Whether you were told them as you fell asleep at night or you watched and re-watched every Disney film version until you knew them by heart, you have probably been reading and interpreting fairy tales most of your life. In this foundational course, we will closely read a representative variety of prose, poetry, and drama; master key literary and critical terms and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the interpretation of literature through constructing and de-constructing various iterations of numerous fairy tales. Together, we will explore, analyze and reflect upon a variety of important conceptual questions about the intentions and impacts of literature through critical and creative modalities, and (perhaps) live happily ever after as well.

Section: 002 #4898
Instructor: S. Zabic
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 8:15–9:05 AM LSC

This course will help students gain a deeper understanding of the literary devices like metaphor, metonymy, imagery, characterization, point of view, and so on, as we investigate how literary forms develop over time. We will study literary texts through close reading as well as creative writing exercises. All along, we will place writers in their literary and political contexts, tackling the contentious arenas of both divisions and solidarity among races, genders, economic classes, immigrants and natives, etc. We will discuss poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays by authors such as James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Harryette Mullen, and William Shakespeare.

Section: 003 #4899
Instructor: C. Williams
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 8:15–9:05 AM LSC

The Southern Gothic

In this foundational interpreting literature course, students will investigate the Southern Gothic. Students will read texts that blur the lines between historical trauma and mystical supernatural-like experiences. These texts are meant to get us to question our perceptions of “the monster” and what and who it is. Using critical literary methods, we will examine poetry, drama, and texts such as Butler’s Kindred, Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, and Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse to unearth the larger stories that are rooted in history and trauma.

Section: 004 #4900
Instructor: A. Palmisano
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 9:20–10:10 AM LSC

Exile and Community

This foundational course in literary studies will require students to closely read and carefully analyze a representative variety of prose, poetry, and drama. During the course, we will 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 in order to help students develop the skills of analysis and interpretation needed to approach literature in a sophisticated manner.

This course explores the themes of exile and community across Medieval and Early Modern Literature. We will examine how various identities are built in and against community, as well as the boons and challenges found in exile and community. In doing so, we will pursue a variety of questions: How do communities define themselves? What are the effects of finding oneself in exile? Is exile a blessing or a curse? How are the boundaries of community drawn, and who draws them? What are the spiritual, cultural, racial, and gendered dimensions of exile and community? Texts will include but are not limited to: Anglo-Saxon poetry, excerpts from various travel narratives, Marie de France’s Bisclavret, Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale”, excerpts from mystical texts, The Tempest, and the Robin Hood legends.

Section: 005 #4901
Instructor: J. O'Briant
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 9:20–10:10 AM LSC

Faith and Doubt in Modern American Culture

As part of the university core, UCLR serves as an introductory course to the conventions of literature, exposing students to drama, fiction, and poetry. Throughout the semester, students will learn key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature.

This section of UCLR focuses on expressions of faith and doubt in modern and contemporary American literature. We will critically examine literary texts that deal explicitly and implicitly with religious belief, experience, and identity, considering how these phenomena are inflected by the dynamics of race, gender, class, and cultural identity in American society in a “secular” age—what Charles Taylor has described as “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Analyzing drama, fiction, and poetry by a diverse selection of 20^th and 21^st century American authors including James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, and David Foster Wallace, this course will consider how literature in its various forms can help us to confront the problems of belief in modern society and examine the sometimes-fraught relationship between the questions, “Who am I?” and “What do I believe?”

Section: 006 #4902
Instructor: A. Jochaniewcz
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 10:25–11:15 AM LSC

This is a first tier, foundational course of literary studies designed to offer students a greater understanding and appreciation of representative and various forms of fiction, poetry, and drama. This course will emphasize individual interpretations arrived at through slow and close reading and will introduce students to key literary terms and core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature. This class will be a prerequisite for all second tier literature courses, as designated by each department.

Section: 007 #4903
Instructor: W. Romero
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 2:45–3:45 PM LSC

As a foundational literature course, UCLR aims to instruct students in the core conventions of literary studies, introducing them to key literary and critical terms, analytical skills, and genres of literature. This specific section of UCLR will examine ghosts in poetry, fiction, and drama, spanning from Ovid in the 1st Century to Jesymn Ward in the 21st. This course will prompt students to question what "work” ghosts and hauntings do in literature. As a class, we will endeavor to understand why ghosts continue to haunt literature today, especially in light of modernity’s skepticism of the supernatural and the inexplicable.

Section: 008 #4904
Instructor: C. Williams
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 11:30 AM–12:20 PM LSC

The Southern Gothic

Section: 009 #4905
Instructor: L. Goldstein
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 12:35–1:25 PM LSC

Utopias and Dystopias

In this course, we will read, discuss and write about how texts and film that create utopias and dytopias form astute social commentary on the present state of the world. With units in the course such as Afrofuturism, White Utopias, Latinx Visions, and Asian American Perspectives, there is a special focus on social ecologies based in racial and gendered hierarchies in the material and our discussions. We will be reading short stories, novels, plays and poetry as well as viewing films. You will be introduced to multiple strategies that approach and interpret challenging texts through lectures, class discussions, group work and short responses. Materials include: short stories by Octavia Butler, the film Pumzi by African filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, a novel by Richard Brautigan, and the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Harryette Mullen, Douglas Kearney, Ocean Vuong and Khadijah Queen.

Section: 010 #4906
Instructor:B. Jacob
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 1:40–2:30 PM LSC

Literary Hauntings

What does it mean to be haunted? Whether the haunting occurs through a supernatural figure, ghosts of historical pasts, or the phantasms of our own mind; the reoccurrence of the spectrum can be all-encompassing. This course will use the literary genres of poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and films to grapple with the conditions that create ghosts in our lives. We will be reading and watching these texts to work through how trauma, grief, nostalgia, desire, and white supremacy produce forces that haunt our perceptions of the world around us.

UCLR 100E will serve as a foundational course for future literary studies at LUC and beyond. You will be galvanizing your interpretive skills through a variety of literary approaches, terms, and methodologies. These analytical engagements will take place through close reading, collaborations, and discussions. Assignments include: blog posts, a video essay, and a podcast.

Short stories: Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, “On the Road” by Nnedi Okorafor, and Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
Novel: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Play: Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
Poetry: Emily Dickinson and Danez Smith
Films: The Witch, Us, Black Mirror: San Junipero

Section: 011 #4907
Instructor: N. Karatas
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

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: 012 #4908
Instructor: J. Hovey
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 2:45–3:35 PM LSC

In this section of Loyola’s foundational course in literary studies we will focus on the revival of chivalry from the 19^th century onwards. What did the conventions of chivalry and the Arthur legend give readers in the 19^th century, the 20^th century, and today? How have African American writers, Feminists, and Queer writers, among others, used these conventions to tell different stories? We will look at how this literature fashions ideals of virtue, gender expression, national identity, class, and race, grapples with social and cultural issues, and interrogates masculine and Eurocentric codes of conduct and governance. Texts may include works by Malory, Tennyson, Twain, Owen, Lowell, Bradley, Martin, Agbabi, and Deonne.

