UPCOMING COURSES
ARCHIVE OF COURSES
UNIVERSITY CORE LITERATURE COURSES (ENGL 1301-2931)
ENGL courses numbers 1301-2740 fulfill the University Core of Common Studies requirement in Literature/Performing Arts (LPA)
UCCS Learning Objectives for Literature and Performing Arts (LPA)
Upon completing these courses, students will be able to:
(1) Produce oral and written assessments of literary and cultural texts and/or performances using the language and concepts of the discipline of literary studies.
(2) Articulate how literary and cultural texts can transform one’s understanding of self, others, and communities.
(3) Apply the methodologies of literary criticism to representative works of literature.
1301 Honors English 1
901 MWF 1:00-11:50 Professor John Curran
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Thematic Title: The Premodern World as an Age of Faith
This course examines some of the greatest specimens of Western literary achievement from the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods. We will trace the development of various important and fascinating themes within and between these eras, but the common thread will be our authors’ handling of the relation between the invisible and visible worlds, and the ideas, tensions, and ambiguities attendant upon it. With selections from such luminaries as Homer, Aeschylus, and Virgil, the Beowulf poet, Dante, and Chaucer, and Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Milton, we will explore how stories were used to express the feelings people experienced and the questions they pondered about how our lives are influenced, guided, shaped, encumbered, or ignored by the divine. This exploration will entail the cultivation of our writing skills, with an analytical paper corresponding to each of our three phases.
902 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Melissa Ganz
- Thematic Title: British Literature to 1800
Description: This course examines the development of British literature from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, focusing on formal innovations and cultural concerns. As we move from romance and epic to satire and comedy, we consider topics such as the nature and limits of authority, the relationship between the sexes, the growth of Britain's overseas empire, the emergence of modern commercial culture, and the nature and power of the imagination. At the same time, we work on honing your close reading and critical writing skills. In particular, you will learn to trace patterns in texts; to analyze devices such as imagery, rhyme, and tone; to draw comparisons between works; and to craft well-supported and well-developed arguments. The course ultimately aims to introduce you to the range and richness of British literature, while giving you a set of reading and writing skills that will serve you well in the years ahead.Readings: Authors include Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Hannah Cowley, and others.
Requirements: Two essays; a final exam; lively participation; and short writing assignments.
903 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Ameila Zurcher
904 TTH 3:30-4:45 Professor Christine Krueger
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This course will provide students with a broad experience of British writing between c. 1400 and c. 1780, including poetry, drama, and prose. As an historical survey, it considers the significance of cultural context and the construction of a national tradition to literary production and reading. Political, religious, economic, sexual, and scientific histories will inform our discussions of works. As an introduction to literary analysis, this course also teaches basic concepts of literary forms and genres. To understand and explain how a work conveys a theme or an impression, readers need to grasp versification, figures of speech, imagery, characterization, plotting devices, and the like. Readings, lecture, discussion, essays, and exams are all meant to enable students to master these materials and skills. Assessed student work: participation (10 pts), 2 essays (20 pts each); 2 exams (15 pts each); final exam (2o pts).
2310 Intro to Global Lit
101 TTH 2:00-3:15 Professor Marques Redd
- Thematic Title: Initiation and Mythic Journeys from Antiquity to the Present
Course Description: This class provides an introduction to global literature from antiquity to the present. In this course, we will travel through writing from ancient Egypt, the Greco-Roman classical world, the Middle East, medieval Germany, 19th-century France, and contemporary Africa. We will focus specifically on how to understand literature as a record of and vehicle for spiritual development and transcendence. Through an examination of mythic images like the Great Goddess, the labyrinth, the underworld, and sacred doorways, we will study how archetypal symbols recur in narratives across temporal and cultural boundaries and contribute to the power of literary texts. Drawing from many disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, comparative mythology, and religion, we will also look at how works of fiction outline powerful mythic journeys that involve three stages – separation, initiation, and return – which lead to a transformation of the consciousness of the hero/ heroine, the society in which they live, and the natural world.
