Courses

Course Description

What do professional writers do? More than you probably realize. We research communication situations and even test documents. That testing part can be lots of fun! We evaluate communication for different situations, and we offer feedback. We write in a particular style, write and design in an iterative process, and often work collaboratively. This course will introduce you to these practices and how professional writers use words—written and oral—and visuals to create knowledge for professional purposes. We’ll also look at a wide range of career opportunities.

Requirements

You will complete short writing/editing and analysis projects appropriate for professional settings. You will design and conduct a usability test. The course will have an exam.

Readings

TBD

Course Description

Literary analysis isn't dead, but living all around us in video essays, explorations of "lore," and reviews and criticism. This course focuses on games, interactive fiction, and other playful media to introduce methods of literary research and genres of writing about literature and culture. 

"The New Game Journalism" (a term coined by Kieron Gillen) is now over twenty years old, and literary and cultural analysis of games in the academy is still older. "Are games art?" is seemingly in constant debate, even with generations of scholars taking the idea seriously. Debates around the nature of games have not only shaped popular discussions about art but also have had widespread impact on the wider political and cultural landscape. As games, their makers, and players continue to innovate, there's few better places to see the work of literary analysis and criticism actively shaping media in real time.

Together we'll explore the history of game journalism, the academic field of game studies, literary games and interactive fiction as ways into discussing the larger field of literary studies, especially modern criticism and reviewing for the public. Class guests will include a variety of working critics in and out of the academy, game writers and designers, and those who use games in the creation of other forms of art. The course will also include out-of-class and in-class play from Dr. Friedman's library of games, with required play session reports and reviews. Students will also be responsible for weekly reflections and scaffolded assignments leading to a final work of games writing and analysis of their devising.

Course Description

This class is designed to (1) introduce you to some of the most significant critical movements within the vast field of literary theory; (2) to investigate some of the essential concepts that we find across these movements; (3) to learn how to apply critical theory to specific literary interpretation; and (4) to consider the various cultural assumptions and consequences of the theoretical essays we read. Theory helps us illuminate in new and fascinating ways on essential questions in literary study, such as, What exactly are we doing when we interpret texts? How do concepts like “ideology” and “subjectivity” (commonly used words that take on a specialized meaning within literary theory that we’ll examine) help shed light on the texts we analyze? What are the stakes involved in using a specific form of critical theory in textual analysis, ie., what kinds of issues and questions can we raise if we read in terms of feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, postmodernism (just some of the methods we’ll emphasize this semester)? These are some of the questions we’ll explore as we learn how to translate critical theory into literary criticism. The relation between these terms is, in one sense, the relation between theory and practice, but much of what we call theory is really a philosophy of culture that has influenced the development of different varieties of literary criticism. In other words, you can think of this course as offering examples of theory that have as much to do with interpreting culture as interpreting literature. In regards to interpreting literature, we will focus on three texts to which we’ll apply the theory--William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Angela Carter’s postmodern novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.

Requirements

Two 5-page essays applying theoretical concepts and/or methodologies to Shakespeare and Conrad (each essay worth 20%), a series of five 1-2 reader responses to specific theoretical essays (20%), final exam (20%), and class participation (20%).

Readings

Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Vincent B. Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism Third Edition; Jeffrey Nealon-Susan Searls Giroux, The Theory Toolbox Second Edition; William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Course Description

This class will study the art of the short story. Class periods will focus on the building blocks of the short story--beginnings, character, voice, point of view, structure, time, plot, conflict, endings, setting, and dialogue. We’ll learn about these topics from reading, discussing, and critiquing professionally published literary fiction, essays on writing by established writers, and student work. Then we’ll apply these writing lessons in our own work, moving through the process of drafting, re-thinking, and revising two stories.

Requirements

Requirements include the following:

• participation in workshops
• responses to assigned reading
• short craft-building and revision exercises
• drafts of two stories (7-15 pages each)
• a portfolio of revised work to include at least two short stories (7-25 pages each)

Readings

We will read story selections from The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction; supplementary stories by James Baldwin, Jennifer Jordan, Ursula LeGuin, and John Edgar Wideman; and craft essays from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me.

Course Description

This course will introduce students to the craft of poetry. Students will compose and revise their own poetry and participate in writing workshops to examine and critically engage with the work of their classmates. In addition to workshop, students can expect course meetings to consist of generative assignments and analysis of contemporary poetry, including discussion of craft elements and poetic techniques. The course culminates in a final portfolio of revised poetry alongside an analysis of student’s creative work from throughout the semester.

Course Description

This course will introduce students to the basic elements of creative nonfiction. Students will read a range of published essays that may include the personal essay, the lyric essay, the humor essay, the braided essay, the character portrait, science writing, and more in order to understand the scope and elements of the craft. They will write two essays which will experiment with at least two different forms, using the published works for inspiration, with a focus on a memoir-forward essay as well as an essay with a subject that transcends the self. We will discuss point of view, research, the blurry lines between fact and fiction, and how elements of craft from fiction writing, such as character, plot, and setting, can be used to tell a true story. Students can expect to participate in writing workshops and to have thoughtful discussions of published works throughout the course.   

Course Description

Too often, we treat dialogue as a secondary concern to other craft elements such as character, story structure, setting, descriptive writing, and narration. In this course, we will put the study and practice of effective dialogue writing front and center. Students will read fiction and creative nonfiction by authors notable for their skill in imagining and capturing human speech in writing (authors might include Charles Chesnutt, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Henry Green, Joan Didion, and Richard Price, among others). Students will also read contemporary teleplays and watch corresponding television episodes to gain a deeper understanding of how popular episodic TV (widely considered a “writers’ medium” compared with the “directors’ medium” of feature-length film) is grounded in expertly crafted dialogue (shows might include White Lotus, Succession, Task, and Righteous Gemstones, among others). Students will write and submit for peer review feedback exercises in fiction and creative nonfiction that require them to write extensive dialogue. The course will culminate in a longer final project in the student’s chosen genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, or teleplay/screenplay).

