Century dramas. Course texts will include works from Tennessee Williams, Margaret Edson, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage, and several others.

This is a writing intensive course.

Exploring Fiction (ENGL 273)

Section: 01W #4066
Instructor: F. Staidum
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 1:40 - 2:30 PM

The Horror of Race

In contemporary society, Black and Brown people are consistently endowed with supernatural and monstrous qualities with often deadly effect. From Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s description of Michael Brown’s “intense aggressive face […] like a demon” to media depictions of Asian-American citizens or Central American migrants as nefarious carriers of COVID-19, measles, the “plague” and other disease, popular representations of Black, Asian, and Latino/a/e peoples (including African-descendent members of the latter) portray these populations and communities as dangerous threats to the US body politic—entities to be feared, contained, and vanquished. These associations between perceived human difference and fear, however, are not new.

Exploring Fiction focuses on comprehending, appreciating, analyzing, and interpreting prose fiction. In this section, we study a sampling of Gothic fiction and, in some cases, Horror film to explicate the long history of representing the scary Other via the nonwhite and foreign presence. Through confrontations between good/evil, human/monster, and living/dead, the Gothic and Horror embody societal anxieties regarding difference and the unknown. In this course, we seek to reveal the myriad ways these genres incorporate marginalized racial, ethnic, and national identities as analogies for the terrifying and sublime. We will ponder: How do these racialized “monsters” simultaneously reinforce and trouble the lines between human and non-human, normal and abnormal, Self and Other? How has society deployed the grotesque figure of the monster, corpse, alien, ghost, and freak to regulate the fluid definitions of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, and sexuality? What are some of the ramifications for both marginalized individuals and communities forced to negotiate these monstrous forms? We will consider figurative and formal techniques, thematic content, historical context, and secondary scholarship to develop sophisticated, nuanced analytical skills for exploring fiction.

This is a writing-intensive course.

Section: 02W #4067
Instructor: A. Aftab
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF2:45 - 3:35 PM

Identity, Power and Resistance in Fiction

What is the function of literature in challenging or reinforcing dominant ideologies about race, class, nation, gender, sexuality and religion? How do writers use fiction to reveal the intricacies of interpersonal and systemic oppression? How do different modes and forms of fiction – such as the bildungsroman or the speculative short story – represent structures of power and strategies of resistance? These questions will guide our class as we delve into contemporary fiction by writers of color. In this course, we will use an intersectional lens to analyze fictional representations of social identity, power and privilege, and resistance and oppression. We will read novels and short stories by Tsitsi Dangarembga, W. E. B. DuBois, Ocean Vuong, Shyam Selvadurai and Nnedi Okorafor. Towards the end of the semester, students will be able to examine how different systems of oppression –such as racism, sexism, and classism – interact and intersect to create unique experiences for marginalized communities. In addition to sharpening their literary analysis, students will learn about current debates in the studies of race and gender, consider the burden of representation for minoritized writers, and examine the relationship between literary aesthetics and politics.

This is course meets the writing intensive and multicultural requirements.

Section: 03W #5966
Instructor:N. Mun
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

This course focuses on the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of prose fiction. Outcome: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of fiction as a means of exploring human experience and understanding the creative process and be able to use the technical vocabulary necessary for understanding fiction. Class Topic: Conflict (polemos) has been written about by philosophers since the pre-Socratic era—from war to ethical struggles. We, in the 21st century, have continued with this obsession, but our tastes have broadened a bit to include not only external conflict, such as war or the cosmos, but psychological dilemmas, as well. To put it succinctly: Conflict is an integral part of human nature. It surrounds us, whether we want it or not, which is why we do our best to avoid it. Literature can take advantage of this avoidance.

Novels and stories can provide a "safe space" of sorts for readers to look at conflict, directly and unflinchingly. Conflict pulls us into the text and allows us to witness, experience, and perhaps process what we might not be able to in our own (very real, sometimes absurdly real) lives. We’ll start by diving into how writers mechanize and think about conflict, and try to understand concepts such as, chronic and acute conflicts. From there we’ll discover numerous creative writing elements writers use to make readers feel, think, react, and even take action, long after they’ve turned the final pages of the book. We’ll also consider all the different “types” of conflict a reader might engage with while reading: interpersonal conflict, person vs. society, person vs. self, etc. By the end of the course, students will have a solid understanding and appreciation for not only how fiction works, but also how conflict—when combined with “eros”— can behave as a motor force that propels the reader toward the final pages of stories and novels. Students will also be able to articulate their understanding and evidence-based opinions in thoughtful writing projects.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 04W #5967
Instructor: A. Sen
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh4:15 - 5:30 PM

Neighborhoods of Fiction

Chicago is known as a city of neighborhoods, but what exactly is a neighborhood and who decides its boundaries? What kind of politics, identities, communities, and emotions do they produce, and what cracks appear in their façade? This course will take up prose fiction in particular, in order to immerse ourselves in the details and intricacies of neighborhoods as little worlds of their own. As we explore a range of neighborhoods from suburban gated communities to inner pockets of cosmopolitan cities, with traces of the utopian, the horrific, and the absurd, we will trace what we might call “neighborhood logic” and the role of literary aesthetics in both representing and challenging that logic. Authors in our syllabus are likely to include Katherine Manfield, Toni Morrison, Ursula LeGuin, Rohinton Mistry, and Hanif Kureishi. Assignments will involve journalling, research on actual neighborhoods, argument-driven essays, and a small creative component.