Texts: Sir Ernest Wallis Budge (translator), The Egyptian Heaven and Hell
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
Sir Richard Burton (translator), The Arabian Nights, Tales from A Thousand and One Nights
Gerard de Nerval, Selected Writings
Malidoma Some, Of Water and the Spirit
Grade distribution: Midterm exam, Final exam, Weekly papers, Participation
2410 Intro to British 1
101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Lacey Conley
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Description: In this course, we will read literary texts from the Medieval period through the eighteenth century, focusing on how those works reflect the tastes, styles, and ideas of their particular historical moment. Cultural context will be a key consideration, but we will also focus on close reading and interpretation in order best to understand the significance of these texts, both in their own time and in ours.
Readings: Authors will likely include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, and Swift, among others.
102 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor
103 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Lacey Conley
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Description: In this course, we will read literary texts from the Medieval period through the eighteenth century, focusing on how those works reflect the tastes, styles, and ideas of their particular historical moment. Cultural context will be a key consideration, but we will also focus on close reading and interpretation in order best to understand the significance of these texts, both in their own time and in ours.
Readings: Authors will likely include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, and Swift, among others.
104 TTH 12:30-1:45 Professor Christine Krueger
- This course will provide students with a broad experience of British writing between c. 1400 and c. 1780, including poetry, drama, and prose. As an historical survey, it considers the significance of cultural context and the construction of a national tradition to literary production and reading. Political, religious, economic, sexual, and scientific histories will inform our discussions of works. As an introduction to literary analysis, this course also teaches basic concepts of literary forms and genres. To understand and explain how a work conveys a theme or an impression, readers need to grasp versification, figures of speech, imagery, characterization, plotting devices, and the like. Readings, lecture, discussion, essays, and exams are all meant to enable students to master these materials and skills. Assessed student work: participation (10 pts), 2 essays (20 pts each); 2 exams (15 pts each); final exam (2o pts).
2510 Intro to American 1
101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor
102 MW 2:00-3:15 Fr. Ronald Bieganowski, S.J.
- “ What does it mean to be an American? The Story: Part One"
Professor Ronald Bieganowski, S.J.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Beginning with some of the first writings documenting
experiences of the “New World,” this course will follow the developing story line of what it means to be American as told in fiction, drama, poetry, autobiography, and essays. The diverse range of characters, setting, action, narrative perspective and sequence, irony, and imagery — all help tell the story’s first part.
READINGS: Readings will include those from Benjamin Franklin, Rowlandson, Royall
Tyler, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and others.
ASSIGNMENTS: Two papers (4-5 pp.), several “Reflections” (1 p. each), a few quizzes, and final exam (essay) will be required. Discussion format.
103 TTH 9:30-10:45 Professor Amy Blair
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Thematic Title: Narrating Nations
Description: This course is designed to give you a general overview of the themes and issues that have concerned people writing in or about the transatlantic diaspora from the Colonial Period through the American Civil War. We are going to be taking as our starting point a serious inquiry into what exactly “America” entails, and by the end of the course, you may be revising your initial notions of what counts as “Literature” as well. In addition to poetry and imaginative prose, we will be reading explorers’ accounts of their travels, captivity narratives, slave narratives, and political treatises, and looking at how literature both shapes and reflects our ideas of what it means to be “American.”
Readings: Textbook: Transatlantic Romanticism; Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; authors studied may include Rowlandson, Bradstreet, Wheatley, Payne, Douglass, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson.