Section: 013 #4909
Instructor: L. Durnell
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

Reclaiming the Narrative

Literature’s art and craft demonstrates how language braided with voice creates beautiful and resonant literary art. While enjoying literature’s imagery and music, we also must acknowledge that literature is often a powerful form of resistance for marginalized writers. This resistance allows them to reclaim their narrative

Our course will address the poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction by twentieth and twenty-first century women and non-binary writers who come from various positionalities and marginalized backgrounds -- race, sexuality, disability, gender, religion – and challenge the dominant narrative. Our authors include Maya Angelou, Chrystos, Akwaeke Emezi, Nicola Griffith, Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Zora Neale Hurston, Erica Jong, Porochista Khakpour, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Z.Z. Packer, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

In addition to discussing and writing analyses centered on these authors’ works, students will learn about and use literary theory and literary criticism. In addition to reading our authors’ varied works, students will read supplemental articles addressing the authors and their specific works.

Section: 014 #4910
Instructor: C. Walton
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 8:30–9:45 AM LSC

In this foundational course in literary studies, students will use an assortment of literary approaches and methodologies to aid in their interpretation, analysis, and close reading of literature. In this course, we will investigate the different types of regulations enforced against black Americans. This exploration will center on how this control is enacted through violence (slavery, police brutality); culture (stereotypes); and systematically (employment, wealth distribution). Specifically, we will study how African American literature has responded to these types of restrictions. We will use novels, poetry, and plays by several African American authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, and Assata Shakur. Methods of assessment will include quizzes, classroom participation, and a final project.

Section: 015 #4912
Instructor: S. Lepak
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 8:30–9:45 AM LSC

This foundational course in literary studies will require students to closely read and carefully analyze a representative variety of prose, poetry, and drama, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to conceptual questions about literature and its study. We will be focusing on a variety of texts from time periods spanning from the ancient Greeks to contemporary Americans. Our focus will be on the story of Homer’s Iliad and mythological literary traditions. We will anchor our study around the character of Achilles to effectively understand the literature and how adaptation functions in literary study.

Section: 016 #4914
Instructor: P. Jacob
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 10:00–11:15 AM LSC

In this foundational course in literary studies, we will ask how literature reflects, refracts, and remakes the world. This course will feature texts from a variety of genres, including poetry, drama, short fiction, and the novel, all of which are engaged in describing the world as it is and imagining how it could or should be. We will pay special attention to how these works address questions of class, gender, sexuality, race, and geography. We will examine the cultural context from which each text emerges, as well as the new world each text creates. Students will be introduced to the key terms and concepts of literary study and will practice rigorous attention to the text. Students will gain experience with the practice of close reading, attending to the form of the text as well as to its content, and will develop their interpretations in short responses, formal essays, and presentations. Texts may include: short fiction by Alice Sola Kim and Louise Erdrich; poetry by Danez Smith and Galway Kinnell; the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; and the live production of Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me.

Section: 017 #4916
Instructor: J. Chamberlin
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 10:00–11:15 AM LSC

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 complete three major assessments—a midterm, a final, and an analytical essay—in addition to short assignments such as reading responses and quizzes.

Section: 018 #4917
Instructor: E. Hopwood
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 11:30 AM–12:45 PM LSC

Murder, Mystery, and Misfits: Reading Crime

In this foundational core course in literary studies, we will investigate representations of crimes and criminality in prose, fiction, poetry, and drama from the 19^th century to today. How does race, gender, class, and culture inform how we demarcate between the “guilty” versus the “innocent”? How has criminality been constructed and legislated? And why are we so attracted to consuming stories about true crime, who-dun-its, murder, and detectives?

We will read authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Cornelius Eady, William and Ellen Craft, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden. We’ll also investigate literature’s connection to broader cultural issues, from analysis of sites like Alcatraz and the Eastern State Penitentiary, to narrative study of true crime podcasts and Law and Order. Students will be introduced to key literary terms and critical approaches to close reading and analysis. Students are expected to communicate insights about each text through writing, creative projects, and in-class discussion.

This course satisfies the first tier of Loyola University’s core Knowledge Area requirement in “Literary Knowledge.”

Section: 019 #4918
Instructor: V. Bell
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 11:30 AM–12:45 PM LSC

Personal & Political Hauntings in American Literature

The foundational course of literary studies requires students to read closely and analyze carefully a representative variety of literary texts, master key literary and critical terms, and explore a variety of core critical approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature.

This section explores the interpretation of American literary works that are “haunted” by the past. The essays, novels, stories, and poems that we will explore speak in the voices of real or imagined people in the history of the Americas, or at least obsessively struggle to represent those voices and earlier events. The works also focus on complex and uncomfortable, even taboo, American problems—death, suicide, racial conflict, genocide, abuse, violence, political upheaval, etc.—but they also explore opportunities for change and for the expansion of freedom. Authors may include George Saunders, Edwidge Danticat, Diana Khoi Nguyen, James Tate, and Coya Paz, among others.

Course requirements include 1 midterm exam and 1 final exam, 2 critical essays, active synchronous class participation, and asynchronous participation in Discussion Forums and VoiceThreads.

Section: 020 #4919
Instructor: B. Molby
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 1:00–2:15 PM LSC

After our experiences of the pandemic, this course will challenge literature to put its money where its mouth is. If literature is understood to be a unique mode of transmitting and interpreting knowledge and human experience through creative lingustic expression, then literature can make a uniquely valuable contribution to our own understanding and experience of times of plague, illness, and loss.

We will read and examine texts such as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of A Plague Year, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” and Ling Ma’s Severance, and in the process discuss how past texts have presented plague, contagion, illness, isolation, and social fragmentation, but also how they provide opportunities for finding consolation and community through the shared experience of narrative.

Section: 021#4920
Instructor: J. Eighan
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 2:30–3:45 PM LSC

In this course, we will read and analyze works of fiction, poetry, and drama to gain a better understanding of what constitutes literature. We will observe how authors utilize literary techniques, which will serve as the basis of our analyses of the texts. While we will read a variety of different works, our course will fundamentally explore “the Monster” in literature. In particular, we will examine character psychology, and consider how themes of identity and the “monstrous body” contribute to our overall understanding of these texts.

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 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? 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.

ENGL 210   Business Writing

Section: 20W #1504
Instructor: D. Gray
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15–5:30 PM WTC

Communicating Effectively in the Business World

In the Business World, it is not enough to show up and complete projects. Communicating effectively within one’s organization and with others outside of it is crucial to success. This Advanced Writing course will focus on the principles of business writing and the application of them to become an effective communicator. These principles will be applied to create numerous documents and projects that include something as small as a cover letter to something more sophisticated like a business proposal. Concepts taught in previous writing courses, such as the Writing Process, will be revisited so that what is produced is clear, concise and delivers the messages the internal and external audiences want and need.

Section: 21W #3481
Instructor: J. Chamberlin
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 2:30–3:45 PM WTC

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.

Section: 60W #2126
Instructor: J. Janangelo
3.0 credit hours Lecture
T 7:00–9:30 PM WTC

Our course covers the rhetorical principles of effective writing, focusing on particular types of discourse practiced in business and professional settings. You will gain experience reading and writing texts pertinent to business communication including memos, proposals, letters, and resumes. There will be individual and collaborative projects; you will also give a group presentation.  