This is a writing intensive course.

Exploring Shakespeare (ENGL 274)

Section: 001 #4068
Instructor: J. Glover
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 1 - 2:15 PM

This course will offer students an introduction to the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. We will combine close readings of his plays with an exploration of their performance on stage and screen (including attendance at performances at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and potentially other venues). Throughout our focus will be on the greatness of Shakespeare’s dramatic art and the many ways to appreciate it.

African-American Literature Post-1900 (ENGL 282C)

Section: 001 #6367
Instructor: H. Graves
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 10:25 - 11:15 AM

In this course, students will gain holistic knowledge of the long arc of 20thcentury African American Literature, from 1900 to the Contemporary Period. Beginning with the Nadir of Race Relations where authors contended with the color line to contemporary literary expressions (1980s- present), the course will introduce students to critical snapshots of expressive writings by and about African Americans. We will read the work of writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Lorraine Hansberry; Black Arts Movement writers such as Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, and Carolyn Rodgers; late-20th century writers such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Essex Hemphill. In short, the aim of this course will be to explore how black people in the U.S. meditated on a range of topics during different historical and politicalperiods such as black life and sociality, and indeed black death and anti-blackness, through literature and the intersections of class, gender, and sexuality.

Content warning:This class will occasionally ask you to read, hear, and view difficult material.Your language, tone, questions, and comments must be respectful and considerate of all other participants in the class.

Section: 01W #6368
Instructor:W. Romero
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF12:35 - 1:25 PM

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman argues that, in order to tell an impossible story, one must “advance a series of speculative arguments” and “exploit the capacities of the subjunctive– a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities.” In the absence of knowing for sure how things were or how they might be, what might be wished for? What could be possible? This course will explore African American Literature since 1900 and we will pay particular attention to the efforts writers have made to create counter histories and alternative futures through the act of speculating. By the end of this course, you will be able to discuss various movements within the African American literary tradition, analyze texts from myriad genres, and articulate how African American literature served and continues to serve as a site of resistance, inspiration, and respite. The syllabus will include texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others, and will also engage with film and other visual media.

This course is writing intensive so there will be several informal and formal writing assignments, including reading responses, in-class writing activities, short papers, and a podcast project.

Women in Literature (ENGL 283)

Section: 001 #4818
Instructor:S. Bost
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Haunted Houses

For as long as women have been associated with home and housework, these places have been haunted by gender hierarchies, colonialism, slavery, hom*ophobia, ableism, and other factors that make the home a potentially unsafe or unhappy place. What do the boundaries of “the home” include or try to exclude? Where does the idea of “haunted houses” come from? In our readings and discussions we will explore historical and cultural memories that haunt the homes depicted in a diverse selection of literature written by women. How do different cultural traditions value homes and haunting?

Our texts will include a Nancy Drew mystery, Toni Morrison’s Nobel prize winning novel Beloved, Susanne Antonetta’s environmental memoir Body Toxic, Allison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, and additional essays, stories, films, games, and images available on Sakai. Assignments will include two exams, regular journaling, and four creative assignments.

Section: 01W #4070
Instructor:P. Warren
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 8:15 - 9:05 AM

Unlikeable Female Protagonists

“Likeability” influences so much, from political votes to earning potential to the likelihood one will be convicted of a crime. That influence grows even stronger and more complex in its outcomes when the “un/likable” figure in question is identified as female. But is “likeability” – specifically in terms of female protagonists - a good thing or not? Does the sword cut both ways, damning the “likeable” and “unlikable” alike? Why, then, do we so often love the dislikeable, or like to dislike them so much? Together, we will explore five texts in various modes/modalities – Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, Rivera’s Juliet Takes A Breath, Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer and Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, along with additional articles, etc. - and their various female protagonists. We will question not just if these women are likable or unlikable, but why we feel that way, and why that matters.

Cross-listed with Women's Studies, English 283 is designed to meet the "literary knowledge and experience" requirements of the Loyola Core. Focusing on literature written by 20th century women authors, this course is designed to help students gain knowledge of women's lives and writings; to show them the difference gender makes to the writing, reading, and interpretation of literature; to train them in the analysis of literature; and to teach them how to describe, analyze, and formulate arguments about literary texts.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 02W #4071
Instructor: V. Bell
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 8:30 - 9:45 AM

English 283 focuses on the representation of women in literature in diverse cultural contexts. In section 02W, we will explore “The Shell Game,” that is writers, most of whom identify as women, who use “borrowed forms” to dialogue powerfully with other texts, forms, discourses, and ideas.