Course Description

What does it mean to yearn for intimacy in a world governed by its illusion? Where we are inundated with a perpetual sense of closeness that inevitably leads us feeling disconnected, isolated, and lonely. This course will explore the concept of intimacy in its varied iterations writher they be racial or sexual, public or private, and grounded in its expected manifestations and institutions like the family, partnership and marriage, friendships, and even its absence. We will pose questions and pursue analyses that help us to understand intimacies importance, its historical trajectory, and ultimately why our current socio and political moment thrives on its ruptures. This course will explore the literary through the novels of Brandon Taylor, Gloria Naylor, and Tara M. Stringfellow, films like Waiting to Exhale and Moonlight, and genres that insist on its intimacies like the Black anthology. The course assignment will consist of reflective discussion board posts, short papers, and a final presentation.

Course Description

Writing, particularly when it happens in the public eye, has always been shaped by the way it’s presented—where it is, how it’s made, how it moves. In this course, we will examine the ways that writing has been understood through how it’s presented, looking particularly at the technologies that shape the way we make texts as well as the how we expect to access and understand information. We will use rhetorical theory and a historical approach to think about how media consumption shapes when, how, and why we read and write. We’ll produce writing that analyzes writing in specific moments, as well as create compositions that speak to this moment and moves us into the next. Keeping media literacy at the forefront of our discussion, we’ll think through why media matters and how we use it both to consume and to influence the way we compose.

Course Description

For those of us whose work and studies revolve around writing and language, AI—or at least the hype around it—can feel overwhelming. But what is AI, really, and what does it mean for writing? What are the limits of this technology? How might it change the future of work, or writing itself? Is it possible to use these tools in an ethical way? In this class, we’ll explore these questions and many more as we examine the political, ethical, and pedagogical implications of AI writing technologies.

In this class, you can expect to:

• Read about and participate in key debates and discussions around AI writing technologies, including their impacts on language, teaching, intellectual property, labor and work, the environment, and more. 
• Critically experiment with and assess the merits and drawbacks of a variety of AI writing technologies.
• Research and locate appropriate sources to help you compose arguments for a variety of audiences and genres.
• Revise and edit your work in response to feedback. 
• Reflect on your own writing practices, including how, if, when, and why you might use AI tools.

Course Description

What is digital rhetoric? How does classical and contemporary rhetorical theory help us understand writing in digital environments? And how does our understanding of rhetoric change in response to digital writing technologies like smart phones, Snapchat, and TikTok? In this course, Digital Rhetorics, we will explore these questions—and many more—by examining the rhetorical, social, cultural, political, educational, and ethical dimensions of digital texts and technologies. We will unpack the history of various digital writing technologies in order to analyze contemporary digital communication practices, and we will work to understand what it means to study and enact digital rhetoric. To that end, we will read scholarship that addresses these questions and attempt to answer them ourselves through writing, discussing, and practicing digital rhetorics in a variety of spaces and genres. Our work will prepare you to articulate how digital technologies shape your own identity/ies, how digital spaces and practices function rhetorically, how definitions of rhetoric change alongside technologies, and how to become a more effective and ethical digital writer.

This semester, you can expect to:

• Analyze various digital texts and technologies
• Learn about and enact key rhetorical theories and concepts
• Read and respond to popular and academic texts that help you better understand the central issues surrounding digital rhetoric
• Participate in discussions about the relationships between writing, rhetoric, technology, and culture
• Compose text-based and digital texts for specific audiences and purposes
• Research and locate appropriate sources and assets to help you compose your own arguments
• Revise and edit your work in response to feedback

Course Description

How can our language be arranged in utterly unique ways? What phrases are so beautiful they bear repeating as refrains? Syntax, diction, musicality, and form are a few of the elements of craft we will consider in this poetry writing course. We will become better poets by studying published poems with aspects we wish to emulate as well as by identifying your distinct style. Our readings will come from books by poets who will visit our class in-person—from their debuts and from their newest collections. We will consider signatures of their styles that appear throughout  their work along with the fresh poetic ground they break as their careers progress. Workshops of your original poems will discuss strengths in your drafts to keep and what to approach differently in revision. Be prepared to participate in evening literary events and conversation, read widely and closely,  and write innovatively and with discipline.

Readings

Cecily Parks, Nicole Sealey, Melissa Range, and Danusha Lameris are the poets with whom we will be in conversation.

Course Description

This course is for students who have learned the basics of creative nonfiction—and who are excited to continue to hone their craft. Students will be expected to produce two to three essays, with a choice of a variety of essay forms that includes the personal essay, the lyric essay, the humor essay, and more, and will be asked to substantially revise one of the essays. They will also work on creating essays that are thematically linked, which could theoretically appear in an essay collection together. We will discuss the elements of craft and read essays that reflect a variety of styles and subjects, with an emphasis on the autobiographical or personal essay, the blurry lines between fact and fiction, and a discussion of how our real-life experiences can be shaped into a meaningful narrative.

Students will read a range of published essays and will use them as inspiration for their own work. They can expect to participate in writing workshops and hearty discussions of published works.  

