Fall 2022
Each semester the faculty for the Department of English provide course descriptions that build upon the University's catalog descriptions. These individually crafted descriptions provide information about variable topics, authors, novels, texts, writing assignments, and whether instructor consent is required to enroll. The details, along with reviewing the advising report, will help students select course options that best meet one's interests and academic requirements.
The following list includes Undergraduate courses that are sequenced after the First-Year Writing requirement and will change each semester.
1000-Level Courses
1201: Introduction to American Studies
Also offered as: AMST 1201, HIST 1503
Prerequisites: None.
1201 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 | Sommers, Sam
“American Media in American Culture”
This course will explore representations of media in American cultural productions from the 18th-century (1700s) to today. By investigating depictions and uses of media (letters, text messages, radio broadcasts, TV) in literature, film, and television students will leave this class prepared to pursue future American Studies courses that engage methods for visual studies, reception studies, performance studies, media studies, and discourse of race, gender, ability and sexuality that intersect with these key methods.
In addition to introducing the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, this course will help students develop university-level writing and research skills. Alongside regular reading, viewing, and reflections, students work in teams to develop university-level research skills and explore the tremendous resources available to UConn students. The Team Research Skills Assignment (TRSA) gives students experience with various sites and methods for research in literary studies and will facilitate digital archival research. The final assignment for this course will be an argument-driven, close reading paper that interprets a visual text.
Possible course texts include The Coquette; The Hate U Give; Dear White People; Good Morning, Vietnam; Good Night, and Good Luck; Pudd’nhead Wilson; The Street; and All Over Creation.
1616W: Major Works of English and American Literature
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
1616W | MW 1:25-2:40 | Falco, Daniela
The UConn undergraduate catalogue lists ENGL 1616W as a course that “includes important works from the major genres and historical periods since Beowulf”; that is exactly what we will be doing in our class: we will read notable British and American works of literature, while we will also get acquainted (or re-acquainted) with three literary genres: poetry, drama, and fiction (both short stories and novels).
The poems we will read come from hundreds of years of poetry, with authors such as Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Blake, Whitman, Frost and Eliot—to name a few. We will read two plays, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, and A Raisin in the Sun by American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and two novels, 1984 by George Orwell, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Short stories written by (among others) Chopin, Lawrence, Joyce, Updike, Twain, Poe, Hemingway, etc. will complete our reading list.
Although the course is listed as “Lecture,” there will be little lecturing; rather, the course will unfold as a seminar to which students are invited and expected to come prepared as active participants in their own learning process—having done their reading thoroughly, and being ready to get involved dynamically in class discussions and activities.
Course requirements: ENGL 1616W has its specific writing requirement, established by GEOC: minimum 15 pages / 4,500 words of revised, polished writing; in this course three 5-6 page papers, one per genre, will fulfill this requirement. In addition, class discussion / participation, reading responses, reading quizzes, and a final exam will be computed into the final grade.
2000-Level Courses
2100: British Literature I
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2100 | MW 11:15-12:30 | Falco, Daniela
According to its catalog description, ENGL 2100 surveys about 1,000 years of British literature, from Anglo-Saxon / Old English to Middle Age, Renaissance, Restoration, and past; thus, it is strongly recommended to English majors, but all interested students are welcome.
Assigned readings will include poetry, drama, and prose—to name just a few: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Thomas More’s Utopia, and also works by Shakespeare (Othello, selected sonnets), Marlowe (Dr. Faustus), Thomas More (Utopia), and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels).
Although the course is listed as “Lecture,” little lecturing shall take place; rather, the course will take place as a seminar, to which students are invited and expected to come well prepared as active participants in their own learning process—having done their reading thoroughly, and being ready to get involved dynamically in class discussions and activities.
Course requirements: active participation in class discussions, quizzes, three short 1-1/2 to 2-page reading responses (assigned as homework), one 5-page literary analysis term paper, and midterm and final exams.
2201: American Literature to 1880
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2201 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 | Sommers, Sam
“Confounding American Origins”
Confounding American Origins is a multi-ethnic introduction to American literature, beginnings to 1880. The class will highlight the forms, genres, institutions, ideologies, and social concerns that helped shape American writing and the people who composed and read it.
Though the syllabus is organized (mostly) chronologically, we will rigorously attend to the recurrence of genres and forms across this period of literary history. Travel writing, confessions, legal documents, meditations, memoir, poems, serialized narratives, short prose works, and hybrid models of all these genres will reappear throughout the term.
In organizing this course, I have sought to complicate and confound the notion that American literature progresses, as if teleologically, toward the realist novel of the late-nineteenth century. The task of identifying recurring concerns will help direct our engagement with course readings throughout the term.
In addition to introducing you to American literatures before to 1880, this course will help students develop university-level writing and research skills. Alongside weekly writing assignments designed to hone your close reading skills, students will practice expository writing as part of the Team Research Skills Assignment (TRSA) The TRSA gives students experience with various sites and methods for research in literary studies. The final project for this course will be a portfolio comprised of two expanded weekly writing assignments that will be revised into an argument-driven essay.
Possible course texts include: Maria Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? selected speeches by Maria Stewart; David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; stories by Sui Sin Far; Iroquois Creation Stories (version by David Cusick); poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Phillis Wheatley; Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, and John Marrant’s Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant; and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
2407: The Short Story
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2407 | Th 11:00-1:30 | Carillo, Ellen
This course is designed to introduce students to the short story as a literary form. The course, which includes short stories from a range of periods and authors, invites students to engage with these stories through short (2-4 pages) formal writing assignments and discussion board posts. Students will also read theoretical texts and pieces of literary criticism, which they will apply to the assigned stories. The course will close with a focus on storytelling, more generally. Students will have opportunities to explore why humans have always told stories, as well as how stories are used across cultures, fields, and industries.