Spring 2022 Course Descriptions: Stamford Campus

Spring 2022

General Information:

For guidance about courses, majors, and minors, contact any English faculty member or Professor Roden, Curriculum Coordinator, at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or Inda Watrous, English Undergraduate Advisor, at inda.watrous@uconn.edu.

 

Helpful Information for Non-Majors

  • 1000-level courses do not count toward the English major but are terrific introductions to literary study and typically serve General Education Category 1b or 4.
  • If you think you might be interested in an English major, try out a course; if you know you’re set on the major, plan on taking English 2600 as early as possible.
  • Non-majors are welcome in advanced courses. Check your preparedness with an instructor before registering if you have questions. Following completion of the English 1010/1011 First-Year Writing requirement, upper-level courses are open to all students. If you encounter difficulty in registering, contact the instructor or Professor Roden.
  • The English minor is highly recommended and easy to accomplish: English 2100 or 2101; 2201 or 2203; and your choice of almost any 3 upper-level courses. See the Minoring in English page for more information.
  • Remember that English courses make great “related field” classes for many other majors. Check with your major advisor for appropriateness of choices.

Helpful Information for Majors and Minors

  • English 2600 (Requirement A) is offered annually in the Fall semester.
  • A Major Author course (Requirement D) is offered annually or every third semester.
  • An Advanced Study course (Requirement E) is typically offered every third semester. The next planned offering for an Advanced Study is the spring 2022.
  • We offer at least one pre-1800 course each semester. This semester, we are offering English 2200. All plans of study require two pre-1800 classes. Check with your advisor or the coordinator if you have questions.
  • We offer a variety of survey and methods courses each semester. The details are listed beneath each course entry.
  • Catalog years prior to 2017 limit the number of Advanced Composition or Creative Writing courses that can count towards the major.
  • Catalog years prior to 2015 allow for 6 elective credits (Requirement F). Later catalog years allow for 9 elective credits. Courses that meet a requirement that you have already satisfied can count as Elective Courses. You are able to change your catalog year to have more flexibility to enroll in courses that you may be interested in.

Optional Concentrations

The Stamford Campus offers the Concentration in Teaching English and the Concentration in Creative Writing as part of the major. These can typically be obtained by taking five courses that already count for your major.

This semester, we are offering several courses that count towards each concentration:

  • Teaching in English: English 1701, 2401, 2407, and 3003W
  • Creative Writing: English 1701W and 3003W

If you are interested in a concentration, consult your advisor and review the courses list, as you may have already met requirements. These include Linguistics 2010W (The Science of Linguistics), a Q course that can serve as a Related Field class for the English major.

For more information, contact Professor Roden or Inda Watrous, Undergraduate Advisor for English.

1000-Level Courses

1503: Introduction to Shakespeare

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
1503 | M 6:20-8:50 | Fisher, Ira Joe

Literature speaks to you.  And to me.  From the room next door.  From another continent.  From four centuries ago.  Literature speaks.  To us.  William Shakespeare speaks to us today.  His words sparkle or darken; lift or lower us by pondering, by confronting the human condition, the human being.  He invites us on to his wave length for a sobering or laughing ride.  Our souls expand to make room for Shakespeare’s wisdom.  And impish wit.  This course will consider plays and poems.  And the visit will stay with you.  Beyond credit for your study to a forever place in your bettered heart.

1616W: Major Works of English and American Literature

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
1616W | Th 5:30-8:00 | Distance Learning | Cramer, P. Morgne

Classics of English and American Literature from the 18th century to the present

Our course readings focus on the theme of "escape" or the journey of no return home. In each novel or autobiography, a main character's "quest" for safety, for a fuller life, for truth, requires some form of irrevocable rift from their past.

We will read Jeanette Winterson's contemporary revision of the Hercules-Atlas myth in Weight (2005) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) against the backdrop of Greek heroic quest narratives; James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Charles Blow's Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2014); Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); Jung Chung's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991).