Course Description

Letter writing was a popular activity in Renaissance England and functioned not only a primary method to convey information at long distances, but also as a way to develop intellectual and emotional bonds, influence political matters, jeopardize or insure someone’s safety, and more. Letters were copied, forged, intercepted, stolen, burned, torn, and lovingly preserved in special cabinets. They were personified as parts of their authors’ bodies and souls and sent on their journeys accompanied by intense doubts about and hopes for their safe arrival and desired effect.

In this course, we’ll study extant Renaissance letters in various forms (written not only with pen and ink, but also with needle and thread, with paint on canvas, with precious metals and gems). We will examine manuscripts in our library’s Special Collections and learn about the tools and materials used for letter-writing in the period. We will learn some methods of ensuring the integrity of letters (such as letterlocking and using seals), make our own ink, and practice writing with quills. We will also study letters as a literary device, using our knowledge about the epistolary culture to gain a richer understanding of the meanings inscribed onto letters in Renaissance literature. As always in my classes, students’ individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

Requirements

Lively participation, weekly journal entries, 5–7-page essay, research project, creative project.

Readings

Tentative readings: Shakespeare’s Hamlet; broadside ballads; and works from writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, Queen Elizabeth I, Isabella Whitney, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, George Gascoigne, and Margaret Cavendish.

Course Description

This advanced undergraduate course explores the rich and diverse landscape of American literature from its colonial beginnings to the 19^th century. Students will engage with a wide range of genres—including sermons, poetry, autobiographies, captivity narratives, essays, and fiction—written by authors who shaped the cultural and intellectual foundations of the United States.

We will examine how early American writers grappled with questions of immigration, settlement, nationhood, religion, civil rights, and the natural world. Readings will include works by major figures such as Anne Bradstreet, William Bradford, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, alongside lesser-known voices that reflect the pluralism of early American experience.

Through close reading, discussion of primary texts and scholarly works, and analytical writing, students will develop a deeper understanding of how literature both reflected and influenced the historical contexts of colonization, revolution, slavery, and reform. Special attention will be paid to the evolution of literary forms and the emergence of distinctively American voices in the decades after the American Revolution.

Requirements

Course requirements include active participation, writing exercises, midterm and final exams, and a final research project.

Course Description

Charles Dickens and George Eliot (the penname of Mary Ann Evans) are widely regarded as the two most accomplished and influential British novelists of the nineteenth century.  And in the past several decades, Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53) and Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) have emerged as most critics’ favorites for the signature works of long fiction produced by each author and perhaps the two most important, innovative novels of the entire Victorian period. In this course, we will pit these two literary heavyweights against each other, interweaving our reading and analysis of both novels over the extent of the semester. At the end of the course, the class will debate and vote on which book deserves the title of Greatest Victorian Novel, after additional input from guest speakers with wide expertise in the study of Victorian fiction. To get us started, the course also features a warm-up bout between A Christmas Carol (1843) and Silas Marner (1861) for the title of Greatest Victorian Novella. Our primary goal, however, will be less to evaluate these works than to understand what each has to teach us about the development of the novel form in the nineteenth century and what distinguishes each author’s approach to characterization, plotting, and other aesthetic features. As we will also discover, these authors and works offer valuable insight into the larger social questions that consumed Victorian fiction and continue to speak to readers today, including questions of gender, class, community, work and professional choices, politics, religion, health, and the environment. We will examine what readers and critics have had to say about these novels in their own time and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, providing further insight into the historical development and understanding of the novel as a form. To help cultivate research interests and approaches, students will also examine first-edition books and other literary artifacts held by the Special Collections department of the RBD Library along with the library’s online George Eliot Archive. By the end of the course, students will have developed a strong understanding not just of Dickens and Eliot, but of nineteenth-century British fiction overall in its wider literary, social, and cultural contexts. 

Requirements

research essay, short in-class and online writing assignments, reading quizzes, midterm exam, final exam, creative group presentation.

Course Description

This class will consider the many ways that twentieth- and twenty-first century American drama relates to U.S. history. We will begin the class by analyzing the role of performance during the Cold War, reading accounts of the Porgy and Bess tour sent to the U.S.S.R. by the State Department. You will research another example of performance as cultural diplomacy and present your findings in small groups at the Gogue Performing Arts Center. The next unit of the course considers plays of the early 1990s as they use techniques of fantasy and realism to represent the complexities of history onstage. Finally, we will read two plays from the 2019 Broadway season as reflections on the contemporary American political landscape. Throughout the semester, we will consider how personal and political history intersect on the American stage.

As part of our class, we will learn how to use a research management software program called Zotero, using it as a tool to engage in scholarly research that will provide historical context for our reading and discussion. We will also use this research as the background for a dramaturgical writing project that imagines a potential production and provides context for that audience. Since plays are often not available in recorded form between revivals, we will also practice finding and analyzing traces of particular productions such as reviews, production photographs, and program notes.

Requirements

Anticipated Assignments:

• Small group research project for presentation at the Gogue Performing Arts Center
• Short writings providing historical context for each new reading
• Close reading of a monologue
• Dramaturgy packet providing background for an imagined production
• Creative response to one of the plays

Readings

Anticipated Readings:

• The Muses Are Heard, Truman Capote
• Angels in America Part I: Millenium Approaches, Tony Kushner
• Assassins, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman
• Twilight: Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith
• Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Will Arbery
• What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck

Course Description

In this course we’ll aim for a richly nuanced apprehension and a commensurately nuanced appreciation of William Faulkner and his work. Organized around a representative survey of his fiction, the course will take as its focus the implications of this inspiring, disturbing oeuvre upon what it means to be a young person alive in the New South and striding toward a wider world -- including all the pitfalls, pressures, and possibilities at play in that liminal subjective dynamism. Our Yoknapatawpha drive-by offers particular promise to future writers, filmmakers, musicians, actors, artists, activists, attorneys, and teachers committed in their professional practice to a critically astute engagement with a culture in social and political flux. As always, the professor will rely upon the informed generosity of his students to promote a spirit of enthusiastic collaborative inquiry.