Our course is writing intensive. We will use a process approach to writing, emphasizing problem-solving, prewriting strategies, and editing and revision skills. Our class is a workshop. As such, much of our time will be devoted to small group discussions and exercises. You will plan and share some of your writing with your peers and with me in draft conferences. That gives you a chance to exchange ideas, get assistance, participate in peer editing, and receive feedback on your work.  

ENGL 210-60W is a writing intensive class.

Section: 61W #3482
Instructor:L. Parzefall
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00–9:30 PM WTC

ENGL 210 offers students who want to improve their professional writing, or are considering careers in business, training and practice in various forms of business writing, such as memos, instructions, letters, resumes, proposals, and reports.

ENGL 211   Writing for Pre-Law Students

Section: 60W #1505
Instructor: D. Gorski
3.0 credit hours Lecture
M 7:00–9:30 PM WTC

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 motions. 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.

ENGL 211-60W is a writing intensive class.

Section: 61W #2557
Instructor: D. Gorski
3.0 credit hours Lecture
W 7:00–9:30 PM WTC

ENGL 211-61W is a writing intensive class.

ENGL 220   Theory/Practice Tutoring

Section: 1WE #2127
Instructor: A. Kessel
3.0 credit hours Seminar
TR  2:30–3:45 PM LSC

English 220 is a seminar designed to prepare students to serve as tutors in the Loyola University Chicago 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 who can speak to the student’s writing ability and interpersonal skills. Recommendations should be emailed to Brandiann Molby (bmolby@luc.edu). Those who excel in the course will be eligible to work as paid writing tutors.

ENGL 220-1WE is a writing intensive class.

ENGL 271   Exploring Poetry

Section: 001 #4109
Instructor: A. Baker
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 1:00–2:15 PM LSC

Why does anybody read, write, study, or even (imagine this!) love poetry? In an era when film, television, music, and social media dominate the cultural landscape, what relevance does poetry still have? In this class, as we familiarize ourselves with the history of poetry and some of its most significant works, we will also attempt to ask and answer a very fundamental question: why does this artform even exist? What are its roots in human psychology? Why has it persisted for thousands of years? Why do we turn to it in times of crisis? When we're in love? When we grieve? How might poetry help us to understand the world and ourselves in deeper and more essential ways? In this class you'll read, discuss, analyze, and even write poems.

Section: 002 #4111
Instructor: J. Stayer
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 2:30–3:45 PM LSC

This second-tier literature course builds on the interpretive moves learned in UCLR 100. Entirely devoted to the glorious genre of poetry, we will focus on British authors: John Donne, Shakespeare, John Keats, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Browning, 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 focus on the experience of Black British authors: Raymond Antrobus and other spoken word poets such as Deanna Rodger, Isaiah Hull, and Warsan Shire.

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, complaint), we no longer need to fear poetry as an arcane game of hide-and-seek with meaning. Sign up for the course. It will change your life.

Section: 003 #4765
Instructor: I. Cornelius
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 2:30–3:45 PM LSC

The word “poetry” derives from a Greek word meaning “to make.” English and Scottish poets were once called “makers.” What do poets make and what is their material? In this course we read a selection of lyric and narrative poetry in English, with a focus on its language. We develop vocabularies for describing the sounds of English and the shapes of words and sentences, and we explore the ways that poets create their art through deliberate selection, arrangement, and shaping of language. Poets include Lewis Carroll, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Keats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Milton, Dudley Randall, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelly, and Edmund Spenser. Assessment is by midterm and final exams, quizzes, and short assignments.

Section: 01W #4112
Instructor: P. Sorenson
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 12:35–1:25 PM LSC

This course will act as an introduction to poetry in English, from the Romantic to the contemporary period. We will discuss the conventions and patterns poets often follow, and I will provide you with the standard terminology used to describe these conventions, such as line, stanza, measure, rhythm, lyric, etc. Perhaps more importantly, you will learn how to critically approach these texts. We will discuss how these poems work, what they might be arguing, what they suggest about the historical moment in which they were written, and how they relate to or comment on other texts. We will also examine the critical literature that surrounds these poems. Finally, our course’s theme is “Inside and Out.” These insides and outsides may relate to a poem’s content: dreamscapes, underworlds, and far-out spaces. Our theme will also feature in discussions of the interplay between the content and the form. In other words, we will investigate the relationships between a text’s surface expressions, its outer form, and its subterranean content, its inner meanings. These investigations will help us to better understand how poems contain, mask, or even occasionally abandon “meaning” altogether. Ultimately, we will excavate these poems’ contents; we will pull the inside out.

Section: 02W #4113
Instructor: T. Altman
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 1:40–2:30 PM LSC

Exploring Poetry gives students the fundamental skills you need to read and analyze poetry with confidence and sophistication. We’ll learn the technical language associated with poetry—and we’ll think about the historical and social contexts that shape the way that poetry is written and read. In this section, we’ll survey a range of poems written between the early 19^th century and the contemporary moment. These poems will challenge our ideas about what poetry is and does. Following Robin D.G. Kelley’s assertion that “…poetry can be the motor of political imagination, a potent weapon in any movement that claims freedom as its primary goal,” we will read poems that engage with—and seek to change—the world. And we will ask tough questions about those poems: what are poetry’s political powers? And what are its limitations?

Section: 03W #4924
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 11:30–12:45 PM LSC

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 pornographic, 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: 04W #5018
Instructor: B. Mornar
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 8:30–9:45 AM LSC

Poetry is the oldest and most mischievous of literary genres, eternally reinventing itself, challenging conventions, bucking traditions. In this second-tier literature course, we will begin with the idea of form in poetry and learn about the complex histories of traditional forms such as the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, and ballad and of forms derived from non-Western sources such as the ghazal, the pantoum, and Japanese tanka. Our focus, however, will be on how modern and contemporary poets engage in a transhistorical dialogue with these traditions by adapting, appropriating, and/or subverting the forms for their own ends. We will read the sonnet sequences of Renaissance poet Lady Mary Wroth alongside the work of Modernist sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay, and we will read Terrance Hayes’s recent Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. The recent BreakBeat Anthology series features many contemporary poets working with traditional forms, and we will focus on the most recent of these anthologies, the Latinext collection, where we will find Latinx poets playfully engaging with poetic traditions. At the end of the semester, we will consider poems in “open forms” as well, reflecting on how the demands of a formal constraint can be productive just as it can be limiting. Along the way, I will provide you with a vocabulary of key poetic terms so that you can describe what you see, hear, and feel happening in poetry. By the end of this course, you will be able to interpret a variety of formal and open poetries and convey these interpretations in writing. The work for this course will include weekly annotations and reading responses, a poetic terms test, a close reading essay, a self-constructed exam, and an exploratory essay project.

ENGL 272   Exploring Drama

Section: 01W #3749
Instructor: K. Zhorne
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 1:00–2:15 PM LSC

This course surveys the history and conventions of dramatic literature, spanning from ancient Greece to the late-twentieth century. We will pay special attention to the social and literary influences that defined the major genres of drama as well as affected their performance and reception. On a deeper level, we will explore the way drama expresses the most complex feelings and concerns of human beings as individuals, family members, and members of a society. Among others, we will study works such as Oedipus Rex, The Second Shepherd’s Play, The Spanish Tragedy, A Doll House, and A Raisin in the Sun.