Poets and writers often “borrow” non-literary forms such as magazine quizzes, recipes, border interrogations, job applications, etc., and transform them into poems, essays, and stories. Like hermit crabs, they steal these homes and re-purpose them for their own needs, desires, questions, and arguments. This literary “shell game” produces a powerful examination of identity in relation to the body, history, nationality, ethnicity, and constructions of race, socio-economic class, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Course texts include work by Layli Long Soldier, Fatimah Asghar, Nona Fernandez, Patricia Lockwood, Gwendolyn Wallace, A.E. Stallings, Nicole Sealey, Kim Adrian, and more. As a writing intensive section, course requirements may include first and final drafts of critical essays, midterm and final exams, asynchronous discussions, and a multimodal writing project.

This is a writing intensive course.

Asian American Literature (ENGL 284)

Section: 01W #4819
Instructor: J. Fiorelli
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 9:20 - 10:10 AM

This course introduces the range of Asian American literature from its earliest works around the turn of the twentieth century to its proliferation in contemporary literature.

The relatively recent resurgence of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. has revived a long-standing question in Asian American experience: where do Asian Americans belong? Their myriad histories include movement and continued connection across oceans and continents; subjection to laws and regulations that have restricted their movement into and within the U.S.; and, in the case of many Pacific Islanders, changes to their homes driven by colonialism. Their social positioning has also been various, whether embraced as the “model minority” or rejected as racial others, unassimilable foreigners, and potential threats. Thus, their literary productions often grapple with notions of place. Our examination of Asian American literature will explore various spatial scales – for instance, local community, island, nation, and globe – that have been sites of belonging, constraint, political investment, and conflict. We will examine a range of literary forms and styles, including poetry, drama, and prose fiction, to consider how Asian American authors have used aesthetic means to illuminate and critique conditions in America and in the world.

This class is Writing Intensive; therefore, in conjunction with our study of this literature, we will give significant attention to the writing process. Course requirements will include active reading, written homework and quizzes, class participation and writing practice, a group presentation, and literary analysis essays.

This course meets the writing intensive and multicultural requirements.

Nature in Literature (ENGL 288)

Section: 01W #4073
Instructor: E. Bayley
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF11:30 AM - 12:20 PM

In this course we will use a number of different Ecocritical approaches, with a particular focus on Ecofeminism to explore and interpret pieces of fiction. This course is cross-listed with WSGS and is writing intensive. Literature provides a vast account of how the natural world is represented, treated, understood, and further, misused or abused. In response to this, we will explore the question: is there is a direct correlation between the treatment of nature and the treatment of humans? Therefore, this course will focus heavily on the connections between the treatment and abuse of humans and nature. Assignments in the semester will include writing papers, reading reflections, and classroom participation.

This is a writing intensive course.

Human Values in Literature (ENGL 290)

Section: 001 #4820
Instructor: P. Jacob
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 1 - 2:15 PM

Hoards and Other Stuff

Tablets, trinkets, pompoms, puzzle pieces, and plastic bags. We use objects to encode memories, reflect our identities, signal social status, and order our world. But we are also utterly overwhelmed by things: collections devolve into hoards, and the ocean spins trash through its currents. In order to better understand human values and systems, we will examine the many categories of object—relic, commodity, rubbish, and keepsake—as they appear in literature. We will discuss how we attribute meaning to things, but also how things escape our attempts at meaning-making. What do objects signify, if anything? How do things help us remember, and what do they allow us to forget? Why do we accumulate so much, and how has that tendency transferred into the digital age? Readings will include: Ruth Ozeki’s novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness; nonfictional essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Teju Cole, and Brian Thill; Marie Kondo’s bestselling decluttering guide; the television programs Storage Wars; the films Wall-E and Finding Vivian Maier; and Julio Torres’s comedy special My Favorite Shapes. Assignments will include creative exercises, close analysis of the readings, and exams with short answer questions.

This course fulfils the multicultural requirement.

Section: 002 #4821
Instructor: J. Janangelo
3.0 credit hours lecture
Tu 7 - 9:30 PM

We will explore major critical approaches and apply them to a range of literary texts, including novels and short stories, with a focus on what comprises and compromises social class and wealth. Our range of theories will include Postcolonialism, Gender, Marxism, Morphology, and Psychology. Our course will help refine our critical thinking and analytic abilities. To that end, we will work on close reading, focused discussion, theorized textual analysis, and effective writing. Our authors will include Dorothy West and Guy de Maupassant.

Section: 01W #4822
Instructor:P. Sorenson
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 1:40 - 2:30 PM

In Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s translation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus asks, “Where shall the track of an ancient guilt, hard to make out, be found?” In this course, we will be exploring Oedipus’s question. In other words, we will be exploring guilt. Who’s to blame? How do we assign that blame, and what does it mean to be found guilty? Can an individual really be held responsible for any crime? Or, are the social conditions themselves at fault? We will be exploring vengeance, mob violence, collective guilt, misplaced blame, and corruption. We will also consider forgiveness, apology, and restoration. In the end, this course raises questions of causation: What are the final causes of any effect? To aid us in answering that question, you will be tasked with reading fiction, poetry, and drama. Moreover, and as a feature of this section’s “writing intensive” designation, we will discuss the expectations for strong academic writing, and you will be required regularly to compose low-stakes in-class journal responses and some higher-stakes single-page responses. You will also write two high-stakes three-page responses and one final six-page essay near the semester’s end.