Requirements

Requirements: daily reading quizzes, a midterm exam, a final exam, a final paper, and consistent in-class participation.  

Readings

Texts: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Course Description

This capstone seminar is designed specifically for literature-track English majors to serve as the culmination of your undergraduate career. The goal is to help you refine the skills that you have already been learning and practicing in your upper-level courses and to help you visualize how you can use those skills as a post-graduate (whether in the work force or in graduate school). The main project is a 20-page research essay, which you will work on in stages over the course of the semester. Much of our class time will be focused on cultivating the interpretive and methodological skills necessary for crafting an essay of this size. While the particular skills we spend time on will, of course, be determined by the interests and needs of those enrolled, some likely candidates include strategizing how to use library resources effectively, formulating a critical methodology, and managing the various stages of a substantive research project. Individual instruction, class discussion, a visit to Special Collections, and group workshops will help guide you in developing your research and your scholarly voice.

In terms of a reading schedule, our primary materials will consist of a selection of poems spanning several historical periods and featuring both canonical and lesser-known authors. Alongside these primary texts, we will be engaging with a range of style manuals, online resources, and professionalization materials to explore what academic writing is, how to assemble a compelling research project, and what role literary scholarship plays in our current cultural moment.

Prerequisite: the successful completion of ENGL 3130: Survey of Critical Theory

Requirements

attendance and well-prepared participation, a seminar paper (20 pages), one presentation, and a final ePortfolio

Course Description

This course is designed for majors in Professional and Public Writing (PPW) to reflect and expand
on the work they have done up to this point. As we read, discuss, and write, we will develop a more
robust understanding not just of PPW as a discipline, but also of our own relationship with it: where
we situate ourselves within the field; what we’ve learned; and how that work might translate to other
rhetorical contexts, professional, academic, public, or otherwise.

In this specific section of 4810, we will ground this work in a close examination of core curricular
and extracurricular documents that have shaped, or will shape, our place in the field. Our entry into
this work will be “genre,” or more specifically, rhetorical genre studies.

Since Carolyn Miller’s groundbreaking article “Genre as Social Action,” scholars of writing have
attempted to build on a notion of genre not as a static set of textual conventions, but rather as
“typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.” That is to say, increasingly scholars and
teachers of writing have become more interested in what a genre does as opposed to what it is. In this
course, we will begin by describing, discussing, and debating this turn towards a rhetorical
understanding of genre. Once we have developed this vocabulary, we will turn our attention to
genres we have encountered in PPW. We will ask: Who/What/When/Where/Why is a discipline?
How do individuals in the field use genres to produce, mediate, and challenge disciplinary
knowledge and identity? What are their limitations? What assumptions are embedded in disciplinary
genres?

To get at these questions, students can expect to: produce consistent short writing assignments;
compose major genre papers; compile and present a multimodal portfolio of disciplinary work; and
contribute to a course soundtrack.

Course Description

The Capstone is the culminating experience of a student’s time studying creative writing at Auburn University. Revision is the primary focus for creative work, as portfolios will be made up of substantially revised versions of stories/poems/essays that students have drafted in their earlier courses.  The Capstone will also work in tandem with Auburn’s Third Thursday Reading Series, as our assigned texts will be comprised of the poems, essays, and works of fiction published by our visiting writers.  Students will attend these events, as well as featuring as guest readers for the Series at the end of the semester.   Information on publishing, applying to graduate schools, and other next steps for writers and professionalization opportunities will also be included. 

Course Description

How is the Black child represented in early America? And why? This upper-level seminar introduces students to literature for and about African American children of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will engage “childhood” as a philosophical and practical framework for interpreting early African American literature. Though nineteenth-century African American literature and culture will be our focus, we will extend our analysis by reading twentieth-century works written for adult and young readers that imagine Black children’s lives before 1900. This course will investigate how the Black child emerges as a central character, metaphor, and problem for thought in early American literary and sociolegal culture, while also studying how Black children and adults represent their own youths. Authors studied in this course will likely include Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Frances E. W. Harper, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Faith Ringgold, Jacqueline Woodson, and Christopher Paul Curtis.

Course Description

This is an introductory study of the craft of creative writing. We will be working in the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Extensive writing experience is not a requirement. The emphasis of the course will be divided between the students’ own writing and the study of published works. Good readers make good writers, but this is not a literature class; the focus of our reading will be on the elements of craft, the techniques and strategies used by these more experienced authors. In addition, we will learn to critique peer work with a particular focus on supporting the execution of the writer’s intention and discovering what is “right” about a piece as a means to understand what is lacking.

Course Description

The aims of ENGL 2010 are to introduce students to the rhetorical principles, professional practices, and research skills they will need to write professionally in a variety of industries, fields, and contexts.

Students enrolled in English 2010 will:

• Deepen their knowledge of professional writing in the workplace and society;
• Broaden their knowledge of writing technologies, cultures, and practices;
• Develop a writing style and tone appropriate to post-graduate (i.e., professional & public) audiences & contexts;

• Gain experience producing and editing examples of business, technical, and public-facing writing.

Requirements

Assignments include document analyses, usability report, design projects, and a Wikipedia article.

