University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Courses
ENGL
348 courses with the subject ENGL, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ENGL 100Basic Writing3
Required for incoming students with SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing or ACT scores below a threshold set by the department. Please visit the department Web site for the most updated scores. The courses focuses on academic writing in a variety of contexts. Workshop format involves frequent writing and revision. A student may not receive credit for this course after receiving credit for ENGL 105 or 105I.
This college-level course focuses on written and oral argumentation, composition, research, information literacy, and rhetorical analysis. The course introduces students to the specific disciplinary contexts for written work and oral presentations required in college courses. Some sections focus on one specific disciplinary context (e.g., natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, law, business, medicine) and some sections cover multiple disciplinary contexts. Each section will reference the topic(s) covered. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 102 and ENGL 102I, 105, or 105I.
ENGL 105IEnglish Composition and Rhetoric (Interdisciplinary)3
This college-level course focuses on written and oral argumentation, composition, research, information literacy, and rhetorical analysis. The course introduces students to one specific disciplinary context for written work and oral presentations required in college courses: natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, law, business, or medicine. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 105 and ENGL 102, 102I, or 105I.
This course is the optional laboratory component of English 105. English 105L complements the learning experience of English 105 through supplemental instruction, workshopping of projects, and peer review activities. English 105L features independent and group work as well as coaching and support from the lab instructor.
This course guides students slowly and carefully through one extraordinary long book that is well worth the time and effort. Texts vary year to year. Required text: one inexpensive book that you will never want to sell back.
This course introduces students to the new field of critical game studies, which uses rhetorical and literary theories to explore the impact that games have on our culture. Students will analyze the impact of immersive narratives on players and explore issues of representation and identity by playing through selected games and reading core texts. No gaming experience or equipment is needed.
This course uses a rhetorical approach to explore the concept of data. Questions of race, gender, class and other markers of identity will guide our analysis of how data is rhetorically used to shape knowledge in our contemporary world. This course is especially well suited for those in the WEDP concentration in English & Comparative Literature as well as those interested in fields such as data science, social media, technical communication, and digital humanities.
A study of the development of English from its Proto-Indo-European origins to modern English, with emphasis on how events and contacts with other languages influenced the vocabulary of English. Course previously offered as ENGL 314.
Fulfills a major core requirement. This course examines how writing has evolved from ancient times to the present, with a focus on how writing technologies (from clay tablets to typewriters, pictographs to emojis) have shaped written languages and writing instruction. Activities will include creating historical replicas, preparing digital exhibits, and other creative projects involving writing technologies.
ENGL 117Arguing on the Internet: Rhetoric in the Age of Social Media3
In this course, students will draw on classical rhetoric--the ancient art of persuasion--to analyze how people argue today, in online contexts. We will use rhetoric to examine the strategies internet trolls use, what makes a post go viral, and whether online arguments can actually change people's minds. We will also develop our own arguments in oral, written and digital formats.
This course examines video games as narrative texts through game play and game design. By the end of the semester, students will develop and create an original interactive narrative video game using the open-source software Twine. Through this making-centered course, students will study existing non-linear narratives to explore the basic principles of writing and examine the needs and expectations of the audience/viewer/player for immersive/interactive media and that of established media.
ENGL 119Picture This: Principles of Visual Rhetoric3
Today, writers in almost every profession use visual evidence persuasively and effectively. How do we interpret and analyze those messages? How do we generate effective visuals that avoid misleading audiences? That is the domain of visual rhetoric, an area of study we will explore in this course. This course is useful for those planning careers in science, computer science, technical communication, business, and data science as well as those interested in cultural and historical aspects.
ENGL 121British Literature, 19th and Early 20th Century3
Fulfills a major core requirement. Seminar focusing on later British literature covering the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods--great foundation for studying later periods. Honors version available.
Fulfills a major core requirement. A survey of literary movements over the course of American history. Movements studied include romanticism, naturalism, realism, modernism, and post-modernism. Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Ellison, Morrison. Honors version available.
Course emphasizes literature, critical thinking, and the writing process. Students explore the relationship between thinking, reading, and writing by studying poetry, fiction, drama, art, music, and film.
A study of approximately six major American authors drawn from Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Clemens, Dickinson, Chesnutt, James, Eliot, Stein, Hemingway, O'Neill, Faulkner, Hurston, or others.
Fulfills a major core requirement. Studies in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, Native American, Anglo-Indian, Caribbean, gay-lesbian, and other literatures written in English. Honors version available.
Intended for sophomores and first-year students. A writing-intensive introductory workshop in fiction. Close study of a wide range of short stories; emphasis on technical problems. Composition, discussion, and revision of original student stories. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 130 and ENGL 132H. This course (or ENGL 132H) serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the fiction sequence of the creative writing program. . Rules & Requirements IDEAs in Action Gen Ed: FC-CREATE. creative writing program. Grading Status: Letter grade.
Prerequisite, for other courses in the fiction sequence of the
ENGL 131Introduction to Poetry Writing3
Intended for sophomores and first-year students. A writing-intensive introductory workshop in poetry. Close study of a wide range of published poetry and of poetic terms and techniques. Composition, discussion, and revision of original student poems. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 131 and ENGL 133H. This course (or ENGL 133H) serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the poetry sequence of the creative writing concentration and minor.
ENGL 132HFirst-Year Honors: Introduction to Fiction Writing3
Intended for first-year honors students. A writing-intensive introductory workshop in fiction. Close study of a wide range of short stories; emphasis on technical problems. Composition, discussion, and revision of original student stories. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 130 and ENGL 132H. This course (or ENGL 130) serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the fiction sequence of the creative writing concentration and minor.
ENGL 133HFirst-Year Honors: Introduction to Poetry Writing3
Intended for first-year honors students. A writing-intensive introductory workshop in poetry. Close study of a wide range of published poems and of the basic terms and techniques of poetry. Composition, discussion, and revision of a number of original poems. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 131 and ENGL 133H. This course (or ENGL 131) serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the poetry sequence of the creative writing concentration and minor.