This is a writing intensive course.

Section: 02W #4823
Instructor: E. Hopwood
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 4:15 - 5:30 PM

What’s your relationship to hustle culture? Is it a necessary evil in our profit-driven capitalistic society? Is it an enviable aesthetic on the socials? Or is it a system that we might re-examine and critically interrogate? If you are burnt out, exhausted, or otherwise fed up with the relentless grind of the workaday world, this course may be for you. We’ve come to value labor and production over rest and self-care, even in (especially in) moments of social, political, and global crisis. But what if care and rest were forms of capital? Or even used as a means of resistance? What if we turn to the power of rest not only as a respite from hustle culture, but as a lens through which to access stories that imagine other ways of being? This course will revolve around care and rest as a means of liberation and “living otherwise,” both historically and today. We will interrogate contemporary “grind culture” and examine how labor, self-care, communes, and social movements operated from the nineteenth century to today. In doing so, we will identify and question the values we ascribe to work, play, and rest. Literature will explore themes of labor, healing, trauma, capitalism, liberation, justice, resistance, and mindfulness. We will read novels, poetry, short stories, and essays by authors such as Jenny Odell, Sayaka Murata, Herman Melville, Ross Gay, Henry David Thoreau, Ling Ma, Louisa May Alcott, and Octavia Butler.

This is a writing intensive course.

Advanced Writing (ENGL 293)

Section: 01W #5423
Instructor:E. Weeks Stogner
3.0 credit hours seminar
MWF 2:45 - 3:35 PM

Theory and Practice

English 293 explores academic writing as both an activity and a subject of study. As contributors in this class, we will take part in the activity – academic writing – and also step back to think about, read about, discuss, and theorize it. As we work on essays, we will also ask questions about the purposes of academic writing, what strong academic writing looks like, how one produces it, where expectations for academic writing come from, and more. Course content will therefore center around, first, students’ reconsiderations of their own writing processes and additions to their repertoire of strategies and, second, active reading and discussion of composition theory. Course requirements are (1) reading and annotating all assigned materials; (2) actively participating and workshopping in class; (3) completing extensive writing processes, including final drafts, for four formal essays; and (4) writing a semester-long reflective blog.

This is a writing intensive course.

Writing in/with New Media (ENGL 294)

Section: 01W #5422
Instructor: R. Peters
3.0 credit hours seminar
TuTh 4:15 - 5:30 PM

The focus of this course is: Writing with/in New Media. We will practice writing in and across modalities and technologies that are both “old” and “new,” familiar and unfamiliar. We will consider how communication is mediated and remediated in the digital age, and we will draw connections between historical moments of print culture with that of contemporary technological advancement. Some topics we will explore include the history of writing and writing technologies, as well as digital genres (websites, podcasts, games), digital storytelling, multimodal discourse, and visual analysis and rhetoric.

This is a writing intensive course.

Border Literature (ENGL 313)

Section: 001 #6504
Instructor: A. Aftab
3.0 credit hourslecture
MWF 1:40 - 2:30 PM

The Queerness of Borders/The Borders of Queerness

How do national borders shape our everyday lives? What is the relationship between queerness and geopolitics? How are sexual and gendered subjectivities informed by the racial demarcations of borders? These are some of the questions we will explore in this class as we analyze literary representations of physical and conceptual borders. This class will focus on theory, fiction and poetry that examine different forms of ethnic, national, gendered, metaphysical and spiritual borders. We will pay specific attention to the intersections of geopolitics and queerness as we study border literatures, examining our primary texts through theories of postcolonialism, decoloniality, and race and migration. Our class will be framed by an exploration of the violence of border imperialism and the urgent need for border abolition. We will also explore how writers manipulate genre and form to reify or challenge aesthetic and literary borders. Some writers we will read include Ocean Vuong, Akwaeke Emezi, Octavia Butler and Nuruddin Farah.

This is course meets the multicultural requirement.

The Writing of Poetry (ENGL 317)

Section: 001 #2839
Instructor:A. Baker
3.0 credit hoursseminar
M 4:15 - 6:45 PM

This course offers practice and instruction in the techniques and analysis of poetry through reading, writing, discussing, and revising poems. We will give particular attention to the unique challenges and opportunities facing beginning poets as we first seek to channel our ideas and life experiences into poetry, to find and then develop our own voices in relation to not only our own impulses but to "the tradition" and the aesthetically diverse and fascinating world of contemporary poetry. The poems you write will be carefully read and critiqued by both your classmates and the instructor. The culmination of the course will be to compile a portfolio of the work you have written over the term.