Readings

TBD

Course Description

Despite variations in genre, setting, and style, popular literature tells us more than just which books are popular right now. Popular literature is a tool through which we can draw inferences about our contemporary society, what we value, desire, or yearn for, as well as our titillating fears. With that in mind, this course, centering around Black Popular Literature, will critically engage works by and about Black folks published within the last few years and which also happen to be book club selections (from Oprah’s book club to Reece Witherspoon’s, Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List, as well as pop star Dua Lipa’s reading group Service95). Collectively we will ask what books like Erin Crosby Eckstine’s Junie (2025), Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants (2024), and Nana Kwama Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All Stars (2023), among other, have in common and what do they tell us about the state of the world and our collective socio, political, and cultural investments?

Course Description

This class will explore the basics of three genres of creative writing: poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. In addition to creating our own work in each of these genres, we will learn to read as writers by engaging with contemporary writers of each form and basing our discussions around the craft and method that these writers employ. Students will also engage in workshops and learn about proper ethics of the workshop environment. This class should help those who are interested in continuing their creative writing studies to have a better sense of which genre they are interested in, while also allowing students who are interested in exploring creative writing for the first time a good foundation from which to explore.

Course Description

This course is a beginner creative writing workshop which introduces students to the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Students will create original pieces in these genres and will receive class feedback for their work. No previous creative writing experience is required. In addition to the reading required for workshops, mentor texts will be read and analyzed, as well as readings about specific elements of craft. This class is about foundation and exploration. Students taking this class will explore their creative writing interests and will build a strong foundation based on technique.

Course Description

This is an introductory study of the craft of creative writing. We will be working in the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Extensive writing experience is not a requirement. The emphasis of the course will be divided between the students’ own writing and the study of published works. Good readers make good writers, but this is not a literature class; the focus of our reading will be on the elements of craft, the techniques and strategies used by these more experienced authors. In addition, we will learn to critique peer work with a particular focus on supporting the execution of the writer’s intention and discovering what is “right” about a piece as means to understand what is lacking.

Course Description

This course is an introductory creative writing workshop that encompasses the composition of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students will study work by established authors, experiment with new techniques and practices, and participate in the workshop model. This course will introduce students to workshop expectations, behavior, and how to be a supportive and active member of a creative community.

Course Description

This course serves as the gateway course to the Professional and Public Writing track in English. We’ll study what do professional and public writers do and how and why they do it. For starters, we research discourse communities and communication situations. We evaluate communication for different contexts, and we offer insight. We adopt and adapt writing styles that fit audience and organization needs. We write and design iteratively, often working collaboratively. And we even test documents, which can be quite fun. This course will introduce you to these practices and how professional and public writers use words—written and oral—and visuals to create knowledge, advocate for the people using our work, and promote action. 

Course Description

How do different professions write? Where do these writing expectations come from? Why do they
exist? How do we learn to produce writing in professional contexts? How can we write more
effectively? How do we study professional writing?

As the gateway course to the Public and Professional Writing (PPW) track within the English major, ENGL2010 seeks to answer these and other questions through a sustained study and practice of
professional writing. Together, we will discuss different rhetorical principles, professional practices,
and research skills that will support and inform your work within PPW and beyond. To do so,
students will direct their own learning on communities and organizations of personal, academic, and
professional interest. Through a series of projects, we will apply key concepts in professional writing
and rhetoric as we research and produce a variety of documents that circulate within your
professional organizations. Students will leave with an increased knowledge of the reasons for
specific professional writing and strategies for producing texts more effectively.

At the end of the semester, each student will produce a final ePortfolio that will include practical
documents that showcase your emerging identities and skills as a professional writer.

Course Description

Introduction to Literary Study offers English majors a gateway to practices and concepts in the study of literature.  What are the important historic literary trends and periods? How can we address the wide range of stylistic choices made by important writers in various periods?  How do we differentiate and evaluate various literary categories: poetry, essay, autobiography, short fiction, novels, religious writing, and dramatic works?  How do we decide what counts as “Literature” and measure the artistic and cultural value of writing?   What have been the most influential theories informing our study of literature? What is literary research and how is it produced? How do we use research to advance our own writing projects and scholarly voice? 

This course will equip students with a set of tools for interpretation and techniques for writing effectively about literature that will serve them throughout the English major.

Requirements

in-class writing exercises, research project (~10 pp.), midterm and final examinations.

Course Description

ENGL 2020 is designed as a gateway course for those who are or wish to be literature majors. It combines training in research with the cultivation of clear and effective academic writing in order to prepare students for upper-division (3000 and 4000 level) literature courses. Thus, instead of focusing on a particular historical period or genre, you will engage with a variety of textual forms in order to acquire a set of research-related skills that will benefit you in any future scholarly venture; some of these skills include how to formulate an effective argument about a text, how to develop appropriate goals or strategies for research, and how to manage the different stages of the writing process. Along the way, we will also explore what it means to be a good literary critic and how we can fashion our own scholarly personas or identities to be not just valuable for others but also deeply rewarding for ourselves. So many of us choose to be literature majors because we love reading. Yet, the study of literature as an academic discipline requires a kind of critical expression and analysis that reaches far beyond emotional response. During the course of the semester, we will explore what this means for our own work: How can we cultivate pleasurable reading experiences that enhance rather than distract from the rigors of conducting research or composing meaningful critiques? What exactly is literary research and how is it produced? How do we begin to answer questions that interest us about a text? How do we begin to locate a literary text in its various cultures and contexts? What is the relationship between reader and text? How do we effectively talk about a text – and our discoveries about it – in an academic environment? Together, we will explore these questions through a selection of shared readings from both poetry and prose.