Assignments: Three brief close-reading essays; midterm; final; active class participation
104 TTH 2:00-3:15 Professor Tom Jeffers
- A chronological and thematic survey of American literature from its Puritan beginnings through the Civil War. Major figures include Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville
105 TTH 3:30-4:45 Professor Tom Jeffers
- A chronological and thematic survey of American literature from its Puritan beginnings through the Civil War. Major figures include Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville
2710 Intro to Lit: Fiction
101 MWF 8:00-8:50 Professor
102 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor
103 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Christopher Wachal
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Thematic Title: “Fiction and/of World Religions”
Description (including outcomes):
Story-telling is the oldest of the humane arts.Painting, music, oratory, interpretive dance – all are, at their heart, new forms of telling stories.For millennia, stories have revealed where we believe we came from, why things are as they are, and what one’s proper disposition toward reality ought to be.These are, at their core, issues of faith. Fiction, a relatively new development in the history of story-telling, enables the communication of these ideas through imaginative creations and technical manipulations.The questions good fiction insists we ask are the questions to which there are, as of yet, no easy answers – questions of ultimate concern.The fiction taken up in this course represents the variety of ways people approach such questions.It examines the role of belief in that which is beyond reason and considers the utility of belief in a social world hostile to its demands. The primary goal of this course is to train you in the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of prose fiction.Over the course of the semester you will develop a critical vocabulary for discussing the formal, thematic and aesthetic aspects of fiction.You will also learn to deploy this vocabulary in critical writing about literature.Finally, by the conclusion of the course you will be able to examine prose fiction in context and evaluate and interpret the various, often contradictory claims made by a piece of literature.
Readings: We will read fiction from a variety of places and religious traditions. Our readings will include the novels The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Other readings will include short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Philip Roth , Alice Walker, Uwem Akpan, Hanif Kureishi, Flannery O’Connor, and others.
Assignments: Three critical papers, three shorter formal analyses, and two quizzes on concepts associated with the criticism of fiction.
104 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Christopher Wachal
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Thematic Title: “Fiction and/of World Religions”
Description (including outcomes):
Story-telling is the oldest of the humane arts.Painting, music, oratory, interpretive dance – all are, at their heart, new forms of telling stories.For millennia, stories have revealed where we believe we came from, why things are as they are, and what one’s proper disposition toward reality ought to be.These are, at their core, issues of faith. Fiction, a relatively new development in the history of story-telling, enables the communication of these ideas through imaginative creations and technical manipulations.The questions good fiction insists we ask are the questions to which there are, as of yet, no easy answers – questions of ultimate concern.The fiction taken up in this course represents the variety of ways people approach such questions.It examines the role of belief in that which is beyond reason and considers the utility of belief in a social world hostile to its demands. The primary goal of this course is to train you in the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of prose fiction.Over the course of the semester you will develop a critical vocabulary for discussing the formal, thematic and aesthetic aspects of fiction.You will also learn to deploy this vocabulary in critical writing about literature.Finally, by the conclusion of the course you will be able to examine prose fiction in context and evaluate and interpret the various, often contradictory claims made by a piece of literature.
Readings: We will read fiction from a variety of places and religious traditions. Our readings will include the novels The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Other readings will include short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Philip Roth , Alice Walker, Uwem Akpan, Hanif Kureishi, Flannery O’Connor, and others.
Assignments: Three critical papers, three shorter formal analyses, and two quizzes on concepts associated with the criticism of fiction.
105 TTH 9:30-10:45 Professor Corinna Lee
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Thematic: Telling Stories—Great and Small
Description: This course introduces students to the art of literary fiction. “Stories,” “tales,” “narratives,” “fabrication,” “illusion,” “lies,” “make believe”…fiction has been called by many provocative names. Despite their variety, what many of these names commonly convey is fiction’s power to transport readers to other worlds and other lives through the medium of language. About his beloved craft, the prolific Henry James once wrote, “It is still expected […] that a production which is after all only a "make believe" (for what else is a "story"?) shall be in some degree apologetic--shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life.” Ever a champion of the art of fiction, James asserts, “the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.” Over the course of this semester, we will examine the ways different types of fiction “compete with life.” Does life precede fiction or fiction precede life? Where do stories come from? And how are those stories told? Together we will engage these questions through the discussion and analysis of different fictional works.