First-year honors students only. This course focuses on women's life writing, including autobiography, biography, autoethnography, personal essay. Includes theories of life writing. Students will read contemporary works in each genre and write their own versions. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 55 and ENGL 134H.
First-year honors students only. Study of literary forms (epic, drama, lyric, novel), beginning in the fall term and concluding in the spring, with three hours credit for each term. Students should consult the assistant dean for honors or the Department of English and Comparative Literature for offerings.
ENGL 136The Publishing Industry: Editing, Design, and Production3
Students explore the many areas of the publishing industry and practice basic skills widely used in publishing, including submissions management, copy editing, proofreading, and book and ebook design. Through hands-on practice and meetings with experts in the field, students develop a solid foundation in publication design and the editorial process. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 136 and ENGL 351.
In this course students learn to study emergent relationships between print and digital literary cultures. In addition to reading and discussion, the course requires that students conduct original research (individual and also collaborative) in both print and digital formats.
Intended for sophomores and first-year students. An introductory workshop in creative nonfiction, a genre that is rooted in fact and composed in artful prose. Through readings and writing prompts, we will explore the full spectrum of the genre, including memoir, travelogues, nature writing, literary journalism, lyric essays, and visual autobiography. We will workshop and revise student essays as well. This course serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the creative writing concentration and minor. Honors version available.
ENGL 140Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Culture and Literature3
Introduces students to concepts in queer theory and recent sexuality studies. Topics include queer lit, AIDS, race and sexuality, representations of gays and lesbians in the media, political activism/literature.
This course will be a basic introduction to literatures in English from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other Anglophone literary traditions.
Examines the ways culture shapes and is shaped by film. This course uses comparative methods to contrast films as historic or contemporary, mainstream or cutting-edge, in English or a foreign language, etc.
Introductory course on popular literary genres. Students will read and discuss works in the area of mystery, romance, westerns, science fiction, children's literature, and horror fiction.
This course examines the complexities and pleasures of horror, from its origins in Gothic and pre-Gothic literatures and arts. Topics include psychology, aesthetics, politics, allegory, ideology, and ethics.
In this class students will practice composing in contemporary digital writing spaces. Students will study theories of electronic networks and mediation, and their connections to literacy, creativity, and collaboration. Students will also develop their own multimedia projects using images, audio, video, and words. Topics include the rhetoric of the Internet, online communities, and digital composition.
Introduces students to methods of literary study. Students learn to read and interpret a range of literary works, develop written and oral arguments about literature, and conduct literary research.
Survey of American literature from 1789-1900. Students will gain expertise in the major literary movements of the century in their historical contexts. Fulfills a major core requirement.
Subject
ENGL
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
May be repeated for credit; may be repeated in the same term for different topics.
Survey of American literature in the twentieth century covering the major literary movements of the century: realism, modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary. Fulfills a major core requirement. Honors version available.
ENGL 153Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Premodern World3
What did people think about sex, and how did they do it, before Darwin, Stonewall, and the Sexual Revolution? This course will introduce students to the rich and varied history of sex, sexuality, and gender in Western culture before 1700. Topics to be considered may include the evolution of marriage, same-sex love in the classical world, trans identities in medieval Europe, and the history of true love.
This course investigates the history of race (as an idea) and racism (as a practice) in Western culture, from the very first discussions of race in classical antiquity until 1700. Topics to be considered may include the history of slavery, the origins of "scientific" racism, early examples of resistance to racial prejudice, and the historical intersection of race with gender and class.
This course examines various visual texts, including graphic novels and emerging narrative forms, and explores how meaning is conveyed through composition, the juxtaposition and framing of images, and the relationship between words and images. Students create their own visual narratives.
ENGL 156Introduction to Writing and Creating Comics3
This hands-on creative writing workshop explores the art of storytelling through the unique medium of sequential art, focusing on developing the essential skills needed to write compelling narratives for a visual format. Students will learn to write and format professional comics scripts, interrogating core narrative elements like plot structure, character development, pacing, and dialogue. While we will learn to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to translate scripts into visual stories, we will focus on the craft of writing. No previous experience as a visual artist is required.
This course is a multigenre introduction to postcolonial literatures. Topics will include postcolonial Englishes, nationalism, anti-imperialism, postcolonial education, and the intersections between national and gender identities in literature. Previously offered as ENGL 463. Honors version available.
ENGL 161Literature of War from World War I to the 21st Century3
This is a class about literature and war and what each might teach us about the other. We will consider a range of texts and center our work around this question: what, if anything, can a work of art help us see or understand about war that might not be shown by other means? Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 73 and ENGL 161.
This course will introduce students to the key critical concepts, debates, and questions of practice in the interdisciplinary field of health humanities. Students will draw on humanities methods to analyze topics related to human health, illness, and disability. Topics to be considered may include narrative medicine, disability studies, chronic illness, graphic medicine, health activism, mortality, and healthcare systems.
Introduction to major questions of Latina/o Studies through an examination of literature, culture, the visual arts, and music. Topics include imperialism, colonialism, labor, decolonization, nationalism, ethnicity and other aspects of identity and identification, and new rubrics. Previously offered as ENGL 364. Honors version available.
Part hands-on gaming studio, part literature seminar - students in this course will play a range of digital and analog games while reading key works of English literature. Students will use literary critical concepts (plot, narrative, dialogue, imagery, characterization, symbol, voice, genre) to interrogate games as cultural texts. They will also apply their experience of critical play to consider the shared affordances of literature and games: as frameworks for play, mechanisms for world-building, and equipment for living. Previously offered as ENGL 258.
ENGL 183Japanese Video Games: Culture, Genre and Design3
This course introduces students to developments in Japanese video games, using the techniques of critical game studies to analyze the history and development of Japanese video games. Students will use the literary techniques of close reading and genre analysis to chart the relationship between culture, technology, and design, including both Japanese and US corporate culture and aesthetic principles. The course may focus on particular designers or genres. No gaming experience needed.