Requirements

regular attendance and lively participation in class, a 10-page essay (written in stages over the course of the semester), a presentation, and an e-portfolio

Course Description

English 3060 aims to familiarize students with rhetorical principles and textual practices commonly associated with writing in the health professions. Informed by a combination of contemporary scholarship and best practices, the course will emphasize two major areas of instruction: for the first, students will research and develop strategies for navigating the breadth of writing activity in the field of health and medicine; for the second, they will conceptualize, design, and compose documents for different audiences and writing situations. Students can expect to develop proficiency in multiple genres, including personal statements, narrative reviews, structured reports, informational resources, perspective essays, and multimedia presentations. They will also have opportunities to collaborate with other students, share their writing with the class, and apply their learning to personal and professional interests. The course should be of interest to anyone pursuing careers in health-related fields as well as liberal arts majors who would like to develop their expertise in areas of medical and health communication.

Anyone who would like to learn more about the course is welcome to email the instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.  

Requirements

Reading assignments will draw on a course textbook and published scholarship on subjects relevant to the field of health and medicine. Writing assignments will be research-based, centering around genres that prepare students for writing in professional settings. The course will also involve periodic quizzes, discussion posts, and collaborative research and writing activities.

Course Description

Languages vary greatly across cultures and times, but language is fundamental to our humanity: it is implicitly present in every situation we find ourselves. Linguistics doesn't ignore the differences among languages, but its principal inquiry explores the nature of language in general, aiming to make explicit its characteristics, to establish techniques that enable us to analyze it, and to grasp the ways it enables and influences our understanding and experiencing of the world.  As such, its reach, questions, and methods are wide and diverse. This course surveys that enormous range, aiming to provide familiarity with the basic concepts of scientific linguistics, the key philosophical debates about language, and conversation analysis and other important extensions the field has produced. We’ll ask how words are structured and how they combine into sentences, how language means, and just what is the meaning of meaning anyway? We'll also explore animal language, talking computers, and translation, how and why languages mix, vary, and change, and what language can tell us about the brain and the mind. This course not only covers the basics methods and ideas of orthodox linguistics but also engages with the most exciting challenges to that orthodoxy.

Course Description

TBA

Course Description

This course will offer students a tour of one of the academic foundations of literary study: critical theory.  Unlike literary interpretation (arguments about specific texts), theory involves the methodologies and language on which those interpretations are based.  As such, it's often more akin to reading philosophy, and that, as we know, can sometimes be an intimidating prospect! 

The goal of this course, then, is to provide an introduction to theory in a manageable and (hopefully) sane way.  We will begin long before any of us ever cracked a book--with classical ideas about aesthetics--and move through representative samples of some of the major theoretical schools, such as formalism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, Marxism and post-colonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Our goal will be to read these samples as texts but also as the providers of ways of reading other texts.  (Indeed, how we read and why we read will be central questions of the course.)  Periodically, we'll train our theoretical lenses on imaginative works--mainly short stories, poetry, and film--in order to practice how theory can be utilized, modified, and reinvented, and how, ultimately, it can make us more ambitious readers ourselves.

Requirements

Likely assignments will include several short extension papers (c. 2 pages), a project (with literary and pedagogical options), a midterm and final exam, and active participation.

Course Description

This course is for students who have some writing experience while being eager to learn more about the dynamic and expansive world of fiction writing. We will read a mix of contemporary and classic short stories to explore elements of craft including plot, character, dialogue, and setting and will discuss how to build rich characters, worlds, and premises. Students will submit two short stories to workshop and will also work on short skill-building exercises along the way. Toward the end of the course, we will work on significantly revising your work for a final portfolio as well. Students will be encouraged not only to polish their work, but also to experiment with a variety of writing styles and genres on the never-ending journey to finding their voices.   

Course Description

This course blends creative practice with literary study, guiding students through the composition and revision of original work. Over the semester, students will draft six poems, participate in workshops, and refine their work through revision, all while engaging with contemporary American poetry. Classes alternate between discussions of poems from the textbook—examining their history and techniques—and workshops focused on constructive feedback. Students will keep a reading journal to reflect on assigned texts and their own creative processes. By the end of the course, students will have assembled a portfolio of revised poems and a personal anthology of works that influenced their writing.

Course Description

This class will serve as an introduction to the genre of literary nonfiction. We will cover both memoir (writing from your personal experience) and literary journalism (writing from reporting and research). We will consider various questions as we write, chief among them how we shape our personal experiences into stories, and what meaning we bring to bear on those stories. We will learn different modes of research—interviewing, observation, archival research—and how to synthesize all the material you gather into a cohesive essay. We will learn and use the technical elements of narrative writing: Scene versus summary, point-of-view, plot, dialogue, etc. The readings assigned for this class will include sports writing, personal essays, science writing, lyric essays, and other kinds of writing that fall under the vast umbrella of literary nonfiction.

Course Description

This multi-genre workshop will center on writing about music.  Our first unit will focus on writing about music that we dislike (and/or guilty pleasures), the second unit on music that we love, and the third unit will be a collage work of prose that incorporates the work of multiple artists.  For each unit, we will study essays, poems, and stories that fall under these broad categories, discussing each writer’s style and strategies, and looking to emulate this inside our own creative work.  End of the semester portfolios will consist of a substantially revised portfolio, and an ongoing critical component will also factor into student grades.

Course Description

For more than two centuries, gothic and horror stories have returned to a recurring figure: the gothic heroine. Whether wandering through a dark castle, confronting a haunted house, or uncovering buried family secrets, this character has become one of literature’s most enduring archetypes.

This course explores the construction and evolution of the gothic heroine from the origins of the genre to contemporary horror. Beginning with early gothic fiction and continuing through nineteenth-century classics, later reinterpretations of gothic traditions, and modern horror, we will examine how writers have reimagined, complicated, and transformed this archetype across time.