Texts will include: Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Assignments: 3 micro-essays (1.5-2 pages); 1 final paper (7 pages); active participation
106 TTH 1:00-12:15 Professor Diane Hoeveler
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This course will introduce you to the basics of how to read and interpret fiction by focusing on a variety of popular fictional genres: the mystery or detective novel, the woman’s romance, the horror story, and science fiction (SF). Specifically, we will be investigating how the detective genre produces and/or undermines notions of coherent, knowable identities and how the act of interpretive reading mimics the process of investigation and probe that characterizes the Detective himself. We will be reading short stories and novels about Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Hannibal Lecter. Romance and Horror works will interrogate how our culture has constructed notions of seductive sameness and otherness, while the SF works we will read examine how fantasy formations operate in imagining the future. Two papers, a midterm, and a final are the requirements for this course.
107 TTH 12:30-1:45 Professor Jodi Melamed
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Introduction to Fiction: Fiction, Sex, Regulation
Course Description:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
-- Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
Fiction, like sex, transacts with the permissible and the impermissible. This course introduces students to concepts of fiction and methods of literary analysis through the study of short stories, novels, and experimental narratives about how acts of writing and affirmations of desire/love unsettle normal politics and contest regulatory ideas of what is moral, rational and authoritative in the name of a good life that cannot be lived without change. We will examine the work of authors who rhetorically relate the powers of fiction - an institution by definition “not true” that may also be “more than true”- to those of sexual expression in efforts to revolutionize the terms of social contests around feminism, sexual normativity, American Indian/U.S. relations, racial histories, HIV/AIDS, war and other “facts” of political modernity.
Readings may include Kate Chopin The Awakening, Gayle Jones Corregidora, Junot Diaz “Drown,” LeAnn Howe Shell Shakers, Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera, Leslie Fineberg Stone Butch Blues, Rabih Alameddine Koolaids:The Art of War, Margaret Atwood The Hand-Maid’s Tale, Octavia Butler, “Blood Child” and R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the Rs.
Assignments will include weekly participation in written online forums, close reading exercises, a midterm and a final paper papers, and active, informed class participation.
108 TTH 2:00-3:15 Professor Leah Flack
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Thematic Title: War and Homecoming in Modern and Contemporary Fiction
Description: This course will teach students how to interpret fiction through an intensive study of short stories and novels about war and homecoming, most of which were written in the past 60 years. We will explore several features of representations of war in literature: the celebratory, commemorative, and protest functions of literature; representations of the body in war narratives; representations of various forms of psychological, physical, and cultural damage caused by war; the difficulty of return and recovery from war; and war’s challenges to traditional narrative forms as writers struggle to define, as Tim O’Brien writes, “how to tell a true war story.”
Course texts may include: O’Brien, The Things They Carried; Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk; Pat Barker, Regeneration; Joseph Heller, Catch-22; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; and Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient. Assignments will include: weekly participation in on online discussion forum, including one week of moderating the forum and presenting the key discussion threads in class; reading quizzes; 2 papers; 2 exams; and active, informed participation.
2720 Intro to Lit: Drama
101 MWF 9:00 - 9: 50 Professor
102 TTH 8:00-9:15 Professor
103 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor
2730 Intro to Lit: Poetry
101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor
102 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor
2740 Reading Film as Narrative & Discussion section
101 TTH 3:30-4:45 Professor Tol Foster
761 Mon 6:00-800 Film Viewing Session/Lab- Professor Tol Foster
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Description: From the Lone Ranger and Tonto (1949) to Southpark’s
Chief Runs With Premise (2003), and even before, American Indians and their stories have been a staple of the film and media industry. But what happens to those familiar constructions of the Indian when American Indians and other indigenous people in settler-societies move behind the lens themselves, creating their own narrativesthrough short and feature-length films, documentaries, and animations?
Through a large number of surprising films and locales – from a Cherokee science future (Hero) to Michael Jackson obsessed Maori New Zealand (Boy), from arid Texas (The Searchers) to a frozen river between New York and Canada (Frozen River), this courseseeks to move along the contested terrain of film as it shifts from a medium with Indian sidekicks to one by and for indigenous peoples.
Film Lab and Readings: In lieu of out-of-class viewings this course features a Monday break-out film viewing lab which students must attend in order to view classroom films.
Paul Chaat Smith. Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong.
English Department