ENGL 184Children's Literature in Contemporary Society3
This course is a survey of children's literature (broadly defined in terms of age range and medium), which considers the current significance of the genre, focusing on its reception in terms of contemporary experience and concerns.
Introduces students to the field of literary studies while emphasizing a single writer, group, movement, theme, or period. Students conduct research, develop readings, and compose literary interpretations.
This course explores the intersections between law and literature, examining how legal and literary texts inform and reflect each other. Students will engage with novels, plays, short stories, and legal cases to explore themes such as justice, morality, power, authority, and individual rights. Featuring guest speakers from legal and literary professions and close reading and critical analysis of key law and literary texts.
An introduction to the study of creativity and aesthetic expression in everyday life, considering both traditional genres and contemporary innovations in the material, verbal, and musical arts.
Everyone has a story to tell, and sometimes those stories reveal a shared experience. In this class, we'll conceive of memoir as an act of witness that documents not only our personal histories, but those of our larger communities as well. Our narratives will deploy classic rise-fall story arcs as well as the most innovative forms in the genre: scrambled chronologies, visual autobiographies, graphic essays, and/or soundscapes. We won't just elevate our lives into art. We'll give voice to our shared humanity as an act of narrative justice.
In this course, we will learn new ways of bearing witness to our rapidly changing world so that we can turn any journey into a travel narrative. We will start with deep readings and discussions of travel literature throughout the ages--from Ibn Battuta's medieval adventures to Robyn Davidson's 1,700 mile trek across the Australian Outback with camels. Through craft talks and writing prompts, we will then devise methods to weave our observations, conversations, and reportage into story arcs that recreate the places pivotal to our lives through sensory detail. We will also debate the ethical dilemmas inherent to this genre.
In this course, we will draw on classical and digital rhetoric to analyze contemporary forms of communication and to develop their own messages for multiple audiences. We will learn to conduct research into online discourse. We will create research-informed communication in written, oral, and digital modes. And we will share that communication with classmates and publicly with the campus and beyond.
Substantial practice in those techniques employed in introductory course. A workshop devoted to the extensive writing of fiction (at least two short stories), with an emphasis on style, structure, dramatic scene, and revision.
An intensification of the introductory class. A workshop devoted to close examination of selected exemplary poems and the students' own poetry, with an emphasis on regular writing and revising. This course serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the poetry sequence of the creative writing concentration and minor.
An intermediate-level workshop in creative nonfiction that focuses on a particular sub-genre, such as memoir, travel writing, food writing, or nature writing. Students will workshop and revise their own original compositions as well. This course can be repeated under a different professor or sub-genre. This course serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the nonfiction sequence of the creative writing concentration and minor.
Subject
ENGL
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
can be repeated under a different professor or sub-genre.
In this writing-intensive workshop, we will explore the ever-expansive category of Young Adult ("YA") Literature, examining genre, plot, and character through our own writing, in addition to YA novels, novel excerpts, and craft essays.
An intermediate-level creative writing workshop intended for students who have already taken ENGL 130 or ENGL 132H, this course focuses on the art and craft of fiction that features visible politics. Rather than encouraging a didactic approach to storytelling, this course teaches students to ask better questions of themselves and their readers. Instead of using storytelling as a tool for propaganda, students will learn how well-crafted fiction can combat false narratives, social injustices, and tyranny.
An intermediate-level creative writing workshop intended for students who have already taken ENGL 130 or ENGL 132H. This course focuses on the art and craft of fiction that features crime or mystery. Students will use the tools of literary fiction, while also learning the conventions of the genre and apply them to their fiction. Close study of crime and mystery novels and short stories. Composition, discussion, and revision of original student stories.
An introductory course in descriptive English linguistics that studies the sounds, word-building processes, and sentence structures of current English as well as general notions of correctness and variation. Previously offered as ENGL 313.
Flash fiction asks a story to deliver its core elements - character, place, time, plot, conflict, resolution - in the shortest space possible. Through tiny fictions, students will explore language, idea, and discovery, then workshop those fictions in a supportive setting. Students will discuss the elements of contemporary fiction - narrative style, voice, dialogue, structure, simple and yet foolproof ways to engage with a reader - and apply what they have learned to their own work.
A historical and critical examination of regional, social, and stylistic variation in English in the United States, including correctness, legal and educational issues, and the influence of mass media. Previously offered as ENGL 315. Honors version available.
This interdisciplinary examination of 'Asian America' takes a rigorous approach via both primary and secondary texts to study the different groups most often identified as Asian American, their histories, legalities, sociology, and culture, and how they have developed within and in relation to the United States.
Content of course varies with instructor, but students are given a sense of the chronological, stylistic, and thematic development of American poetry over two centuries. Previously offered as ENGL 348. Honors version available.
The development of the American novel from the late 18th century through the 20th century. May proceed chronologically or thematically. Previously offered as ENGL 347. Honors version available.
Instructors choose authors or topics from the period before 1900. The course may be organized chronologically or thematically, but is not intended as a survey. Previously offered as ENGL 344. Honors version available.
Instructors choose authors or topics from the period 1900 to 2000. The course may be organized chronologically or thematically, but is not intended as a survey. Previously offered as ENGL 345. Honors version available.
Fulfills a major core requirement. An introduction to Chaucer's major poetry: Troilus and Criseyde, the "dream" poems (e.g., Parliament of Fowls), and The Canterbury Tales. Previously offered as ENGL 320. Honors version available.
ENGL 224Survey of Medieval English Literature, excluding Chaucer3
This course surveys the canonical works of Old and Middle English literature from the eighth to the 15th centuries, with the sole exception of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Topics to be considered may include the development of courtly love, the history of meter, religious visions and visionary experience, and the birth of modern English. Previously offered as ENGL 319. Honors version available.
Fulfills a major core requirement. A survey of representative comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances by William Shakespeare. Honors version available.
A survey of Renaissance drama focusing on contemporaries and successors of Shakespeare during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Honors version available.