Because ENGL 272-01W is a Writing-Intensive course, we will devote time in and outside of class to practicing and improving your academic writing. Assignments will include in-class reading responses, four performance reviews, a midterm with a take-home essay, and a research paper on an approved topic.

ENGL 273   Exploring Fiction

Section: 002 #4926
Instructor: L. Le-Khac
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

“Different”: Coming-of-Age Stories in a Diversifying America

This course explores fiction centered on racial minority young people finding their places in America and changing the nation in the process. We’ll examine the diversity of American coming-of-age stories from 1960 to today, a period when many minority groups struggled to claim their places in the nation. We’ll follow extraordinary minority writers as they narrate the possibilities for young people of different backgrounds to develop in contemporary America. And we’ll equip you with the analytical tools you’ll need to appreciate their artistry in fiction.

Section: 003 #4927
Instructor: A. Aftab
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 10:00–11:15 AM LSC

Identity, Power and Resistance

What is the function of literature in challenging or reinforcing dominant ideologies about race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality? How do writers use fiction to reveal the intricacies of interpersonal and systemic oppression? How do different genres and forms – such as the bildungsroman or speculative fiction – represent structures of power and modes 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 writers such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chimamanda Adichie, Nnedi Okorafor and Octavia Butler. Towards the end of the semester, students will be able to examine how different systems of oppression – such as racism, sexism, and imperialism – are represented in fiction, and how these representations contribute to movements for social justice. In addition to sharpening their literary analysis, students will engage in creative writing, consider the burden of representation for minoritized writers, and examine the relationship between literary aesthetics and politics.

This is a multicultural class.

Section: 004 #4928
Instructor: J. Kerkering
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 1:00–2:15 PM LSC

This course examines works by important U.S. novelists from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Class discussions will address formal and thematic features of these writings. Based on these discussions, students will write papers that draw upon the readings to support insightful and consequential literary interpretations. Readings will include novels by Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton.

Section: 01W #4929
Instructor: J. Fiorelli
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 12:35–1:25 PM LSC

Exploring Fiction: Speculative Fiction

This course focuses on the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of prose fiction. Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of fiction as a means of exploring human experience and to use the technical vocabulary necessary to effectively analyze works of fiction. To do this, we will study a sampling of speculative fiction. While a somewhat contested term, speculative fiction may be considered a broad designation that encompasses several genres, including science fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. It stages a break with “ordinary” life, thereby offering a view into a particular historical moment’s concerns and a vantage point for social critique. Thus, speculative fiction both offers aesthetic pleasure and furthers historical understanding and the interests of social justice, as it points out the limitations of existent society and points toward what could be.

While science fiction especially has been frequently characterized as the domain of white, male writers and readers, early speculative authors who identified as women and/or people of color and the exploding diversity of contemporary speculative fiction illustrate the force of speculative fiction for addressing a wide range of social positions, experiences, and forms of oppression. This class will focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American (considered somewhat broadly) speculative fiction written primarily by authors who identify as members of one or more marginalized group, including primarily authors of color. We will examine various forms and style of fiction, considering the value of fictionality generally and, more specifically, how these authors have used aesthetic means to illuminate social struggle and human life.

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, and literary analysis essays.

Section: 02W #4925
Instructor: K. Quirk
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 8:15–9:05 AM LSC

This is a writing-intensive course in which we will read works of fiction that are particularly concerned with the themes of crime and punishment. Possible texts may include novels such as Richard Wright’s Native Son and James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, and Isabel Allende. We will also watch some film adaptations of one or two of our fictional works. In our readings, discussions, and writing, we will examine the nature of crime and criminality, as well as questions about punishment, guilt, forgiveness, morality, and knowledge. There will be three short analytical assignments and a longer final assignment that will involve imagining how we might adapt a work of fiction into a film.

Section: 03W #4931
Instructor: E. Stueber
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 11:30 AM–12:45 PM LSC

How do fiction writers construct a world, and how do the choices they make create meaning? In what ways is a fictional world distinct and governed by its own rules, and in what ways does it reach us where we are and speak to the deepest of human experiences? In an effort to answer these questions and gain a true appreciation of the art of prose fiction, over the first half of the semester students will be asked to present on a wide variety of authors who are masters of the short story form, looking at them through the prism of different literary techniques and styles that they exemplify. We will investigate a good mix of conventional fiction and styles as well as more experimental approaches so that a basic understanding is formed of the vast expanse that is labeled “literary fiction.” In learning how a fictional world is constructed, we will gain insight into how we can deconstruct it to engage in interpretation. To this end, the second half of the semester will focus on novels that are considered both exceptional and innovative. We will consider the different opportunities presented by short and long works of fiction, and how literary works build upon each other over time, expanding the possibilities of the form. Readings will include authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Franz Kafka, Amy Hempel, Kelly Link, John Barthes, Tim O’Brien, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and more. Beyond the readings and presentations, course work will include periodic quizzes, and, since this is a writing intensive course, two essays (5-7 pages each, one of which will include a creative option) and multiple short writing assignments.

Section: 600 #4932
Instructor: J. Janangelo
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00–9:30 PM LSC

Our course focuses on ideas and representations of "wealth” as it concerns human happiness, gender identities, equity, and inclusion. Through our readings, discussions, and analysis, we will pay particular attention to concepts and intersections of gender, race, social class, and sexuality.  

Throughout the semester, we will draw on the scholarship of Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Karl Marx, among others. We will study ways that that ideas of “wealth” have evolved across time and maturing media.  

Our course texts include Ellen Foster, Room at the Top and The Postman Always Rings Twice. We will write two essays, a reading journal, a presentation, and two exams.   

ENGL 274    Exploring Shakespeare

Section: 01W #4114
Instructor: V. Strain
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 10:00–11:15 AM LSC

This course takes students on a deep dive into six or seven of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. We will approach each text from four directions: poetic features, cultural and literary contexts, performance history, and critical interpretations. This course will also focus on the similarities and differences between the language culture of Shakespeare’s day and our own. We will begin with the language culture of the sixteenth century and its understanding of the personal, social, and political potential of speech. From there, we move on to the history of critical discussion in higher education and I provide strategies for effective preparation, participation, and reflection. Education theorists have long connected classroom discussion with the goals of democracy, and they are now increasingly linking discussion to the goals of social justice. By learning the techniques of open-ended and transformative discussion in the classroom, students develop a greater capacity to shape social and political conditions in which all individuals can thrive. Class time will be devoted to discussion, and participation will be evaluated accordingly. The approach offered in this course will help students recover the historical importance of Shakespeare’s works while giving those works a new contemporary significance.

Section: 02W #5015
Instructor: J. Hastings
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 11:30 AM–12:20 PM Online

Our primary emphasis in this course will be on the textuality of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic works with special emphasis on the earliest documents that transmit them to us. The culminating project of the course will be your own edition of your favorite scene or sonnet.