Section: 002 #4075
Instructor: L. Goldstein
3.0 credit hoursseminar
Tu 2:45 - 5:15 PM

“Basic” Poetry: An Experimental Workshop

Poetry creates an experience for readers on a page as well as in a room. It is a practice and craft that requires reading, discussion, exploration and sharing. Each week we read a unique work of contemporary poetry, mostly by POC and queer writers, to form a framework for discussion about vulnerable points of view and innovative forms. From there, students are encouraged to find their own process, form and voice. In our sessions, we experiment with language together to discover and foster creativity and delight by creating work both as a group and on our own. The course also includes prompts for writing in between sessions, and presentations of student poetry for review by the full group or small groups. Finally, students spend several weeks compiling and reviewing their own final collections of poetry for a self-published chapbook, and give a reading of their work at the end of the semester.

Section: 003 #4076
Instructor:P. Sorenson
3.0 credit hoursseminar
W 2:45 - 5:15 PM

This course aligns poetry writing with the reading of poetry and the exploration of poetic practices both old and new. Through outside reading, students will question their relationships to contemporary modes and cultures. Thus, students will further develop their own voices, styles, and methods of production, and they will begin to situate their craft in the larger poetic world. Our class will center the poem as project. Over the course of the semester, you will be constructing a chapbook-length work. This work will include a single poem or a set of linked poems that speaks to or expresses the same concept, theme, image, or narrative. Finally, the course content will cover some basic elements, terms, and techniques of writing poetry, such as the line, form, rhyme, free verse, imagery, and metaphor.

The Writing of Fiction (ENGL 318)

Section: 001 #4079
Instructor:H. Axelrod
3.0 credit hoursseminar
F 2:45 - 5:15 PM

Section: 002 #4080
Instructor:V. Popa
3.0 credit hoursseminar
M 2:45 - 5:15 PM

Section: 003 #4081
Instructor: N. Mun
3.0 credit hoursseminar
Tu 2:45 - 5:15 PM

Five Beginnings, One Ending.

Starting a story or a novel is not unlike standing at the edge of a cliff. Both can be terrifying. There are many reasons to not dive into that project. My ideas are terrible, one might think. Or, I don’t know where to begin. Or, Is this really a good time to start something new? In this course, we’ll hold hands at the cliff for moral support but also to push each other off (gently). Some might tiptoe. Others might cannonball. And still others might swan dive into that abyss. But no matter our varying degrees of fear, we will, without a doubt, leave that ledge and land on our feet as better writers and better risk-takers. For the first five weeks, we’ll analyze notable beginnings and ask questions, such as: What propels the story forward? What stings us? What questions are being raised that can’t be easily answered? Then we’ll write five propulsive and perhaps unrelenting beginnings of our own. The goal isn’t only to practice the “art of diving” but to have five projects already in free-fall, so we’ll have things to work on, long after the course’s end. The final 10 weeks will be focused on developing one of those beginnings into a polished story or chapter. So the question is: Is this a good time to start something new? The answer is: always.

Section: 004 #4082
Instructor: M. Hawkins
3.0 credit hoursseminar
W7 - 9:30 PM

In this fiction writing workshop students will read, write, revise, and critique short fiction with the aim of becoming better writers and readers. Each student will write and workshop three short stories for the class. Workshops will be rigorous and respectful, based on the understanding that analysis of other writers’ craft teaches us to hone our own.

Every week we will read and discuss short stories by master writers; most weeks students will read, discuss, and write responses to each other’s work, too. As time allows, students will also free-write in class in response to prompts designed to spark creative momentum, generate ideas, and explore technique. Class discussions will focus on craft and concept, with attention to the following topics: structure, character, dialog, voice, tone, imagery, and ethics.Again and again, we will ask each other and ourselves: What works, what doesn’t, why, and how can it be made better?

Writing Creative Nonfiction (ENGL 319)

Section: 001 #4084
Instructor: M. Hawkins
3.0 credit hoursseminar
Tu 7 - 9:30 PM

This writing workshop focuses on the personal essay.Students will draw from their lives and their observations of the world to craft short, thoughtful, carefully composed works that tell true stories, raise questions, and possibly (but not necessarily) draw conclusions.One meaning of essay is to try; the purpose of a personal essay is not merely to report facts or to so say what happened but to try for greater understanding. What did you learn? How does your experience link to larger themes? Ideally, you will discover what you think about your chosen topics as you write. You may surprise yourself.

In addition to writing polished, finished essays, students will read each other’s work and discuss it in class. Weekly assigned readings of both classic and experimental essays will provide wide-ranging examples of this literary form at its highest level. We will also free-write, when time allows.