Poetry and prose of the earlier English Renaissance (from 1485 until 1600), including More, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, and Marlowe. Honors version available.
Poetry and prose of the later English Renaissance (from 1600 until the early 1660s), including Donne, Jonson, Bacon, Herbert, Burton, Browne, Marvell, Herrick, and others. Honors version available.
Fulfills a major core requirement. A study of Milton's prose and poetry in the extraordinary context of 17th-century philosophy, politics, religion, science, and poetics, and against the backdrop of the English Civil War. Honors version available.
Poetry and prose of the Victorian period, including such writers as Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, the Brontës, Dickens, G. Eliot. Previously offered as ENGL 439. Honors version available.
ENGL 234The British Novel from 1870 to World War II3
Students will read novels in English, including Joyce, Woolf, and Proust, to explore how writers from across cultures created new strategies to represent the late 19th and 20th century worlds of imperialism, science, and experiment. Previously offered as ENGL 355. Honors version available.
Fulfills a major core requirement. This course focuses on both the novels of Jane Austen and their fate since publication in the early 19th century. They have inspired countless imitations, over 150 sequels and continuations, and more than 30 full-length films. We will trace the transmission and transformation of the original texts across time and cultures. Previously offered as ENGL 340.
Twentieth-century poetry in English, approached historically, thematically, formally, politically, and aesthetically. Previously offered as ENGL 350. Honors version available.
This course focuses on the life and works of one of the most striking personalities of the nineteenth century: Oscar Wilde. In addition to reading numerous works by Wilde (including short fiction, poetry, drama, fairy tales, and critical essays), we consider the scientific, religious, and aesthetic contexts that shaped Wilde's work.
The study of an individual Victorian writer, a group (such as the Pre-Raphaelites), a theme (such as imperialism), or genre (such as Victorian epic or the serialized novel). Previously offered as ENGL 442.
This course focuses on gender and sexuality by examining the history, theory, politics, and aesthetics of queer identities in film and possibly other audiovisual media. Questions of representation, authorship, genre, and performance are addressed, either in national or transnational contexts.
ENGL 248Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice3
The first goal of this super course is to give students real tools for how to address multiple modes of difference and identity formations like race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Devoted to British Romantic-period literature's engagement with a literary mode (such as the Gothic) or a historical theme (such as war or abolition) or to an individual author. Previously offered as ENGL 441. Honors version available.
This course focuses on performances in cinema, as well as the concept of stardom. This course surveys a diverse range of performances across cinema history, through a variety of different genres and production modes. Close attention is paid to actorly expression, and to the creation of star images in media.
Historical, theoretical, and analytical approaches to the intersection of nation and cinema. This course may focus on films made within a particular nation or serve as a comparative analysis of the cinemas of several nations.
This course provides an introduction to concepts of media studies as they bear on the critical examination of cinema, television, and other cultural forms. Students explore different theoretical perspectives on the role and power of media in society in influencing social values, political beliefs, identities, and behaviors.
ENGL 256Crafting the Dramatic Film: Theory Meets Practice3
This course places students behind the camera and in front of the screen as they alternate between creative and critical approaches to cinema. They learn how to practice the basic principles of narrative film production (producing, directing, cinematography, editing, and sound design) while engaging critically with key debates in film theory and criticism (semiotic, cognitive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and phenomenological). Honors version available.
In this hands-on gaming course, students decipher the narrative design of video games while exploring the legacy of cinema to gameplay. They also apply critical gaming concepts (agency, world-building, point of view, authorship, representation, narrative choice, play) to evaluate cinema as a ludic and participatory artform beyond conventional narrative elements.
A performance-based course that supercharges the writing process through improvisational comedy and theater games. Topics include: generating ideas and characters; tuning a sense of setting, description and metaphor; and keeping the writing process lively. Students work individually on the page and - most importantly - collaboratively in the classroom to explore new possibilities, harness the complexity of what they already know, think laterally, communicate orally, and respond to incomplete information and uncertainty.
This course investigates the historical, aesthetic, experiential, and social dimensions of cinematic sound. Whether it rumbles in our chests or subtly envelops us, sound is a primary aspect of the film experience. And yet its importance is often downplayed by critics who typically dwell on visual elements. This course more expansively appreciates how cinema works as an audio-visual medium. Students become more perceptive listeners while covering a history of film sound that spans multiple eras and sonic technological formats including immersive surround sound. The course also considers how sound informs our ways of inhabiting and knowing the world around us.
An introduction to literary criticism in English studies, with an emphasis on historical developments from Plato to the present. Honors version available.
Focused study of how issues of gender shape literary themes, characters, and topics, and the composition and reception of literary texts. Honors version available.
This course brings together literary and ethnographic methods to explore narratives of illness, suffering, and healing, and medicine's roles in these processes. Themes include illness narratives, outbreak narratives, collective memory and healing from social trauma, and healers' memoirs.
ENGL 265Literature and Race, Literature and Ethnicity3
Considers texts in a comparative ethnic/race studies framework and examines how these texts explore historical and contemporary connections between groups of people in the United States and the Americas. Honors version available.
Introductory exploration of the relation between science and literature, as well as the place and value of both in the contemporary world. Honors version available.
This interdisciplinary course will examine what it means to grow up Latina/o through an exploration of childhood narratives, linguistic debates, education policies and legislation, and censored books.
An introduction to key topics that focus on questions of representation at the intersections of medicine, literature, and culture. Honors version available.
This course will introduce students to the key critical concepts, debates, and questions of practice in the emerging scholarly field of disability studies.
This course introduces students to the study of Asian American literature and culture. The focus of the course may include examining coming-of-age novels, immigration narratives, or other genre explorations.
ENGL 271Mixed-Race America: Race in Contemporary American Literature and Culture3
This service-learning course is partnered with a charter school, and together UNC-Chapel Hill and high school students will explore issues of race in American literature and culture.
This course focuses on the life and writings of a specific African American author. In addition to examining numerous texts by the author, we will consider the cultural, political, and artistic contexts that shaped the author's work. Fulfills a major core requirement.