ENGL 282B   African-American Literature

Section: 01W #4933
Instructor: F. Staidum
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 11:30 AM–12:20 PM LSC

While the activist movement, Black Lives Matter, has garnered national attention since its inception in 2013, African American literature has long been concerned with asserting the value of Black lives since the late 18^thcentury. African and African descendant peoples in the United States have used the written word to express their desires for freedom and its various iterations (i.e., equality, citizenship, self-determination, justice) and to represent the full humanity and beauty of Black peoples and their cultures. This course surveys this diverse literary tradition of autobiographies, pamphlets, essays, short stories, novels, poetry, and plays. We will especially study the artistic and socio-political context of this literature for what they reveal about the ever-changing status of the Black condition and Blackness within the US.

This particular version of the course focuses on material within the time period 1700-1900. Authors will include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Wilson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Pauline Hopkins.

ENGL 282B-01W #4933 is a writing intensive and multicultural course.

ENGL 283    Women in Literature

Section: 001 #4934
Instructor: B. Klaver
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

Jezebel, rebel, witch, femme fatale: what can the representation of “wicked women” in literature and film tell us about how and why women have been socially scapegoated, objectified, and ostracized? Do some women break the rules or choose to live on the margins as a way of challenging what bell hooks calls imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy? We’ll begin with the biblical Eve and end with so-called “unlikable” women protagonists on contemporary TV shows. In between, we’ll read novels, short stories, poems, and plays by Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Jenny Zhang, and others as we examine how the cultural threat of wicked women might be recast as a form of power.

Section: 02W #4935
Instructor: P. Warren
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 2:45–3:35 PM LSC

Unlikeable Female Protagonists

In 2013, PW reviewer Annasue McCleave Wilson interviewed author Clare Messud about Nora Eldridge, the “angry, really angry” protagonist of Messud’s latest book, The Woman Upstairs. Wilson asked: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”

Messud’s answer was the shot heard ‘round the think pieces: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?’”

“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.

As Lionel Shriver writes: “Good stories require mistakes. If you want to read about unimpeachable characters, order the annual report from Oxfam. If you want to read about difficult, complicated, maddening characters who remind you of people you know – who remind you, if you’re honest, of yourself…”, then take this course.

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 course counts towards the post-1900 and multicultural requirement for the English major. ENGL 283-02W is a writing intensive class.

Section: 03W #4936
Instructor: S. Bost
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 1:00–2:15 PM LSC

Haunted Houses

For as long as women have been associated with “the home,” misogyny, colonialism, racism, ableism, and homophobia have made the home a potentially unsafe or unhappy place. What do we mean when we say “the home,” and what does this term try to exclude? Where does the idea of “haunted houses” come from? What does the literary fascination with haunted houses have to do with gender, sexuality, race, and class? How do different cultural traditions value homes and haunting? We will read novels and short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Carolyn Keene, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Nancy Mairs, Alison Bechdel, and Carmen María Machado. Assignments will include regular in-class exercises and four papers of different lengths.

This writing intensive section is cross-listed with Women’s Studies and Gender Studies.

Section: 04W #4937
Instructor: C. English
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 2:30–3:45 PM LSC

Building off of the famous trope of the madwomen in the attic, this course will examine the gendering of mental health afflictions that led to the oppression and confinement of women for transgressive behavior through a variety of genres (fiction, poetry, short story) from the late eighteenth-century (1790s) to the present day. We will study texts written by women as well as texts representing women by male authors. Situating these texts within their historical frame, we will consider the medical discourses that labeled women insane and posited that women were afflicted with “wandering wombs” in order to interrogate patriarchal cultures and institutions. Students will examine these representations of women’s mental health issues in a global context in order to better understand how different cultural and political contexts influenced these depictions.

This writing-intensive course is designed to focus on writing skills that will help students to write about gender construction and difference; to analyze literary texts and formulate arguments about them; and to situate these texts in their historical contexts, with close attention paid to medical and political discourses.

Authors include: Toni Morrison, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Rhys, Syliva Plath, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Ottessa Moshfegh

ENGL 283-20 W is a writing intensive class.

ENGL 288    Nature in Literature

Section: 01W #2671
Instructor: E. Bayley
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 11:30 AM–12:20 PM LSC

In this course we will use a number of different Ecocritical approaches, with a particular focus on Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice to explore and interpret pieces of fiction and non-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? Assignments in the semester will include writing papers, reading reflections, and classroom participation.

Section: 02W #4118
Instructor: E. Bayley
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 1:40–2:30 PM LSC

ENGL 290    Human Values in Literature

Section: 001 #3757
Instructor: R. Peters
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

This section of ENGL 290: Human Values in Literature will explore the theme of “Future Worlds.” Literature frequently depicts visions of future worlds, societies, and human beings. The texts studied in this course explore both utopian and dystopian portraits of humanity and society in the future. Authors for this class may include Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Octavia Butler, George R.R. Martin, and others.

Section: 20W #3759
Instructor: S. Sleevi
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

As human beings, who we are and what we value differs radically based on our distinct positionalities. How do factors of time, place, and identity affect our outlooks on the world around us? How do our individual experiences of being human lead us to have differing—and even conflicting—perspectives and judgements regarding the “same” situations and events? In this section of Human Values in Literature, we will explore these questions within a variety of narrative texts that range from the nineteenth century to the present, looking closely at both their thematic content and formal features. In order to achieve the Writing Intensive aspect of the course, we will also dedicate time and attention to the writing process itself and write regularly as a means of thinking through course material. Authors likely to appear on the syllabus are William Faulkner, Edward P. Jones, Julie Otsuka, and George Saunders, and assignments for the course will include reading quizzes, regular short writing assignments (such as discussion forums), three response papers, and a final paper.

ENGL 293    Advanced Composition

Section: 01W #3080
Instructor: S. Weller
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

Feminist Rhetoric in Personal, Political, and Public Persuasion

In this course we will investigate writing and the meaning-making of writing through a gendered lens. We will explore contemporary feminist rhetoric as it collides and collaborates with researched and persuasive writing for academic, personal, and public audiences. We’ll ask questions about whose voices are heard and whose have been silenced or left out. We’ll discuss how voice, style, gender, and rhetoric affect our understanding of what is persuasive ---personally, politically, publicly, and why.

We'll read a variety of feminist rhetorical theory (Andrea Lunsford, Cheryl Glenn, Foss & Griffith, bell hooks, Chimamanda Adichie), some writing process and composition theory (Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, Chris Anson), and a range of texts and articles by feminist writers, thinkers, and activists as they make their personal, political, and public arguments for change in pursuit of gender equity. Authors/voices will include: Roxane Gay, Cheris Kramarae, Sally Gearhart, De Beauvoir, Fannie Lou Hamer, The Grimke Sisters, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Sanger, Dorothy Day, Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Helene Cixous, Gloria Anzaldua, Mary Daly, Paula Gunn, Barbara Johnson, Andrea Dworkin, Minnie Pratt, Dorothy Allison, Terry Tempest-Williams, Virginia Woolf, Nikki Giovanni, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, Mikki Kendall, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Leslie Marmon-Silko, among others.