Section: 002 #4085
Instructor:H. Axelrod
3.0 credit hoursseminar
Th 2:45 - 5:15 PM

Section: 003 #4086
Instructor: C. Macon Fleischer
3.0 credit hoursseminar
W 2:45 - 5:15 PM

Studies in Medieval Literature (ENGL 323)

Section: 001 #6142
Instructor:I. Cornelius
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Middle English Narrative Poetry

Until recently, fictional narratives in English and other European languages regularly took the form of poetry. In this course we read several of the great narrative poems written in Middle English, the form of the English language in use between about eight hundred and about five hundred years ago. Looking back at an even earlier age, one poet from this period wrote, “wordes tho / That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge / Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so” (words that were then current now appear to us surprisingly senseless and foreign, and yet they spoke them so). We moderns may well agree, until we learn to read the language. We do that in this course. We then read selections from the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (often described as the greatest English poet prior to Shakespeare), William Langland’s Piers Plowman (a restless surreal vision quest), and the anonymous Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (easily the cleverest entry in its genre). Evaluation is by short assignments and mid-term and final exams and essays.

Plays of Shakespeare (ENGL 326)

Section: 001 #4087
Instructor: J. Knapp
3.0 credit hours lecture
MW 4:15 - 5:30 PM

This course will focus on a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in all the major genres (comedy, history, tragedy, and romance). We will read the plays through a variety of critical approaches, taking into account the historical context in which they were produced. To emphasize the importance of drama as intended for theatrical performance, we will view recorded performances, and, if possible, attend a local theatrical performance. Over the course of the semester we will explore the development of drama in England, the material history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and the political and cultural place of the theater in Shakespeare’s England. Plays may include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline. The primary text will be David Bevington’s edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. There will be papers, a midterm and a final.

Romanticism and the Age of Revolution (ENGL 335)

Section: 001 #5970
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the most powerful earthly king was beheaded, the institution of monarchy annihilated, and a God who had been heretofore supposed “Almighty” overthrown. “The French Revolution is,” conceded even Edmund Burke, its greatest British opponent, “all circ*mstances taken together … the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.” We’ll study this time of exuberance, dispute, and outburst, in which every inherited piety and orthodoxy seemed debatable. We’ll read poets and novelists, of course—but we’ll also read lunatics and prophets, opium addicts and enslaved people, “blue-stocking” feminists and the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Lord Byron. In William Wordsworth, we’ll find the first poetry created out of a “language really used by men”; in Mary Wollstonecraft, a fiery annunciation that “it is time to affect a revolution in female manners”; in John Keats, a verse dismissed as “mental masturbation.” We’ll follow the rise of Napoleon, the fall of the Slave Trade, and the foundation of Australia—in newspapers and magazine articles, political pamphlets and diaries, as well as the parlors of Jane Austen. Fulfills post-1700, pre-1900 requirement. Papers, exams, other miscellaneous torment.

Studies in Modernism (ENGL 344)

Section: 001 #5971
Instructor: J. Stayer
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Literature and Life in Eliot and Woolf

In this course, we will take a deep dive into the works of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. The theoretical background of the course will be biographical criticism, a genre that has passionate adherents and contemptuous naysayers. We’ll look at arguments for and against the “biographical fallacy” and consider the ways in which biographical explanations illuminate (or reductively misinterpret) the work. We will read much of what Eliot and Woolf wrote in the first half of their careers in tandem with two biographies: Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, and Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. We’ll also look at the recently published (2023) letters of Eliot to Emily Hale, with their eye-opening revelations about biographical influences. Along the way, we’ll discover that works once theorized as “impersonal” turn out to be deeply personal, and that works that present themselves as biographical are often artistic constructs with little relation to historical fact.

Contemporary Critical Race Theory (ENGL 354)

Section: 001 #4827
Instructor: A. Sen
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh1 - 2:15 PM

From Self to Relation

This course will track the emergence of the “self,” also known as the “I” or the “subject,” and its legacies in contemporary discourse, such as debate about the dominance of the personal essay. However, we will place this topic in dialogue with another concept that is fast gaining traction in popular discourse: that of being in relation, or community, whether in the context of unionizing, communal living, or an interspecies ethos in the face of climate change. We will contextualize the current thrust of such debates with the help of theoretical traditions (metacognition, Marxism, queer theory, anticoloniality, ecocriticism, and more) through which notions of the self and of its relational possibilities emerge. We will ask questions such as: is there anything such as a true self? Why does the idea have such a strong hold on our imaginations? How and why do we challenge it through a spectrum of positions, ranging from multiculturalism to espousal of the possibility of a posthuman world? Through a combination of lecture, class discussion, and activities applying theory to literary readings, we will try to salvage ethically (and aesthetically) meaningful answers for ourselves.

