English Undergraduate Course Descriptions

 

 

 

ENG 200 
Intro to Drama 
Tu/Th 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM 
Dr. Alexandra Valint 
 
The primary goal of this course is to make you more confident, enthusiastic, and sophisticated readers of drama. We will explore a diverse selection of plays, from Ancient Greek tragedy to recent Pulitzer-Prize winners. We will pay particular attention to how these plays engage with issues of gender, race, love, and war, as well as to how they represent the struggles of individuals, relationships, and societies. We will practice analyzing and articulating how plays work--how they are structured, how they affect us, what they mean, their limitations and possibilities. Whether you are a seasoned theatre practitioner or a new visitor to the world of drama, you are welcome in this class. Together we will experience the wisdom and wonder of theatre! We will likely read plays by Edward Albee, James Ijames, Euripides, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lynn Nottage, William Shakespeare, Paula Vogel, Oscar Wilde, and Tennessee Williams. 
 
 
 
ENG 221 
Fiction Writing I 
Tu/Th 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM 
Instructor TBA 
 
In this course, you will write your own original fiction and poetry. Class sessions will be organized around craft topics, which will include assigned readings and writing exercises. Craft topics will include: character, dialogue, setting, structure, revision, and more. 
 
 
 
ENG 223 
Creative Writing 
M/W 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM 
Instructor TBA 
 
In this course, you will write your own original fiction and poetry. Class sessions will be organized around craft topics, which will include assigned readings and writing exercises. We’ll begin with fiction. Craft topics will include: character, dialogue, setting, structure, revision, and more. For poetry, craft topics will include: the line, sound, imagery, and more. 
 
 
 
ENG 311 / IDS 352 / IDS 371 
Tu/Th 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM 
Illness & Disability Memoirs 
Dr. Emily Stanback 
 
Illness and disability memoirs have become incredibly popular in recent decades, offering a first-hand perspective experiences of everything from depression to autism to cancer to paralysis. In When Breath Becomes Air, for example, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi describes the shift from doctor to patient after his diagnosis with stage IV cancer in his late 30s. In Girl, Interrupted, Susannah Kaysen uses medical documents and reconstructed memory to scrutinize her time in McLean Institution and her diagnosis, at 18 years of age, of borderline personality disorder. The first-person narratives in Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility depict several dimensions of what it means to be disabled in the 21st century—what it means to be Black and disabled, what it means to be a disabled parent, what it means to be a disability activist. 
 
Why have these authors—and countless others—turned to the written word to articulate their embodied experiences? Why have countless readers returned again and again to memoirs such as these? Why has this genre become so popular at this particular moment in literary history? 
 
 
 
ENG 313 
Survey of Multiethnic Literature 
M/W 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM 
Dr. Ery Shin 
 
This course explores the meaning of ethnicity—of identifying, too, with multiple ethnicities—in contemporary American life and letters. For this term has shaped not only the nation’s public policies but also its most intimate of spaces and interactions: individual homes, say, or a singular look from a stranger. The body, for many, bears the burden of the quest to define ethnicity itself. The ethnically differentiated body has often been portrayed throughout history as a profoundly equivocal one, but new generations of writers continue to reimagine such narratives, rendering the body as a site of fresh possibilities. 
 
SAMPLE READING LIST: 
Katherine Min, The Fetishist 
Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars 
Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend 
Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez 
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars 
 
 
 
ENG 321/421 
Fiction Writing II/Fiction Writing III 
Dr. Olivia Clare Friedman 
Tu/Th 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM 
 
In this class, you will write your own original fiction and workshop one another’s fiction. In addition to honing your craft, you will be working on your workshop skills. Craft topics will include: character, dialogue, setting, structure, style, revision, and more. You may turn in either short stories or novel chapters. 
 
Required Text: 
Refuse To Be Done, Matt Bell 
 
Recommended Text: 
Writing Fiction, 10th Edition, Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Ned Stuckey-French 
 
Short stories and novel excerpts to be distributed in class 
 
 
 
ENG 335 
Collaborative Learning and Tutoring Writing 
M/W 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM 
Mrs. Amy Carey 
 
This course will introduce you to key theories and approaches of peer tutoring, such as facilitating growth mindsets, responding to diverse audiences, scaffolding tasks, navigating ethical dilemmas, and tutoring in online environments. While peer tutoring exists in many collaborative learning contexts, we will focus in particular on the theory and praxis of tutoring in university writing centers. We will explore topics such as linguistic diversity, process-based pedagogies, writing across the curriculum, and new media tutoring as they relate to the work of peer writing tutors. Each topic will be contextualized with writing center scholarship so that you can develop a conceptual foundation for facilitating effective collaborative learning. We will engage in reflective practice to prepare you to apply your knowledge in future opportunities as a tutor, teacher, mentor, or learning advocate in writing center, speaking center, learning center, or other collaborative learning spaces. Undergraduate students who complete this course will have the opportunity to apply to work as an undergrad peer tutor at the USM Writing Center in the future. 
 