2000-Level Courses

2101: British Literature II

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2101-Z81 | M 3:35-6:05 | Roden, Frederick

Honors

British Literature II examines a broad variety of genres (poetry, non-fiction prose, and novel/short story) in three historical periods, from 1800 to roughly 1950: Romanticism, Victorianism, and Modernism. We will pay particular attention to works and movements on the margins of these categorical terms. This era was one of tremendous change with respect to definitions of identity: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national and ethnic self-understanding, and religion -- just to name a few. Honors students will select to focus on clusters of historical documents concerning some of these themes and will develop their formal course writing around those texts.  Professor Roden will mentor these projects individually, and we will meet as an Honors group to workshop this independent study.   Collectively as a full class, we will analyze the literature in the context of the politics of identity and the idea of "subjectivity": the speaking self.   

Engl 2101 counts for the 2021 English major Literary Histories and Legacies track; in earlier plans of study, the B1 requirement; elective credit; the English minor; and GenEd 1b. 

2101-Z82 | M 3:35-6:05 | Roden, Frederick

British Literature II examines a broad variety of genres (poetry, non-fiction prose, and novel/short story) in three historical periods, from 1800 to roughly 1950: Romanticism, Victorianism, and Modernism. We will pay particular attention to works and movements on the margins of these categorical terms. This era was one of tremendous change with respect to definitions of identity: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national and ethnic self-understanding, and religion -- just to name a few. We will analyze the literature in the context of the politics of identity and the idea of "subjectivity": the speaking self.   

Engl 2101 counts for the 2021 English major Literary Histories and Legacies track; in earlier plans of study, the B1 requirement; elective credit; the English minor; and GenEd 1b. 

2201: American Literature to 1880

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2201 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 | Pierrot, Gregory

In 1894 scholar Lewis Pattee published “Is There an American Literature?” an essay in which he asserted: “the time has come to study American literature, apart form the English product, as if it were a distinct entity.” Pattee was responding to the opinion held by some of his peers that American literature was only a regional branch of English literature. How things have changed.  

And what difference have those changes made? ‘America’ entered the Western imaginary as both a source and a product of literature from all over Europe, about two new continents and a smattering of islands; the people who already lived there, those who came of their own volition, and those who were forced to go. The ideas of America we now take for granted are derived from texts that shaped local and global imaginings of this place. With the idea of an American literature came notions of what should be included in it. Those notions have also changed profoundly in the past 120 years: we will study the many voices that ring in those texts, from Amerigo Vespucci to Phillis Wheatley, Mary Rowlandson to Walt Whitman—who heard America singing in the work of its artisans—in the time period that birthed American literature, and find out for ourselves what makes American literature.

2214W: African American Literature

Also offered as: AFRA 2214W
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2214W | TuTh 12:30-1:45 | Pierrot, Gregory

Black experience in America has been marked by displacement and movement. Forcibly taken from Africa and deported to the New World, black people in the New World built cultures uprooted from Africa yet necessarily tied to it; of the West but not completely in it, in between, in flux. Movement is especially significant for ethnic groups long denied the security of racial and national belonging. Movement both acknowledges and overcomes borders, whether physical or conceptual, and it concretizes networks and communities. According to Paul Gilroy, global black culture is characterized by “long histories of the association of self-exploration with the exploration of new territories.” Black American literature overwhelms US borders and is essential to American culture.  

In this course we will follow in the steps of black American authors in these explorations, by land, sea and air, from Afrofuturism back to the Middle Passage and back again, from Octavia Butler to Phillis Wheatley and back to Colson Whitehead and tracing the textual itineraries that have made black American literature. 

In this course we will follow in the steps of black American authors in these explorations, by land, sea and air, from the Middle Passage to the Great Migration and beyond. 

2401: Poetry

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2401 | MWF 1:25-2:15 | Hybrid | Brown, Pamela

2407: The Short Story

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2407 | TuTh 3:30-4:45 | Gorkemli, Serkan

In this course, we will study the theory and history of the short story as a literary form and read its fine examples by significant American and international writers. In our discussions, we will focus on the literary elements of plot, character, setting, point of view, style, and theme in short stories, and you will write textual analyses.