Students will write a variety of essays, projects, and pieces for a range of audiences as they interact with the course content. There will be wide student choice in terms of topic focus for each writing assignment. Assignments may include project proposals, annotated bibliographies, researched arguments, Op-Ed pieces, personal and/or journalistic essays, podcasts, short film/documentary, blogs, and social media. Students will participate in peer review and draft workshops throughout the course to support the writing process and advanced development of their personal, academic, and public writing skills.

ENGL 303    Grammar: Principles and Pedagogy

Section: 001 #1791
Instructor: E. Stogner
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF 2:45–3:35 PM LSC

What is a passive verb? Why is this a fragment? Does a comma go here? We use the English language, but do we really understand how it works? The goal of English 303 is to analyze the structure of the English language, to learn and appreciate its intricacies, quirks, and demands. We will explore English grammar not only as a list of rules and regulations that govern language use but also as a means of clearly conveying meaning. This course will examine the most important elements of English grammar from parts of speech and how they function in a sentence to punctuation and how it enhances clear and precise prose. Course requirements include reading all assigned materials, doing all assigned exercises, taking regular quizzes and tests, and giving a short teaching presentation. This course is required for students planning to teach high school English, but it is open to others and recommended for anyone who studies texts written in English.

ENGL 313    Border Literatures

Section: 001 #5017
Instructor: A. Aftab
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

The Borders of Queerness; the Queerness of Borders

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 Dionne Brand, Akwaeke Emezi, Gloria Anzaldúa and Shyam Selvadurai.

This is a multicultural class.

ENGL 315C    South Asian Literature Post-1900

Section: 001 #6656
Instructor: H. Mann
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15–5:30 PM LSC

This course examines literatures in English from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Focusing primarily on the issues of modern-day colonization, independence and partition, decolonization, and globalization, this course also investigates the representation of multiple nationalities, ethnicities, classes and castes, religions, linguistic traditions, gender and sexuality, migration, and "terror" in the writings under study. In addition, the course assesses the role of the English language and the authors' locations and target audiences in determining the reception of the literatures both at home and abroad; and it analyzes the cultural bases of contributing literary techniques, including structure, language, narrative focalization, and characterization among others. Finally, the course addresses the disciplinary and pedagogical practices underwriting the study of South Asian literatures in English in the western academy. Readings will include novels written by authors from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (and residing in India, Pakistan, USA, UK, or Canada) as well as some supplementary essays.

ENGL 317    The Writing of Poetry

Section: 001 #1329
Instructor: A. Baker
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
T 2:30–5:00 PM LSC

In this class, we will give a great deal of 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 #1330
Instructor: L. Goldstein
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
W 2:45–5:15 PM LSC

Writing poetry is a craft that requires reading, exploration, practice, 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 in creating work both as a group and on our own. Our work also includes prompts for writing in between sessions, and presentations of student poetry for review by the group. Finally, students spend several weeks compiling and reviewing final collections of poetry for a self-published chapbook, and for the final, give a reading of their work.

Section: 003 #3760
Instructor: P. Sorenson
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
F 2:45–5:15 PM LSC

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. Weekly class meetings will center on discussions and presentations of outside materials, in-class writing and writing experiments, discussions of student-generated poetry, and collaborative writing. In addition to regular writing assignments and in-class presentations, students will develop a twenty-page chapbook by semester’s end.

ENGL 318    The Writing of Fiction

Section: 001 #1331
Instructor: V. Popa
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
M 4:15–6:45 PM LSC

This course explores the art and techniques of writing fiction; how and why it succeeds in capturing the imagination of readers, and how those skills can be channeled successfully to craft new and original work. This course will include a combination of craft lessons and workshop critique. We will investigate the output of a diverse cast of authors, from Francois Rabelais and Laurence Sterne to Denis Johnson and Danyial Mueenuddin. From these works, we will then distill valuable lessons about the writing of fiction, such as character development, dialogue, plot, and tension, which students will then apply to their own compositions. Assignments include two original works of short fiction (either short stories or novel excerpts) and a final portfolio (which will include revisions of workshopped assignments).

Course Goals:

This introductory Creative Writing course requires you to develop the following skills:

Using a variety of techniques to craft original drafts of short fiction;
Critiquing your own and other’s work in the workshop setting;
Performing close readings of published and unpublished fiction;
Engaging with the process of writing as an ongoing and plastic development

Section: 002 #2128
Instructor:M. Hawkins
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
W 4:15–6:45 PM LSC

In this fiction writing workshop students will read, write, revise and critique short fiction with the aim of becoming better writers and readers. Workshops will be rigorous and respectful, with 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 and discuss each others’ stories, too. Every week students will write. In addition to three completed stories assigned as homework, students will do in-class writing exercises designed to create momentum, generate ideas and explore technique. Class discussions will focus on craft as well as concept, with particular attention paid to structure, character development, dialog, voice, tone and imagery. Again and again, we will ask of each other and ourselves: What works, what doesn’t, why, and how can it be made better?

Section: 600 #2129
Instructor: M. Meinhardt
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
T 7:00–9:30 PM LSC

This advanced writing workshop for fiction will explore traditional and contemporary flash fiction, short story, and novel (chapter) forms. Vocabulary, criticism, genre, and rhetoric will fuel a keen attention to the dynamics of both reading and writing fiction for personal and perhaps even artistic purposes. Character engagement, tone, and structural awareness will guide the development of each writer’s ‘voice’ through the development of creative writing designed to both explore and perform on the page. All students will write flash fiction and short story forms, but the novel start (or chapter) is optional. Old and new classics start the class off, but we shift very quickly to student writing and finish with attention to publication awareness and preparation. This workshop develops both new and experienced writers of fiction and satisfies the core expressive arts requirement!

ENGL 319    Writing Creative Nonfiction

Section: 001 #1792
Instructor:V. Rendel
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
R 7:00–9:30 PM LSC

Telling the truth doesn’t have to be boring. This course will provide an overview of traditional and hybrid genres of creative nonfiction (including literary journalism, memoir, biography, essays, humor and travel writing) by authors from Maya Angelou to Tobias Wolff. Students are encouraged to experiment with a variety of formats, including graphic art, podcasts, videos, and micro essays. We’ll also hear directly from successful authors who can answer questions about every stage of the writing and publication process, from finding inspiration to landing a book deal. Students should be prepared to participate in writing workshops, and to submit at least one original creative nonfiction piece to a publication outlet of their choice (ideally one that pays).

Section: 002 #4120
Instructor: C. Macon Fleischer
3.0 credit hours  Seminar
W 7:00–9:30 PM LSC

ENGL 327    Studies in Shakespeare

Section: 001 #3762
Instructor: V. Strain
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 2:30–3:45 PM LSC

Discussing Shakespeare in the Democratic Classroom

This introduction to Shakespeare’s plays takes seriously the central role of discussion in the literature classroom. Education theorists have long connected classroom discussion with the goals of democracy, and they are now increasingly linking discussion to the goals of social justice. By learning the techniques of open-ended and transformative discussion in the classroom, students develop a greater capacity to shape social and political conditions in which all individuals can thrive. This course begins by introducing students to the language culture of the sixteenth century and its understanding of the personal, social, and political potential of speech. From there, we move on to the history of critical discussion in higher education and I provide strategies for effective preparation, participation, and reflection. We then dive into Shakespeare’s plays, approaching each play from four directions: language features, cultural and literary contexts, performance history, and critical interpretations. A fifth topic, reflection, guides post-discussion reflection and suggests ways to transform classroom discoveries into reading practices, written and creative assignments, and real-world action. The approach offered in this course will help students recover the historical importance of Shakespeare’s works while giving those works a new contemporary significance.