 
 
ENG 340 
Analysis of Literature 
MW 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM 
Dr. Ery Shin 
 
This course is an introduction to the discipline of literary criticism. The art of reading can be both a leisurely pastime and a venerated practice that hones the individual’s ability to appreciate a text’s nuances in many different situations. Much of reality can, indeed, be likened to a text to begin with: the subtexts underlying our everyday conversations, the value judgments inculcated by particular words and turns of phrase, the language informing our legal and penal codes, and the miscommunications accrued through verbal ambiguities. To read well is to understand such subtleties and master the ability to potentially rewrite them. 
 
SAMPLE READING LIST: 
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 
James Wood, How Fiction Works 
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (excerpts) 
Edward Said, Orientalism (excerpts) 
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” 
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 
 
 
 
ENG 340 
Analysis of Literature 
Tu/Th 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM 
Dr. Alexandra Valint 
 
The primary goal of this course is to make you more confident, adept, and sophisticated readers of literature and writers of literary analysis. Our core pieces of literature will be two classic gothic Victorian texts: Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" and Bram Stoker's vampire novel Dracula. This course gives you critical tools—literary terms, theoretical approaches, and close reading—to enrich and strengthen your engagement with literature. A series of writing assignments, in addition to in-depth discussions of the writing and research processes, will enable you to strongly articulate and support your arguments about literary texts in your writing. 
 
 
 
ENG 351 
British Literature II 
Tu/Th 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM 
Dr. Eliza Holmes 
 
This class is a survey of British Literature from the Romantic period to the present day. 
In this class, we will be reading poems, plays, novels, stories, and essays in historical, literary, and ecological contexts. As we consider what British literature is —what has historically been included in this “canon” and what has not—we will also be considering how this literature reinforces and resists the culture of extraction that has shaped the past two centuries. Throughout, we will explore the boundaries of genre, with particular attention to the lyric poem, the gothic, the realist novel, and detective fiction. Through close readings, visits to the archive, and analytical papers, students will consider how a single text can be engaged in multiple genres, ecologies, and geographies. The course will include readings from Jane Austen, Mary Prince, John Keats, Seamus Heaney, Sally Rooney, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Zadie Smith among others. 
 
 
 
ENG 371  
Survey Of American Literature Ii 
M/W 9:30-10:45 AM 
Dr. Kate Cochran 
 
In this course, we’ll be examining some major figures and texts of American literature since 1865. The semester is divided into three parts: 1865-1914 (Realism), 1914-1945 (Modernism), and 1945-present (Postmodernism). Each section includes nonfiction selections, short stories, poetry, and plays, in addition to the two novels that bookend our readings. Our first is one of the most iconic American novels, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and we conclude with a newer novel by a celebrated contemporary writer, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2007). In between, we’ll be looking at nonfiction, stories, poetry, and plays from some significant American authors representing a variety of experiences and viewpoints. Students will actively participate in class discussion and activities, write two brief essays, and take in-class tests as well as a comprehensive final exam. 
 
 
 
ENG 400/416 
The Aesthetics of Failure in Modernist Literature 
Tu/Th 2:30-3:45 
Dr. Charles Sumner 
 
This class will explore the defining concerns of modernist literature in the United States, Britain, and Europe more broadly. Particularly important for us will be works whose formal discord reflects and responds to the social upheavals of modernity. We will see that many of our authors – including T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Mary Butts, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust – raise formal and thematic problems without resolving them, and we will consider whether this failure is flawed or whether it is purposeful. Put differently, the major concern of our class will be determine the difference between failed aesthetics, on the one hand, and a purposeful aesthetics of failure on the other. 
 
 
 
ENG 400 / 416 
Frankensteins, Creatures, & Modern Science 
Tu/Th 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM 
Dr. Emily Stanback 
 
This course addresses two kinds of transatlantic circulation: the circulations of bodies that informed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and the proliferation of Frankensteins and Creatures that have followed the publication of Shelley’s novel. We will begin by examining 18th- and 19th-century circulations surrounding Shelley’s novel—the transatlantic slave trade, imperial exploration, electricity—after which we’ll look at Shelley’s novel itself. Next, we’ll look at adaptations of Frankenstein, as well as other 20th- and 21st-century texts that imagine new versions of Frankenstein and his Creature. Why and how is the story of Frankenstein still relevant in the 21st-century? Why is the character of Victor Frankenstein, arguably the first “mad scientist,” such a compelling and enduring literary figure? What can the Creature teach us about what, or who, counts as “human” in the 21st century? 
 