Approaches to the literary interpretation of drama through consideration of PlayMakers Repertory Company's current season, stressing original research into literary history, genre, and social and cultural contexts.
ENGL 275Founding Fictions: Democracy and American Literature3
How did early Americans conceptualize their new nation in distinction from Great Britain, and how did their foundational texts shape the evolution of American democracy? This course examines the literary, political, and legal fictions that structured the early republic, focusing on how concepts such as ''asylum,'' ''liberty,'' and ''the people'' informed governance and national identity. Through close readings of key documents--including the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and early immigration and naturalization laws--we will analyze how founding texts established the principles of democratic republicanism and the tensions embedded within them.
Covers literary and other social texts associated with the legacies of population transfers and the movements, forced or voluntary, of people across borders. Course previously offered as ENGL 365.
Students will analyze and compose various types of travel literature, such as voyage, pilgrimage, and tour, in terms of literary conventions, historical conditions, and considerations of gender, ethnicity, economics, empire, and religion. Honors version available.
Students will analyze and compose different forms of life writing such as autobiography, biography, and autoethnography. Readings will include theories of autobiography and selected literature. Honors version available.
An overview of the tradition of children's literature, considering the ways those books point to our basic assumptions about meaning, culture, self, society, gender, and economics. The course stresses original student research and oral and written presentation. Honors version available.
This course explores Black horror as a cinematic universe held together through the logics, sounds, and aesthetics of anti-blackness, violence, nostalgia, Black trauma, and themes/tropes from horror media. We will consider the relationship between horror and Black modes of expression focusing on the various ways Black filmmakers, writers, and artists have attempted to visualize the haunting connections between the body, the flesh, and the cultural geography of America and the Black Diaspora.
In this course students will read early 20th-century poetry, fiction, films, and criticism, and consider the ways these works constituted, defined, and challenged the phenomenon known as literary modernism.
This course examines Jewish American literary works in various genres from the nineteenth century to the present day. Together, we will interpret and critique the aesthetic and moral "worldview" of each work while simultaneously situating these works in the historical and cultural contexts in which they were created.
A survey of illustrated books for children in Britain and America considering both image and text. The course stresses original student research and oral and written presentation. Honors version available.
An examination of youth in culture through a range of texts that focus on the aesthetic, historical, and social factors grounding the depiction of youth in the past and its experience and representation today. The course stresses original student research and oral and written presentation. Honors version available.
An opportunity to gain credit for an internship in a field related to the study of English, such as publishing, teaching, business writing, or law. Available to majors with at least a 2.5 GPA. Requirements include portfolio of work completed for the internship, meetings with the academic advisor, and a 4000-word writing project related to the internship.
Guides students through the processes of developing an original research topic, conducting research, and analyzing research, leading students to produce a high-quality presentation of their findings. Topic varies by instructor but may focus on literary studies or closely-related arenas such as medical humanities, digital humanities, and creative writing, among others. Honors version available.
Subject
ENGL
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
May be repeated for credit; may be repeated in the same term for different topics; 9 total credits.
Advanced practice with writing for professional audiences, based on attention to theories of genre, audience, rhetoric, and style. Students will develop skills in professional writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, and publishing.
ENGL 300IProfessional Writing in Health and Medicine (Interdisciplinary)3
Advanced practice with writing about health from medical and humanistic perspectives, ranging from grant proposals to qualitative research articles to the personal illness narrative.
A course focused on writing in professional settings focused on the arts and humanities. Students will compose documents such as funding proposals, performance reviews, artists' statements, or promotional educational materials. Includes oral, written, and digital compositions.
ENGL 302Professional Communication for Social Movements3
Advanced course focused on writing for professional audiences in non-profit, public policy, social justice, and social entrepreneurship settings. Includes oral, written, and digital compositions. Students will compose documents such as grant proposals, policy reports, websites, public presentations, or multimedia videos to advance social causes.
Advanced course focused on adapting scientific and technical content to public or non-expert audiences in oral, written, and digital forms. Assignments may include composing professional reports, developing multimedia instructions for a product, or developing an interactive exhibit.
Advanced practice with business and professional oral, written, and multimedia forms. Students will develop business proposals, reports, plans, and professional oral presentations for professional audiences.
A workshop for people interested in writing plays, focusing on elements that make them work on stage, such as characterization, climax, dialogue, exposition, momentum, setting, and visual effects.
ENGL 307Studies in Fiction and Poetry: Stylistics3
An occasional intermediate course that may focus on such topics as living writers, poetic forms, flash fiction, or imitation. Permission of the program director.
Studies of syntax, parts of speech, types of sentences, wordplay, the narrative and non-narrative power of words, prose style, and the relationships between language, rhythm, and culture culminate with students performing a selection of the comedic and dramatic sketches written during the semester.
A study of fairy tales as historical artifacts that reveal the concerns of their times and places, as narrative structures capable of remarkable transformation, and as artistic performances drawing upon the expressive resources of multiple media, intended to challenge conventional presuppositions about the genre.
ENGL 312Oral Presentations in the Professional World3
Students will focus on learning skills and strategies to deliver effective oral presentations. The course will be organized around an individual research project that will culminate in a major presentation following the "best practices" of that discipline. During the semester, students will deliver presentations of various lengths and genres and will learn effective use of media support. Course standards will emphasize professional-level expectations and current "best practices" in the field. Honors version available.
This class explores writing in and about contemporary social media spaces. The course focuses on developing writing projects that study and participate in online social networks. Topics include the rhetoric of the Internet; collaboration online; information ethics; amateur content creation; networks and social interaction; networks and literacy; data and privacy; and remix composition.
This class studies composing in a variety of modes, including visuals, moving images, gestures, sounds, and words. Students develop projects using image, audio, and video editors, examining how multimedia fits within the history of rhetoric and writing and relates with concerns such as purposes, audiences, contexts, arguments, genres, and mediums. Honors version available.