ENGL 328   Studies in Renaissance Literature

Section: 001 #5016
Instructor: J. Knapp
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF  10:25–11:15 AM LSC

This course will focus on the relationship between literature and science in the English Renaissance. This period witnessed the emergence of modern science after a medieval period in which knowledge was concentrated in the church and dominated by a scholastic tradition that emphasized textual authorities over empirical observation. What the poet John Donne called the “new science” would eventually usher in an Age of Reason as precursor to the Enlightenment. We will examine how the emergence of modern scientific methods of observation and experimentation made their way into the early modern imagination of writers including Donne, Ben Jonson, Margaret Cavendish, Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell. There will be exams, projects, and short papers.

ENGL 338   Studies in the Romantic Period

Section: 001 #4943
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR  10:00–11:15 AM LSC

Romanticism and the Hazards of Romance

The term “Romantic” was coined to describe the unprecedented demand in England, from about 1780 to 1830, for literary romance: stories of elsewheres and once-upon-a-times, packed with damsels and distress, banditti and crumbled castles, bloody ghosts and the spice of “Oriental” palaces. We’ll take the pleasures of romance—its promise of imaginative, national, and historical displacements—as our subject: we’ll tour the Mediterranean gloom of Ann Radcliffe’s seminal gothic novels (along with Jane Austen’s heroines, who devour them), meet the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” heroes of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold and his “Eastern Tales,” savor Byron’s haplessly naughty (and riotously funny) Don Juan, and ponder the femmes, fatales and sometimes just fated, of John Keats’s Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Isabella. But we’ll also be interested in the ways romance interrogated the modernity it escaped, as it becomes a privileged form for treating public and private violence; the pressures of sexual, gendered, ethnic and racial difference; the possibilities for religious belief in a disenchanted world; and the materiality of reading, writing, and publishing its fantasies. As we’ll see, the lure of romance may be its thrill of hazard: who, after all, wouldn’t want to read Percy Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance, after its first reviewer diagnosed it as "one of the most savage and improbable demons that ever issued from a diseased brain"? Infuriatingly broken by COVID in Spring ’20, returning with enchanted determination to charm the Year 2022! Exams, papers, substantial readings in murderous monks, dark necromancy, and queer camp. Satisfies the English major’s literature from 1700-1900 or before 1900 requirements, as well as other needs unspeakable, unknown, and overwhelmingly urgent.

ENGL 343  Victorian Period Studies

Section: 001 #3082
Instructor: P. Jacob
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR  11:30 AM–12:45 PM LSC

The Novel and Its Secrets

The novel is a house of secrets. Blackmail plots, illicit love affairs, hidden identities, and the violent deeds of empire lurk in its pages, waiting to be deployed. In this course we will peek into the guilty heart of the nineteenth century, discussing how Victorian literature grapples with the evils of imperialism, the effects of urbanization on class society, the legal realities of marriage and accompanying fear of bigamy, and the evolution of a modern concept of privacy. We will read detective, sensation, and Gothic fiction built around the unfolding of mysteries, as well as a traditionally realist novel in which secrets continue to play a pivotal role. Indeed, this course treats the secret as the defining unit of the novel, the tinderbox from which narrative springs. Considering literary techniques like suspense and theoretical terms like opacity, we will explore how the novel draws the reader into its secrets—and how, sometimes, it keeps its secrets to itself. Texts will include Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Helen Oyeyemi “if a book is a locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think,” and Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

ENGL 355   Studies in Literary Criticism

Section: 001 #4942
Instructor: S. Bost
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR  10:00–11:15 AM LSC

The Politics of Theory

Literary Theory is often criticized for its specialized jargon and conceptual difficulty, but what assumptions underlie theoretical writing? In this course will compare “canonical” theoretical essays with works of theory written in unexpected forms like poetry, graphic novels, memoirs, manifestos, performance, and even coloring books. As we focus on theory as a genre, we will analyze the various forms that deconstructive, feminist, queer, ecocritical, posthumanist, Marxist, and critical race theories might take. Required texts will include Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, Bechdel’s Fun Home, Rankine’s Citizen, Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing Me, and several essays posted on Sakai. Assignments will include regular in-class exercises, two exams, and a final paper.

ENGL 361   Modernist Poetry

Section: 001 #4944
Instructor: J. Stayer
3.0 credit hours Seminar
TR  1:00–2:15 PM LSC

This course will focus on British and American poets—men, women, queer, straight, and persons of color—associated with the first half (-ish) of the 20^th century: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas, Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Bishop. In considering these authors, we will give particular weight to issues of poetic form: how the constraints of meter, rhyme, line length and structure create meaning when those patterns are followed or broken. We will consider biographical and historical contexts, particularly the forces of modernity which put extraordinary pressure on poetic form. While earlier forms of poetry had always trafficked in the artificial, the 20^th-century’s proliferation of styles brought an unprecedented disjunction, making heavy demands of readers: compression of language, contortion of syntax, and absence of transitions were bewildering developments for those used to the staid satisfactions of Victorian and Edwardian styles. All of these changes at the turn of the century produced the general sense, as Eliot said, that poets “must be difficult.” From the perspective of a hundred years, and with more spectacular experiments of form still on the horizon, these poets no longer seem difficult so much as they are peculiarly and powerfully expressive.

Texts:

The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 6^th Ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. Norton, 2018.
Versification: A Short Introduction, by James McAuley. Michigan State UP, 1966.

ENGL 375   American Literature to 1865

Section: 001 #4123
Instructor: F. Staidum
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MWF  1:40–2:30 PM LSC

The Literary Geographies of Race

This course is a study of selected works of early American literature against the backdrop of changing ideas about race and geography from the early 1600s to 1865. As modern-day political conflicts and natural disasters raise crucial questions about immigration, gentrification, displacement, environmental racism, and de facto segregation (i.e., who belongs where?), it is of the utmost importance to understand the ways race have historically influenced our understandings of space, place, and geography. In North America, these contestations over who belongs where have raged since the seventeenth century.

We will use the literary methods of geocriticism and critical race theory to study (1) how places, locations, and territories were represented as black, white, Indian, and Other within early American literature and (2) the political, social, moral, and cultural values attributed to those racialized spaces. We will explore several literary spaces, including the frontier, the river, the plantation, the factory, and the home. Beyond simply identifying settings, we will be attentive to the representation and manipulation of scale, movement, proximity, borders and boundaries, and property.