Studies in Fiction Post-1900 (ENGL 372C)

Section: 001 #5973
Instructor: M. Reddon
3.0 credit hours lecture
TuTh10 - 11:15 AM

Indigenous Pop: Transforming Genre Fiction

This course will examine a range of contemporary genre fiction written by Indigenous authors. Imagined as a "shared language," pop culture offers Indigenous writers a set of forms and figures for representing collective experiences of colonial violence across disparate and distinct transnational and tribal contexts. The conventions of genre fiction, for instance, provide Indigenous authors with common tropes and formulas that can be reworked to speak to their own desires, anxieties, and fears and to represent anticolonial futures. Central questions we will consider in this course include: how do Indigenous authors translate the conventions of horror, detective, and speculative fiction into Indigenous contexts and what are the politics of these translations? And how is "appropriation" used as an aesthetic strategy to represent community and cultural resurgence or express anticolonial critique? Students will be introduced to theoretical and literary discussions of genre to help support their readings of this work. We will also learn about Indigenous epistemologies, traditional stories, and languages to help build culturally specific frameworks for reading the material. Alongside a critical inquiry into fantastic, the speculative, and the imaginative in Indigenous genre writing, we will consider the importance of political histories such as treaty rights, dispossession, residential schooling, and resource extraction, for understanding these literary works.

Contemporary American Literature 1700-1900 (ENGL 381B)

Section: 001 #5974
Instructor: F. Staidum
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 2:45 - 3:35 PM

New Orleans in the Age of Revolution

Comparative American Literature typically focuses on the study of US literature in relation to the literatures of other regions of the world. However, this section takes an alternative approach by comparing an assortment of works written in French, Spanish, Creole, English, and German all originating from a single location—New Orleans, Louisiana. In spite of this narrow geographic scope, the ethnolinguistic diversity and heterogenous national origins of early New Orleans literature allows for a rich comparative study of American culture in the broader context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the age of revolution.

Due to the city’s presence in multiple empires—French, Spanish, and US—and its geography connecting North America to Latin America and the wider Atlantic world, New Orleans was at the crossroads of major historical-material developments radically reshaping modernity. As a result, New Orleans literature was both multilingual and cosmopolitan. For example, seventeen Black poets of New Orleans compiled the first literary anthology published by African Americans, Les Cenelles: Choix de Poésies Indigènes, composed in French and influenced by the French Revolution and its impact on Romanticism, while Eusebio José Gómez serialized the first US Latino novel, Un matrimonio como hay muchos: Novela contemporánea, in his Spanish-language New Orleans newspaper La Patria, whose editorial perspective extolled the revolutionary virtues of George Washington while criticizing US imperialism. Similarly, Bavarian-American author Ludwig von Reizenstein writes Die Geheimnisse von New-Orleans, a novel inspired by the French sensationalist genre and published in one of New Orleans’s German-language newspapers, Louisiana Staats-Zeitung. Making several allusions to the Haitian Revolution and the European Revolutions of 1848, the novel lambasts capitalism and social hierarchy, satirizes the perversities of slavery, and predicts a retributive race-war. The class will compare the artistic and ideological qualities of this multilingual, multinational, and multiracial literature attending to its cultural-linguistic particularities within their revolutionary context. By doing so, our study of New Orleans literature will illuminate competing racialized definitions of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty circulating during the 1700s and 1800s, while also developing a more hemispheric, less insular story of American history.

Studies in African American Literature Since 1900 (ENGL 384C)

Section: 001 #5975
Instructor:H. Graves
3.0 credit hours lecture
MWF 11:30 AM - 12:20 AM

Beginning with his publication of his seminal novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright rose to literary prominence, and directly influenced the course of African American Literature for the remainder of the 20th century. Emerging from his literary influence were his protégé’s James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who struggled with identifying with his political views and his aesthetic technique of protest literature. Alongside, Richard Wright was a lesser known, but important writer Chester Himes who deals with similar themes in the West Coast geography of Los Angeles.

This course is an advanced introduction to the interconnected works of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Chester Himes. This course will focus on a mix of canonical novels like Himes’ If He Holler Let Him Go (1945), short stories like Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues (1957), and political writing and essays of each of these authors that deal with their central themes: psycho-existential paradox for black identity produced by racist culture; the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class; and the challenges of black assimilation into American identity due to the ongoing legacies of Transatlantic Slavery. In addition to performing literary analyses of these authors texts, we will discuss the political and intellectual history that they emerged from as a means of understanding their literary approaches and perceived roles as writers.

Content warning: This class will occasionally ask you to read, hear, and view difficult material concerning violence and archaic racial language. Your language, tone, questions, and comments must be respectful and considerate of all other participants in the class.

Advanced Seminar (ENGL 390)

Section: 01W #4088
Instructor:P. Jacob
3.0 credit hoursseminar
TuTh 10 - 11:15 AM

You've Got Mail: Epistolary Narrative and Its Afterlives

Today we communicate through texts, voice notes, and dms, but, not too long ago, people wrote letters. The letter was the building block of print narrative: many of the first novels in English were made up entirely of letters, in what we call the epistolary tradition. Though both narrative forms and communication technologies evolved, the letter and its successors remain powerful mechanisms for storytelling. As private utterances, written in solitude, letters offer special opportunities for representing inner life. As mediums of communication, letters negotiate distance, circulating through semi-public spaces while simultaneously creating zones of intimacy. Even as epistolary narratives were replaced by new literary methods—and as the letter was replaced by the telegram, the phone call, and the snap—the connection between literature and communication technology has remained strong. Twenty-first century literary experimentation includes “cell phone novels,” Tiktok playlists, and twitter threads, but novels in letters continue to be produced. This course will consider the long history and evolution of epistolary narrative, its formal possibilities and restrictions, its social and affective dynamics, and its encapsulation of particular historical moments. Texts will range from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. We will pay special attention to the use of letters in genre fiction, such as romance, horror, and science fiction. Readings may include: Burney’s Evelina, Austen’s Persuasion, Stoker’s Dracula, Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, and El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War. We’ll watch films like The Shop Around the Corner, You’ve Got Mail, and Searching. We’ll also examine how longform narratives are told on social media.