ENGL 323American Cinema of the 1970s: New Hollywood and Beyond3
This course examines one of the most adventurous decades in U.S. film history, from the "Auteur Renaissance," to independent cinema, through to the politically conscious reconfiguration of popular genres. Films are discussed in the context of social changes and anxieties in the years surrounding Watergate and the Vietnam War.
This instructional course gives students the opportunity to make video essays. Students learn how to use creative audiovisual media tools, in particular those related to the moving image. Students gain familiarity with digital production and editing technology, which they use as instruments of critical expression and argumentation.
This course explores the wide range of drama produced in England between the 1570s and 1640s, including work by Shakespeare and his many rivals. Honors version available.
ENGL 327Renaissance Literature and Its Intellectual Contexts3
An introduction to one or two intellectual movements of the Renaissance, such as humanism, the protestant reformation, the baroque, or the scientific revolution, through the examination of both literary and non-literary texts of the period.
This course explores the contributions of the Middle Ages, and of medieval women, to the history of feminism and women's writing. Over the course of the semester, we will explore four different types of work by and about women: literary writing, theological writing, life writing, and the performance of identity and dramatic character. Along the way, we will also read selections from contemporary feminist theory, including Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler.
Students will study Renaissance literature through one or more contemporary theoretical lenses, which might include feminist theory, queer theory, cultural materialism, new historicism, or psychoanalytic theory. Texts may range in date from the early 16th century to the late 20th and early 21st century.
This interdisciplinary course examines the technical and aesthetic revolutions in the fine arts of the English Romantic Period. It will discuss productions, experiments, and aesthetic theories of William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, J. M. W. Turner, and William Blake, focusing on the developments of lyrical poetry, landscape painting, and original printmaking. We will pay special attention to the period's new ideas about nature, the sublime, picturesque travel, genius, originality, and social role of the artist.
ENGL 341Tabletop Games: Narrative, History, and Design3
This course introduces students to developments in modern tabletop gaming. Students will analyze the mechanics and thematics that tabletop games use to create narratives. Particular attention will be paid to the values and stories that emerge from the decisions made by designers. This course culminates in a capstone project in which students create their own tabletop game. No prior experience with tabletop gaming is required.
This course pairs selected canonical works of U.S. literature (short stories, poems, essays, and short novels) with films that adapt or translate the original text for cinema. Works range from westerns and war movies to psychological thrillers, biopics, and comedies. By comparing text and film, the course deepens students' understanding of both aesthetic forms and traces the sometimes conflicting ideals, myths, and narratives that gave shape to different historical versions of American national identity. Honors version available.
ENGL 351From Manuscript to Press: Writer as Publisher3
Students learn the basics of book production, including acquisitions, developmental editing, copy editing, layout and book design, marketing, and digital publication by working on titles in production at a national press and meeting with professionals in the industry.
ENGL 356British and American Fiction Since World War II3
Course studies contemporary British and American fiction through representative works. Intellectual and aesthetic, historical and cultural emphases. May include works from the Anglophone diaspora. Honors version available.
ENGL 35720th-Century British Literature and Culture3
This course examines factors shaping British/Commonwealth literature in the 20th century, especially the world wars and the dismantling of the British Empire. We will investigate themes of both nostalgia and anticipation: ways of remembering the past of England and the Empire, and of describing the future of British culture(s).
This course focuses on important poets and poetic trends in the United States in the 21st century. It addresses how poems create space for marginalized, unacknowledged, suppressed, or completely unfamiliar perspectives. The class explores how social and cultural conditions both limit and enable poetic expression; how poets engage in political movements or modes of social critique; and how they work to build community across differences. The course seeks to develop reading skills that are crucial for interpreting poetry; to strengthen writing and oral communication skills; and to develop research skills.
ENGL 359Latina Feminisms: Civil Rights, Ecofeminism, and Health Studies3
This course will offer a theoretical grounding on Latina feminism and the historical moments and movements that inspired and/or influenced such Latina feminist thought and productions. In this course, we will gain a foundation for how Latina feminists theorize about gender, race, sex, culture, history, and aesthetics. We will analyze a variety of literary forms and genres (e.g., poems, essays, novels, plays, testimonios) and mediums (literature, film, documentaries, visual art).
ENGL 360Contemporary Asian American Literature and Theory3
This course will explore contemporary Asian American literature and theory and will examine how Asian American literature fits into, yet extends beyond, the canon of American literature.
This course focuses on events of particular import in Asian American history and how they are recounted in a variety of interdisciplinary texts. Events may include the Japanese American incarceration, refugee movements, immigration, or others, at the instructor's discretion. Honors version available.
Subject
ENGL
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
May be repeated for credit; may be repeated in the same term for different topics; 6 total credits.
Covers literary works associated with one or more of the major historical migrations, forced and voluntary, and present-day works engaged with globalization.
This interdisciplinary course explores how issues of health, medicine, and illness are impacted by questions of race in 20th-century American literature and popular culture. Specific areas covered include pain, death, the family and society, reproduction, mental illness, aging, human subject experimentation, the doctor-patient relationship, pesticides, and bioethics. Honors version available.
ENGL 371The Place of Asian Americans in Southern Literature3
This course will consider the themes of globalization and regionalism through an examination of narratives featuring Asians/Asian Americans in the American South. Honors version available.
An introduction to Southern literature, with emphasis on the 20th-century: fiction, poetry, drama, essays. Representative authors include Faulkner, Wolfe, Williams, Warren, Hurston, Wright, Ransom, Tate, Welty, Chappell, McCullers, O'Connor. Honors version available.
A broad survey of the cultures of the Celtic-speaking areas, notably Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany, with special emphasis on language and literature.
This course examines one or more topics in film history, focusing on specific periods. The scope may be national or transnational. Films are analyzed for how they address and reflect key historical developments. Restricted to any undergraduate student who is a Sophomore, Junior, or Senior with a GPA or 3.0 or higher, OR any First-Year student. Honors version available.
The course introduces students to the complex narrative, aesthetic, and rhetorical relationship between literature and cinema. Honors version available.