Authors may include Black Hawk, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Catharine Maria Sedgwic

ENGL 390   Advanced Seminar

Section: 01W #4947
Instructor: P. Caughie
3.0 credit hours Seminar
MW  4:15–5:30 PM LSC

“The twentieth century is often called ‘the century of sex’” (Dagmar Herzog). In the early decades, the birth control movement, the suffrage movement, increasing advocacy for homosexuals, and the new science of sexology all contributed to this moniker. Sex became more and more central to identity and to scientific research. The modernist era (c. 1890-1940) witnessed tremendous change in concepts of sexual and gender identity. Psychoanalysts, sexologists, and endocrinologists were challenging the sacrosanct nineteenth-century belief in sexual dimorphism. Anthropologists were disclosing the tradition of the “man-woman” (men dressing and living as women) in various cultures. The “new woman” was cutting her hair, wearing pants, smoking in public, and riding the subway, arousing anxiety about "masculine women and feminine men," the title of a 1926 popular American song. In Germany in the 1920s endocrinologists and sexologists connected to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin were preparing for the first gender-affirmation surgeries, or as they were then called, genital transformation surgery (Genitalumwandlung). In Copenhagen in 1928 Hirschfeld, British sexologist Havelock Ellis, and Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel founded the World League for Sexual Reform. Add to these events numerous literary examples of transgender, works such as Sherwood Anderson's “The Man Who Became a Woman” and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), and Djuana Barnes's Nightwood (1936), and is it any wonder that Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929, “No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own”?

This is the historical context for our course on Queer Modernity. We will read primary works, fiction and nonfiction, from the early 1900s through the 1930s, along with scholarship in modernist and queer studies. Readings include works by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld; the life narrative of Lili Elbe; novels by Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, and Christopher Isherwood; and scholarship by historians Robert Beachy and Alison Oram, and literary scholars Tim Armstrong and Heather Love (among others). Students will give one oral presentation with a written component and produce a final research project to be tailored to the student’s interests. Regular attendance and frequent participation are expected as well.

Section: 02W #4948
Instructor: M. Werner
3.0 credit hours Seminar
TR  4:15–5:30 PM LSC

Looking at Emily Dickinson: Studies in The Modern Manuscript

This course will introduce students to the coordinates of the modern manuscript through an especially compelling example: the writings of Emily Dickinson. We will begin in the archive, drawing the objects of our study from that source even as we wonder about the archive as a system of power and about the openings and limits, the pleasures and sufferings of archival work. We will then gaze at the faces of the manuscripts before us, learning to distinguish among Dickinson’s different composing and copying hands, the states (drafts, fair copies, etc.) of her poems and other writings, the interplay of linguistic and iconic codes in her works-on-paper, and the bewildering array of genres represented in her oeuvre. We will encounter the “great problematics” of manuscript study—What is a “private” MS? What is a “public” MS? What is the interpretive significance of textual variants, cancelations, marks of time, and other noise in the MS? What does it mean for a MS to survive beyond its author and its author’s time? To whom does the MS belong?—and examine the ways in which scholars have approached these “beautiful cruxes.” In addition to applying our knowledge as literary and cultural historians to a reading of Dickinson’s work, we will turn into philologists, following the histories and longings of key words in her lexicon. And, at last, we will engage in poesis, that is, we will make things out of what Dickinson has left us, out of what has survived across centuries, contributing new transcriptions of Dickinson’s writings, new collations of the phenomena we find in them (textual variants, cancel marks, etc.), new forms of the old concordance, new exhibits/installations, editions and (un)editions of her writings for our time… The goals of the seminar are simple and radical: to be able to see Dickinson’s manuscripts (and, by extension, modern manuscripts) as physical artifacts laden with numerous clues about the people and culture(s) that made them; and to find ways of telling new stories about these artifacts and their meaning for us in the midst of the Anthropocene.

ENGL 392   Advanced Creative Nonfiction

Section: 01W #4949
Instructor: H. Axelrod
3.0 credit hours Seminar
R  2:30–5:00 PM LSC

In this advanced workshop in creative nonfiction, we’ll develop a keen sense of craft by reading each other’s work and the work of some of the finest writers in the genre, including Joan Didion, Vladimir Nabokov, Maggie Nelson, Eula Biss, Olivia Laing, and Leslie Jamison. We’ll pay particular attention to questions of voice, narrative distance, narrative immediacy, personal research, hybrids, concept essays, dialogue, and story. We’ll also have Skype visits from established authors working in the field, who will be willing to answer your questions about everything from writing habits to publishing. Through writing, reading, and workshopping, we’ll work to build a common vocabulary and orientation in the genre, and you’ll also be working to develop your own individual orientation, so that you become more comfortable and innovative as a writer.

ENGL 393   Teaching English to Adults

Section: 01E #1353
Instructor: J. Heckman
1.0-3.0 credit hours Field Studies
TBA

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 adults in written and spoken English at the Loyola Community Literacy Center. We were located in Loyola Hall, 1110 W. Loyola Avenue, but we have been tutoring online since Fall 2020. In Spring 2022, we will judge whether it will be safe for us to resume tutoring in person on campus but will likely continue online as well.

While the Literacy Center offers community adults an opportunity to improve their skills, it also gives student-tutors the chance to serve their community and to engage with their Jesuit education.

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

The Center is open online for tutoring M-Th evenings during the fall and spring semesters from 7-9:30 pm 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 5:45 pm, just before tutoring hours; 3 credit/Core students meet for a 6^th 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.

ENGL 394   Internship

Section: 01E #1355
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours Lecture

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.

ENGL 398   Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction

Section: 01W #1357
Instructor: H. Axelrod
3.0 credit hours Seminar
W 4:15–6:45 PM LSC

The unspoken generates compelling and memorable fiction—narrators who can’t find the words to do justice to their own experience; characters who can’t share their thoughts or feelings with each other; writers who have no other way to animate and play out their ideas. We’ll read such stories and novels in this course to improve our own fiction writing. We’ll focus on craft elements such as narrative voice, detail, dialogue, detail withheld, time, structure, and character. We’ll read work by Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Ian McEwan, and Marilynn Robinson.

Students will write three original short stories, and will learn how to critique each other’s stories in class as part of a supportive workshop environment. Class participation is emphasized. Fulfills a Core Expressive Arts Requirement.

ENGL 399   Special Studies in Literature

Section: 001 #3487
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours Supervision
TBA

Loyola University Chicago

Spring 2022 Courses

UCRL 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 282B African-American Literature

ENGL 283 Women in Literature

ENGL 288 Nature in Literature

ENGL 290 Human Values in Literature

ENGL 293 Advanced Composition

ENGL 303 Grammar: Principles and Pedagogy

ENGL 313 Border Literatures

ENGL 315C South Asian Literature Post-1900

ENGL 317 The Writing of Poetry

ENGL 318 The Writing of Fiction

ENGL 319 Writing Creative Nonfiction

ENGL 327 Studies in Shakespeare

ENGL 328 Studies in Renaissance Literature

ENGL 338 Studies in the Romantic Period

ENGL 343 Victorian Period Studies

ENGL 355 Studies in Literary Criticism

ENGL 361 Modernist Poetry

ENGL 375 American Literature to 1865

ENGL 390 Advanced Seminar

ENGL 392 Advanced Creative Nonfiction

ENGL 393 Teaching English to Adults

ENGL 394 Internship

ENGL 398 Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction

ENGL 399 Special Studies in Literature