Readings

Readings will include works such as Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, gothic stories by Angela Carter, and contemporary novels including works like Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Hart’s Weyward, and Harrow’s Starling House, along with selected films such as Crimson Peak. Together, these works trace how the gothic heroine has been continually reinvented as writers use the archetype to explore changing ideas about women’s identity and agency.

Course Description

The Salem Witch Trials fascinate us. Perhaps the most famous miscarriage of justice in American history, they serve as a spooky reminder of how far superstition and religious fervor can go. We invoke the term “witch hunt” any time we think an ignorant mob is ganging up on a few individuals, anytime we think someone has been falsely accused. But we rarely bother to put ourselves in the Puritan mindset. Fortunately, the Puritans were excellent record keepers. In this course, we will try to understand how the Puritans conceived of witchcraft, how they dealt with it as a legal problem, and how things ever got so out of hand. We will discover that the Puritans were not as ignorant as we like to think. And we will be forced to ask ourselves some difficult questions about the evidence available to us in the historical record. How did political and economic tensions contribute to the witch hunt? How did the legal system break down? And, perhaps most importantly, is it just possible that we have misunderstood everything? That is to say, is it just possible that some of the accusations were at least partially true? As we try to answer these and other questions, we will read first-hand accounts of witchcraft from the Puritan era. We will also consult various histories of Puritan New England and the Salem Witch Trials. Finally, we will read the available transcripts of some of the court proceedings associated with the trials themselves. 

Requirements

There will be one major paper and several shorter writing assignments, in addition to occasional reading quizzes.

Course Description

At the end of the 2015 documentary Sneakerheadz, DJ Clark Kent is asked how he might define a
sneakerhead. “What is a sneakerhead?” he repeats. “I have no idea. I’m just a guy who likes sneakers
a little more enthusiastically than you.”
This course is about that enthusiasm for sneakers.
Specifically, this section of ENGL4010 is designed to introduce students to sneaker culture through
sustained study of its history, its cultural resonances, and its potential futures, all while attending to
its intersections with various topics in rhetoric and writing studies. Students will produce a variety of
individual and collaborative projects as we seek to unpack the place of sneakers within and beyond
the academy. Together, we will design multimodal projects that explore the value of sneakers as
cultural symbols of mobility and as commodities reflective of larger social and rhetorical trends.
Students will chart a trajectory of sneakers from counterculture to mainstream, while interrogating
their own relationship to fashion, rhetoric, culture, and materiality.

Course Description

Grammar? Punctuation? Sure, but there’s a whole lot more to technical editing. Come find out! You will, of course, learn the principles and practical applications of copymarking, print and electronic copyediting, and comprehensive editing. But you'll also learn how to be an advocate for the reader, manage projects, create in-house style guides, and work tactfully and effectively with authors. We'll work with a variety of technical writing pieces; these pieces may include professional writing from technology, business, and science, as well as texts intended for academic publication. We’ll cover the standard details you expect, but this course will take a broad approach to editing. NOTE: We’ll also break myths. For instance, you can split an infinitive and end a sentence or clause with a preposition! (E.g., "You’ll learn to effectively use references that editors rely on.”)

Course Description

The goal of English 4030 is to introduce students to the theory and practice of document design.  To accomplish this, the course will introduce design theories and design tools and teach students how to use these theories and tools to produce visually compelling and effective documents in a variety of print and online genres. 

Requirements

Assignments will include reading responses, rhetorical analyses, informational poster, and client-based design project  

Readings

TBD

Course Description

As digital spaces become more and more ubiquitous, they are also becoming increasingly important public sites, spaces where citizenship, identity, and meaning are created and negotiated. How, then, have digital writing technologies changed our understanding of publics, and, conversely, how might public sphere theory inform how we understand, use, and teach with digital writing technologies? How might we best define the contours of these digital publics? What does it mean to access and compose in such spaces, and what are the ethical implications of doing so? In this course, “Writing (in) Digital Publics,” we will engage with and contribute to these conversations as we explore and interrogate (sometimes competing) approaches to publics, digital spaces, and writing technologies. Together, we will endeavor to better understand how digital publics inform our work as writers, students, and citizens.

Course Description

This course will be an in-depth study of contemporary fiction. We will read and discuss work by published authors, focusing on craft elements such as point-of-view, character, and setting. We will discuss not just what a story does, but how it does it. You will write and workshop and revise your own short fiction, learning how to think critically about your creative work.

Course Description

This course is an in-depth study of the craft of poetry. Students will participate in writing workshops to examine and critically engage with the work of their classmates. In addition to workshop, students can expect course meetings to include generative assignments and analysis of contemporary poetry through discussion of craft elements and poetic techniques. The course will culminate in a final portfolio of revised poetry alongside an analysis of the student’s creative work from throughout the semester.

Course Description

This course aims to familiarize students with the intricacies of the genre, with a primary focus on work that falls under the broad label of Narrative Nonfiction.  The course will look both at early practitioners of the genre and contemporary innovators to help establish a useful lineage for one’s own creative work. Narrative Nonfiction is commonly defined as fact-based writing that uses the techniques of fiction to bring its stories to life—including such craft elements as description, dialogue, character development and scene.  Our workshop will center on three sub-genres of Creative Nonfiction: literary journalism, creative criticism, and place-based writing.  While writers in these forms often incorporate personal elements into their work, all strive to also transcend them, consistently turning to outside research and cultural meditations that extend far beyond the self.  Students will study a wide range of such professional work and attempt to emulate it in their own creative essays.  End of the semester portfolios will consist of two substantially revised essays, and an ongoing critical component will also factor into student grades.