This course investigates the rich and complex relationship between literature and other mass media. Previously offered as ENGL 281. Honors version available.
This class studies the composition and development of podcasts, paying attention to the unique affordances and drawbacks of podcast technologies. Students develop, research, script, and record podcasts in several genres, including topical, interview, and storytelling formats, while learning practical editing techniques using industry-standard software.
Explores various connections of literature and law, including literary depictions of crime, lawyers, and trials; literary conventions of legal documents; and/or shared problems in interpretation of law and literature.
ENGL 386Gender, Sexuality, and the South Asian Diaspora3
This course explores how gender and sexuality shapes the literature, politics, and public culture of South Asian immigrant communities in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and other locations outside the Indian subcontinent.
What was modernism? When was modernism? Where was modernism? Reading literature and visual art from 1890 to 1940 in Europe, America, and Africa will be key to finding answers.
This course introduces students to the aims and concerns of authorship study in film through discussion of a major filmmaker's body of work. The course may focus predominantly on a single figure or may compare two or more figures who share certain affinities of theme or style.
This course is dedicated to the study of key concepts of storytelling through theoretical readings and the media of film and TV. To learn the concepts, students will engage in analyses of filmed scenes and screenplays, and they will write scripted scenes. At the end of the semester, students will have written three 5-page analytical essays, an outline for a 4-scene act, and four contiguous screenplay scenes that, together, make up an act. For the final exam, students will present their revised four-scene act as a portfolio and will read an excerpt to the class.
ENGL 392Professional Writing Portfolio Development and Publication3
Students research, refine, and compose a portfolio of advanced written, oral, and multimedia work for professional audiences or publication. Each portfolio will contain an array of work that demonstrates the student's versatility as a writer, speaker, researcher, and/or editor. The portfolio is intended for presentation to professional audiences, potential employers, prospective graduate programs, and/or publication. Previously offered as ENGL 492.
ENGL 394Misbehaving Bodies: Dis/ease, Dis/order, & Dys/topia in Latinx Fiction and Film3
This course explores how Latinx fiction and film portray diasporic ''misbehaving'' bodies. We will explore how bodies not conforming to desired ''norms'' are treated both within global society and within their own multi-ethno-racial diasporic communities. The ''norms'' Latinx individuals and communities navigate are often invisible but clearly defined through language, policy/policing, social structure, and cultural production. The Latinx diaspora includes the United States, the Caribbean Basin, and other sites beyond the North Atlantic region.
Museums have long been considered repositories for artifacts and sites of pedagogy, far removed from contemporary visual practices. And yet, today's museums are full of moving images, from interactive displays to IMAX theaters to screen-based art. In this class we will consider interactions between the cinema and the museum. Topics to be addressed include immersive viewing technologies, film and ethnography, expanded cinema, virtual reality, and installation art. This course includes visits to campus museums.
This course combines frequent writing practice with discussions of rhetorical theories and strategies for teaching writing. The course examines ways to design effective writing courses, assignments, and instructional materials.
ENGL 402Investigations in Academic Writing and Writing Centers3
This course considers learning to write from three vantage points: personal, social, and contextual. Emphasis on theory, reflective practice, and pedagogy for peer tutoring.
A course focused on research, writing, and engagement with museum exhibits focused on art or other collections. Students will practice rhetorical analysis and close looking with a special focus on works at a curated museum installation. Includes collaborative and individual research projects. Honors version available.
In addition to surveying key works of creative nonfiction throughout the ages - from Montaigne in the 16th century to Solnit, Rankine, and Urrea in the 21st - we will be composing (and peer-reviewing) our own explorations of every subgenre, including memoir, literary journalism, travel writing, flash nonfiction, and the lyric essay, with an eye toward publication.
A continuation of the intermediate workshop with emphasis on the short story and novella. Extensive discussion of student work and revisions in class and in conferences with instructor. Permission of the program director.
Permission of the program director. A continuation of the intermediate workshop, with increased writing and revising of poems. Extensive discussion of student poetry in class and in conferences with instructor.
This is a course in popular-songwriting collaboration, a workshop with constant presentation of original songs and close-critiquing of these assignments. Varied assignments including songs for soloists, duos, trios, quartets, and chorus; ballads, folk, jazz, blues, art, and musical-theater songs, etc.
ENGL 409Lyrics and Lyricists: A Collaborative Exploration of the Processes of Popular-Song Lyric Writing3
This course is a collaborative exploration of popular-song lyric writing, requiring numerous drafts written to varied existing musical models - narrative ballads; hymns; folk, theater, jazz, art, R&B, R&R, and worldbeat songs, etcetera - to be tried out and worked on in class, as well as in conference.
This course provides a history of documentary cinema since the beginnings of the medium and surveys different modes and theoretical definitions; or the course may focus largely on a certain mode (such as ethnographic, observational, first-person, cinema vérité, politically activist, found footage compilation, or journalistic investigation). Honors version available.
ENGL 411Composing for Clients: Technical Communication Practicum3
This advanced technical communication course will help you develop skills in developing professional communication with a focus on developing written and oral communications for clients, user experience, project management, and technical editing. You will assess the communications needs for a client, develop a communication plan to fulfill that need, and then produce polished, professional deliverables for that client, including oral communication. You will also practice presenting communication plans and final documents orally to clients.
This course provides a rigorous introduction to comedy arts, focusing on the individual and collaborative writing processes of sketch comedy. Students will learn to develop characters, settings, and tension using the tools preferred by contemporary performers, including the game of the scene, absurdity and incongruity, status, active patterning, and parody. This intensive experience culminates in student-written, live sketch comedy performances.
ENGL 425Literature, Archives, and Original Research3
"Archives" are documents - manuscripts, photographs, recordings, diaries, letters, and other materials - that are so valuable they need to be preserved in a special place. In this course, the instructor will guide students as they conduct original research in literary archives, such as online databases or physical archives (at Wilson Library, for example). We will learn how to formulate research questions and how to identify key documents. Previously offered as ENGL 342.