 
 
ENG 400/476 
Youth Culture Between Two DeathS 
Wednesdays 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM (Face to Face Gulf Park Campus) 
Dr. Damon Franke 
 
This course satisfies the Senior Seminar Capstone Requirement, but it also can be taken as the elective ENG 476. 
 
This course examines American literature and culture of the early 1990s with particular focus on youth culture during that time. In his critical study Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001, Philip Wegner argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks function as two “deaths” surrounding the 1990s with the latter solidifying the former’s symbolic end of the Cold War. Wegner’s book shows how this period “fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense possibility now at risk of being forgotten.” Indeed, young people coming of age during the early 1990s faced a vastly different political and economic future than their predecessors had. In what is called the “age of diminished expectations,” economic growth of the 1980s had born a recession. The Cold War was over, the Iron Curtain had fallen, and Eastern Europe was open for discovery. Youth culture of the day reflects an antimaterialism, a distrust of government, and a desire to reside out of the mainstream. Such counterculturalism is familiar, and in the five-year span from 1990-94 we will look at how culture fashioned itself out of the old and the alternative. Environmental awareness was common and passionate, Top 40 radio was abhorred, people developed a do-it-yourself ethos, and consumerism was scoffed at. Yet the youth of the time slowly fashioned a striking and unique character of its own, while incorporating elements of the Lost Generation, the Beats, the Hippies, and the Punks. How did this alternative culture become mainstream and then commodified? The course will examine literature, music, and film of the time; the lives of people during this time; and youth cultural phenomena of the era. We will discuss independent film and indymedia of all sorts including fanzines. We will listen to and discuss grunge, gangsta rap, riot grrrl, and post-punk music and its various scenes. Students can pursue research topics on films such as Pulp Fiction, Clerks, CB4, and My Own Private Idaho, musicians such as Tupac, Nirvana, and Bikini Kill, and television shows such as The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, Blossom, and In Living Color. Students also can pursue research topics on the books we will read: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Jennifer Lynch's The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Chuck Palahnia’s Fight Club, short stories by Don Delillo and ZZ Packer, and some fanzines. Students will choose a film and music album of the time to present upon. In the spirit of the bricolage of the time, students can eclectically design their own research projects drawn from the various course materials. 
 
 
 
ENG 403 
Language Study for Teachers 
M/W 4:00pm-5:15pm (ONLINE CHAT) 
Mrs. Melanee Barton 
 
This course is designed to build students’ content knowledge of language study, acquisition, and adolescent learners’ developmental needs and the unique needs of individuals’ diversity (social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, etc.); additionally, the course introduces students to concepts for the teaching of language through reading and writing. Students will be immersed in reading and discussing critical theories, research, and pedagogies central to language study in order to apply their new knowledge to instructional planning. 
 
 
 
ENG 406 
History of the English Language 
Online 
Dr. Leah Parker 
 
In ENG 406, we will trace the history of the English language from its prehistoric Indo-European roots, through sound changes of the Middle Ages, standardization in the era of print, and diversification as a global language in the modern world. You will learn the basics of linguistics; the pronunciation and basic grammar of Old English (spoken ca. 450–1150 CE) and Middle English (spoken ca. 1150–1500); how to fully utilize dictionaries and editions of English texts; and how dialects develop through isolation, imperialism, and human interactions. In addition to learning about the deep history and vast geographical range of English, students will complete a transhistorical narrative of a single English word as a cumulative project linked to literary and linguistic history. 
ENG 406 will be fully online and asynchronous in Spring 2025, with work organized into weekly modules. There will be no required full-class synchronous meetings, though office hours and individual or small-group meetings will be available to help students succeed in the course. 
 
 
 
ENG 409 
Environmental Literature 
M/W 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM 
Dr. Christopher Spaide 
 
What’s so environmental about literature? Why write a poem or novel or essay, of all things, in order to relate to places and other species, describe local ecosystems and global networks, protest state and corporate violence, or bring about change? How might we approach literature—any literature, regardless of its origins, intentions, or effects—as a product of and participant in its environments? These questions underlie our introduction to “environmental literature,” a phrase for which we’ll build up various understandings as the semester progresses. Drawing our examples from the last two and half centuries of global English-language literature, we will concentrate chiefly on poetry, fiction, and various forms of nonfiction (including the essay, memoir, journalism, theory, and so-called nature writing). As our survey moves into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we’ll also look for the environmental in popular music, visual art, film, the graphic novel, and digital and social media. 
 