Course Description

In this course we will survey some of the American fiction, poetry, music, and painting that helped give contour to a transatlantic modernist aesthetic.

Our exploration will include the period influence of the Parisian avant-garde (painters Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Gris; poets Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Pound; performer Josephine Baker), some of the foundational figures of American jazz (Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, et al.), and several exponents of the Harlem Renaissance (Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman).

The hope is to arrive at a contextual understanding of the disparate thematic, stylistic, and structural concerns of the modernist project in its plurivalent American incarnations. As always, the professor will rely upon the informed generosity of his students to promote a spirit of enthusiastic collaborative inquiry.

Requirements

 Consistent in-class participation; daily reading quizzes; midterm exam; final exam; term paper (3000 words).  

Readings

Three Lives, Gertrude Stein, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald,   The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore

Course Description

One hallmark of literary fiction in the twenty-first century is what scholars have called “the genre turn.” The term identifies a phenomenon whereby “literary” writers (that is, writers identified with serious literary fiction) adopt the forms and modes of so-called “genre” fiction (science fiction, romance, horror, etc.). What is at stake in this promiscuous commingling of generic modes? What becomes of “the literary” when it encounters popular generic forms? What effects does popular culture have on “high” (or perhaps “unpopular”) art? What does literary fiction have to offer genre fiction, and vice versa? Does the literary exist apart from popular generic forms, or has it simply become one genre among many? What aesthetic qualities or social orientations distinguish literary engagements with popular genres from their (literally) generic counterparts? In this course we will read books by contemporary North American writers with an eye to thinking through the promises and perils of the genre turn in literary fiction.

Course Description

Theater is inherently a place where identity flickers in and out of sight. In the first publication of Much Ado about Nothing, instead of the character names Dogberry and Verges, we find the names of the actors who played these parts: Will Kemp and Richard Cowley. Shakespeare created characters that played to his fellow-actors’ strengths. Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, timeless as they are, were written with Richard Burbage in mind and would perhaps be very different if Shakespeare meant these parts for another player. In theater, one’s performance can hide one’s identity or be enhanced by it; the audience is asked to accept the conventional substitution of selves; and some characters carry out their increasingly layered performances where their “real” identities glimmer nevertheless, unbeknownst to the audience.

In this course, we will ask how identity is constructed against the backdrop of the demands of public and private spheres. To what extent are Shakespeare’s characters able to shape their own inward and outward selfhood? How do these processes occur in our own lives and how much control do we have over our own identity? And, finally, what role does performance play in construction of identity? In what way is performance—and early modern theater as an institution—engaged with political, social, and other agendas? Along with these questions, we will consider a multitude of additional issues, using your individual interests as an important factor in class discussion, research, and creative projects. We will also experience the Shakespearean theater culture through a Reacting to the Past role-playing game. As always in my classes, your individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

The fundamental goals of this course are to familiarize you with Shakespeare’s plays; to explore and understand the social and political forces at work in Shakespeare’s England and their direct relevance to theatrical production; to acquaint you with the genre variety in early modern drama; to improve your ability to read literary texts closely and with understanding; to develop your skills at writing about literature and culture clearly and perceptively; to collaborate on projects and work both individually and in a team.

Requirements

Lively participation, close-reading essay, scaffolded research project, position paper, speech, and strategic writings for the game, final exam.

Readings

Tentative readings: Shakespeare’s Richard III, King Lear, As You Like It; Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Course Description

This course will do a deep dive into the text, context, and afterlife of a single novel by Jane Austen. Together we will read Austen's most playful novel, Emma (1815). We will also take a look at Austen's world and culture, Emma's publication history, its reception by contemporary readers, the many different scholarly readings of the novel, and how those readings have shaped numerous adaptations of the novel, from comics to movies to games. We will also be visited (in-person and virtually) by scholars, game designers, critics, and content creators engaged with the eighteenth-century today.

​In keeping with Austen's world, this course is intensely analog: students will be responsible for annotating their copy of the novel and keeping a handwritten commonplace book. Students will be guided through a series of scaffolded assignments leading to a final project of their devising according to their larger research and/or career goals.

Course Description

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) published it’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 5, 1981 detailing the rare occurrence of pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in otherwise healthy, young, homosexual men in Los Angeles. A month later, the New York Times published an article about a cancer seen in 41 homosexual men. The AIDS epidemic would go on to shape and impact politics, art, medicine, and communities across the globe. This course will expansively explore some of the poetry, prose, dramas, films, and other media, created by and about folks with HIV. So while canonical texts like Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors (1989) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) will be discussed, we will also read selections by Black folks across the diaspora like Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), poetry by Essex Hemphill and Danez Smith, films by Marlon Riggs and television shows like HBO’s It’s a Sin, as well as stories that center the experiences of Black women from Pearl Cleage and Sapphire. Through each of these texts we will ask questions and pursue analysis that asks what can we glean from dwelling within this particular historical moment, to linger with those we lost and are still losing, and how they expand how we see the world around us.

Course Description

Unlike other literary periods within African American literary history like the Literature of Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the period of Realism, Naturalism and Modernism, and the Black Arts Movement which have identifiable themes and conventions, the contemporary period is a little harder to categorize. What constitutes contemporary African American literature? When does the period start? What links the texts together outside of their publication dates at the turn of the 20^th century and into the 21^st century? This course will explore Black literature of the contemporary, stories of the black past, speculative fiction, poetry, and essays from writers within the US and abroad. By the end of the course students will be able to articulate what makes contemporary African American literature contemporary and why it is still worthy of study.