2701: Creative Writing I

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011. May not be taken out of sequence after passing ENGL 3701, 3703, or 3713.
2701 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 | Gorkemli, Serkan

In this course, we’ll study creative expression in short fiction and creative nonfiction. We’ll discuss and practice elements of prose-writing craft, and closely read the works of classic and contemporary authors. But the main focus will be on your own original writing, which you will reflect on and refine through a series of assignments, in-class and take-home exercises, and workshops.

3000-Level Courses

3003W: Advanced Expository Writing

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011; open to juniors or higher.
3003W | Online | Shaw, Francine

Business Writing

3220W: Jewish American Literature and Culture

Also offered as: HEJS 3401W
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
3220W | Tu 5:30-8:00 | Roden, Frederick

The first Jews to come to what is now the United States were refugees: fleeing the Inquisition in Brazil, after expulsion/forced conversion had already driven them from Portugal to Amsterdam.  They named their new assembly in New York the “remnants of the Jewish people.”  This was 1654, and ever since, the Jewish story in America has been the American story: one of migrants and displaced persons.  This course will consider the American Jewish experience through lenses of both “race” and “religion.”  From questions of “when Jews became white” to inflections of gender, sexuality, and class, we will explore Jewish identity in a comparative context.  From politics to peoplehood, we will pay particular attention to issues of Jewish diversity.  Drawing on literary and non-literary sources, through guest speakers, cultural events and (if permitted) field trips, the intersectionality we analyze will focus on concepts of “belonging” and “voice,” as well as the impact of Jews on American culture (and vice versa).  Prior experience in Jewish studies or literature not required.   

Engl 3220W counts for the English major (in the 2021 plan of study: Antiracism, Globality, and Embodiment Group 2 (Difference and Diaspora) and the Literature, Antiracism, and Social Justice track; for earlier plans of study, B2/B3 depending on catalog year, and diversity distribution where applicable; and elective) and minor, and both GenEd 1b and GenEd 4-USA.

    3503: Shakespeare I

    Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011. May not be taken out of sequence after passing ENGL 3505.
    3503 | W 3:35-6:05 | Brown, Pamela

    3703: Writing Workshop

    Prerequisites: ENGL 2701; instructor consent required. May be repeated once for credit.
    3703 | Online | Shaw, Francine

    Magazine Writing

    4000-Level Courses

    4600W: Advanced Study: Seminars in Literature

    Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011; at least 12 credits of 2000-level or above English courses or consent of instructor; open to juniors or higher.
    4600W | F 11:15-1:45 | Distance Learning | Cramer, P. Morgne

    Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group

    "How full of life those [early Bloomsbury] days seemed! Beauty was springing up under one’s feet. . . . A great new freedom seemed about to come." Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)

    “I want to raise up the magic world all round me, & live strongly & quietly there for 6 weeks. The difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds. . . . One must combine." Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

    Virginia Woolf is an iconic modernist, acclaimed for her poetic narrative aesthetics, her feminist and pacifist iconoclasm. This course focuses on Woolf's life and work within the context of her closest friends, the Bloomsbury Group. As late as 1936, Woolf asserts, “All the people I most respect & admire have been what you call 'Bloomsbury.'” Through readings, lectures, and guest speakers, we will aim to recapture the magic and fun—the creative "home"--that Bloomsbury members enjoyed as "chosen family." The Bloomsbury Group is composed of artists, intellectuals, and political theorists who transformed early twentieth century aesthetics, lifestyles, social and sexual norms. Core members include Clive Bell (art critic), Vanessa Bell (painter), E.M. Forster (novelist), Roger Fry (art critic), Duncan Grant (painter), John Maynard Keynes (economist), Desmond MacCarthy (literary critic), Lytton Strachey (biographer), Leonard Woolf (political theorist). Connected by friendship more than ideology, Bloomsbury members nevertheless were united by a few core values that shaped their lives, work, and distinct contributions to modernism. Clive Bell (1881-1964), for example, writes "we did like each other; also, we shared a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth & a contempt for conventional ways of thinking & feeling"; Duncan Grant (1885-1978) recalls "Nothing was expected save complete frankness & a mutual respect for the point of view of each." Perhaps, in the spirit of Bloomsbury, we too can delight in authentic discussion, the pursuit of "truth," mutual respect for each other's opinions, and readiness to question our own familiar ways of thinking and feeling?