 
 
ENG 428 
Publishing for Writers 
Mondays 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM 
Dr. Rachael Fowler 
 
Would you like to one day be an editor? Want to see your name listed in an esteemed literary journal? ENG 428 welcomes all creative writers who’d like to learn more about the world of literary publishing. In this class, we’ll work to produce an issue of Mississippi Review and Product Magazine, giving you the chance to have a reading/editorial position in both. We’ll also talk with professionals currently working in various areas of publishing so that we can ask career questions and learn about the evolving literary landscape. Finally, we’ll explore how to write and submit book reviews for publication, and you’ll complete an in-depth research project on a specific aspect of publishing that is interesting to you. At the end of this class, you’ll have experience as an editor and literary citizen as well as contacts within and growing knowledge of the professional literary world. 
 
 
 
ENG 463 
The Victorian Short Story 
TuTh 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM 
Dr. Alexandra Valint 
 
Although we think of the massive novel—the so-called “three-decker novel”—as the literary hallmark of the Victorian period (1837-1901), short fiction also flourished amidst an expanding and lively periodical culture. Most critics agree that by the end of the nineteenth century, the modern short story was born. In this course, we will explore the vast and varied landscape of the Victorian short story by reading texts from many different genres including detective fiction, ghost story, gothic, horror, fairytale, science fiction, and New Woman fiction. Authors will likely include Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Olive Schreiner, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rabindranath Tagore, H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde. We will learn how different genres work—what their conventions, advantages, aims, and limitations are—and how individual stories fulfill and resist those norms. In these stories, we will stay attuned to how authors address and work through complex topics such as gender roles, race, sexuality, empire, spirituality, and science. 
 
 
 
ENG 474 
Studies in Colonial and Early American Literature: America in the European Imagination 
Tu/Th 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM 
Dr. Luis Iglesias 
 
Before America was “discovered,” it already had a place in the European imagination. English and European Writers from the Renaissance through the 17th century found expressive (and conflicting) ways to imagine a new world, while projecting onto it their fears and aspirations, inventing a sense of place from a variety of social, cultural, and economic desires and preconceptions, not only fueled by the expanding transatlantic colonial enterprise but also by fueling the imagination of literary and visual artists seeking new ways to express worlds elsewhere. This course will examine a variety of texts – from exploration and travel accounts to colonial and imaginative narratives – that shaped the idea of America, often before the fact, refashioning both a European and future National understanding and representation of North America, its colonization, and what will eventually (though not inevitably) become the United States. 
 
Among the readings: 
Christopher Columbus, Letters (1493) 
Thomas More, Utopia (1516) 
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Journeys of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542) 
Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Caniballes” (1580) 
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610-11) 
John Smith, A Description of New England (1616) 
Mary Rowlandson, The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) 
Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter (1689) 
Jonathan Swift, selection from Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726) 
 
 
 
ENG 478 American Women Writers 
M/W 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM 
Dr. Kate Cochran 
 
This course will examine 20th- and 21st-century literary works by several major American women writers. Probable authors will include Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Lorraine Hansberry, Joy Harjo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Rich, Wendy Wasserstein, and Eudora Welty. Students will maintain a reading journal, write one short and one longer researched essay, and engage in active reading and participation in class discussion. 
 
 
 
HUM 301 (H081) 
The Light Ages: Medieval Science and the Birth of the Renaissance 
Online 
Dr. Courtney Luckhardt 
 
While Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps best known as an artist in the popular imagination, he was also scientist and engineer, and well-versed in the most up-to-date knowledge of his day. Da Vinci’s expertise did not spring up from nothing, but instead built upon the remarkable creativity of the previous thousand years of medieval art and science. While the Middle Ages is at times dismissed as the “Dark Ages”, this class will instead argue that the medieval period was in fact a “Light Ages” in which foundational scientific, philosophical, and artistic ideas were invented and tested. This paved the way for the remarkable transformations of modernity in the “Age of Discovery”, in which people from across the globe encountered one another, in both positive and negative ways, in a complex web of connection, contagion, and exchange. 
 
This class is offered completely online and is open to all majors in the Humanities and beyond! I particularly welcome STEM and health sciences majors, as this class will explore the history of your future professions. Also, there are two Hum 301 classes being offered in Spring 2025; make sure to sign up for Hum 301 H081.