This is a writing-intensive course. In addition to formal literary critical papers, in which we will closely analyze texts and engage with scholarship, we will also practice other kinds of writing. We will resurrect the lost art of letter-writing, for instance, writing letters to one another as characters from our novels. We will also practice and examine digital forms of communication as we find ways to reflect, tell stories, and connect.

Section: 02W #4089
Instructor:K. Lecky
3.0 credit hoursseminar
TuTh2:30 - 3:45 PM

The Art and Science of Community Healthcare in Early Modern England and its American Colonies

Recent history has reminded us that a national healthcare crisis tends to reveal the internal cultural, political, and religious fractures within the national polity, as well as the class-based, gendered, and racial inequalities exacerbating those rifts. This seminar turns to an earlier period when England's official state-sanctioned medical industry was born amidst profound social upheavals and a flood of foreign people and commodities due to trade and colonization, ultimately causing a healthcare crisis that reshaped the ethical landscape of medicine in ways that still resonate today. This seminar will delve deeply into the seventeenth-century archive of England's literary and scientific productions to explore the ways in which ordinary people experienced the rich texture of the entanglements weaving together the medical and the cultural, the pragmatic and the emotional, and the historical and the literary in the everyday practice of medical care in the metropole and its early American colonial holdings.

This is a writing-intensive course.

Teaching English to Adults: Internship (ENGL 393)

Section: 01E #1454
Instructor:J. Heckman
1, 2, or 3 credit hours

Engage with Jesuit values and meet our adult neighbors who come from many cultures.

This course offers an excellent opportunity for service learning and practical experience in tutoring neighborhood adults in written and spoken English with the Loyola Community Literacy Center. Our in-person tutoring location is Loyola Hall and we hope to return someday, but in Spring 2024 it is likely we will continue tutoring only online.

No previous tutoring experience is necessary. English 393 can be taken for 1, 2, or 3 credit hours. When taken for 3 credit hours, this course satisfies the Core Engaged Learning-Service Learning Internship requirement. It is open to second-semester freshmen, sophom*ores, juniors, and seniors. Incoming freshmen are always welcome to tutor as volunteers and take the course at a later date.

Requirements: Only UCWR 110 or its equivalent

The Center is open for tutoring M-Th evenings during the fall and spring semesters when the university is in session. 1 credit hour students tutor one evening per week; 2 and 3 credit hour students tutor two evenings a week. In addition, there are 5 class meetings scheduled at times convenient for all students; 3 credit/Core students meet for a 6th session.

Students who have taken this course have found it to be a challenging and exciting experience, even life changing as they help neighborhood adults improve their skills.

More information can be found at www.luc.edu/literacy. Follow the links to "tutoring" and then "course credit tutoring" for a complete description of English 393 and Honors 290, combined courses.

Internship (ENGL 394)

Section: 01E #1455
Instructor:J.Cragwall
1, 2, or 3 credit hours

English 394 provides practical, on-the-job experience for English majors in adapting their writing and analytical skills to the needs of such fields as publishing, editing, and public relations. Students must have completed six courses in English and must have a GPA of 3.0 or higher before applying for an internship. Qualified second semester juniors and seniors may apply to the program. Interested students must arrange to meet with the Internship Director during the pre-registration period and must bring with them a copy of their Loyola transcripts, a detailed resume (which includes the names and phone numbers of at least two references), and at least three writing samples. Students may be required to conduct part of their job search on-line and to go out on job interviews before the semester begins. Course requirements include: completion of a minimum of 120 hours of work; periodic meetings with the Internship Director; a written evaluation of job performance by the site supervisor; a term paper, including samples of writing produced on the job.

This class requires department consent. Please contact Dr. Cragwall at jcragwall@luc.edu or (773) 508-2259 for permission.

Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry (ENGL 397)

Section: 01W #4093
Instructor:A. Baker
3.0 credit hoursseminar
Tu 4:15 - 6:45 PM

In this advanced poetry workshop, we will seek to deepen our engagement with poetry as an art form—both as readers and writers. Through reading, writing, and workshopping, we will grow more familiar with the anatomy and texture of poetry: image, word, voice, syntactical configurations, rhetorical devices— stanza, line, punctuation, and page. Your work will be given a great deal of individual attention in our workshops, and you will be offered the opportunity to work very closely with the instructor as you write and revise your final project for the course—a portfolio of your best work.

This is a writing intensive course.