This course examines Renaissance literature through the lens of cultural themes, issues, and problems that were important to Renaissance authors and readers. Texts may be drawn from, among others, the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish literary traditions, and may range in date from the 15th to the 17th centuries.
ENGL 443American Literature before 1860--Contemporary Issues3
A junior- or senior-level course devoted to in-depth exploration of an author, group of authors, or topic in American literature to 1860. Honors version available.
A junior- or senior-level course devoted to in-depth exploration of an author, group of authors, or a topic in American literature from 1900 to 2000. Honors version available.
This course brings together theories of collective and individual memory with questions of aesthetics and narrative while exploring global connections between memory and literature.
ENGL 450Retro Aesthetics from Teen Films to Period Pieces3
Through analyses of teen and period films, this course explores cinema's relationship to time, memory, nostalgia, adolescence, aging, and history. It also examines the material specificity of film and its visual and sonic technologies, both analog and digital. Particular attention is given to retro aesthetics--tendencies that recall and rework the historical past.
ENGL 464Latinx Hybrid Narrative: Experimental Fiction and Film3
Latinx narrative in fiction and film has continually challenged the form and function of "genre". This course will examine books, films, and videos that are narrative in nature. We will focus on cultural productions reflecting some of these innovations to consider how authors and film makers engage concerns intersecting at different points of self-conception, including but not limited to experiences of dis/ability, diaspora, gender, geography, race, nationality, sexuality, spirituality, and transnationalism.
Examines current issues in literary theory such as the question of authorship, the relation of literary texts to cultural beliefs and values, and to the formation of identities. Honors version available.
Permission of the instructor. Designed for students accepted as mentors to the Scholars' Latino Initiative (SLI). Students will take this course during their first year as SLI mentors to prepare them as effective mentors to Latina/o high school students. Students cannot receive credit for both ENGL 267 and 467.
ENGL 472African American Literature--Contemporary Issues3
Study of particular aspects of African American literature, such as the work of a major writer or group of writers, an important theme, a key tradition, or a literary period. Honors version available.
A rigorous combination of field work, lab work, and colorful, original contemporary writing on the natural world will help tell the story of our many, evolving North Carolina coasts. Combining marine science and the creative literary arts, this immersive course will explore issues of change over many eras. This combination of social, cultural, and scientific observation will lead to imaginatively constructed, well-written non-fiction reportage about one of North America's most productive, compelling, and challenging regions.
Students will explore the history of computer-assisted humanities scholarship, from its beginnings in computational linguistics, media studies, and humanities computing to its current incarnation as "digital humanities." The course will provide an introduction to the field and to digital research methodologies and prepare students to develop their own digital projects. Previously offered as ENGL 530.
ENGL 482Metadata, Mark-up, and Mapping: Understanding the Rhetoric of Digital Humanities3
This Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) course interrogates the rhetoric of data construction and management by positioning students as "critical makers" in a digital humanities project. Previously offered as ENGL 353.
A research-based course in which students are introduced to recent developments in the field of critical theory of games, and how thinkers in the public humanities draw on games to ask and answer questions in theoretical realms such as narrative, agency, language, identity, rhetoric, and economics. The course will culminate in a capstone digital humanities project in which students share their original research as a podcast. No gaming experience or equipment is needed.
ENGL 487Everyday Stories: Personal Narrative and Legend3
Oral storytelling may seem old-fashioned, but we tell true (or possibly true) stories every day. We will study personal narratives (about our own experiences) and legends (about improbable, intriguing events), exploring the techniques and structures that make them effective communication tools and the influence of different contexts and audiences.
Introduces major topics in the interdisciplinary field of critical security studies. Critically analyzing the public construction of risk and security in military, technological, informational, and environmental domains, the course explores major theories that attempt to make sense of the transnational proliferation of violence and risk in historical and contemporary contexts.
ENGL 489Science, Medicine, and Cultural Studies--Contemporary Issues3
The student will have an opportunity to concentrate on researching topics and texts central to the study of health, medicine, culture, and ethics. Central topics may include representations of genetics, cloning, reproduction, and biotechnology. Honors version available.
Permission of the program director. An occasional advanced course, which may focus on such topics as advanced creative nonfiction, editing and publishing, the lyric in song and collaboration between lyricists and composers, the one-act play, and short-short fiction.
This course introduces students to research methods in film studies. While this course will provide a broad survey of methods one might employ in film studies research of all kinds, the course may be restricted to a particular research topic.
Recommended for students in junior or senior year of study. Intensive mentored research, service learning, field work, or creative work. Requires 30 hours of research, writing, or experiential activities, culminating in a written project.
ENGL 50First-Year Seminar: Multimedia North Carolina3
Each student will complete a service-learning internship and compose a multimedia documentary about the experience using original text, photos, audio, and video.
ENGL 52First-Year Seminar: Computers and English Studies3
How do computers change the study of literature? How do images tell stories? How is writing evolving through photo essays, collages, and digital video? Students investigate these and related questions. Honors version available.
ENGL 53First-Year Seminar: Slavery and Freedom in African American Literature and Film3
The seminar's purpose is to explore the African American slave narrative tradition from its 19th-century origins in autobiography to its present manifestations in prize-winning fiction and film.
ENGL 54First-Year Seminar: The War to End All Wars? The First World War and the Modern World3
Examination of literary and cinematic works that expose the cultural impact World War I had on contemporary and future generations. Honors version available.
ENGL 55First-Year Seminar: Reading and Writing Women's Lives3
This first-year seminar emphasizes contemporary autobiographical writing by and about women. Students investigate questions of self and identity by reading and writing four genres of life writing: autobiography, autoethnography, biography, and personal essay. Both traditional written and new media composing formats will be practiced. Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 55H and ENGL 134H. Honors version available.
ENGL 564Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature3
Examines the ways knowledge from other disciplines can be brought to bear in the analysis of literary works. Questions of disciplinary limits and histories will also be addressed.
ENGL 57First-Year Seminar: Future Perfect: Science Fictions and Social Form3
This class will investigate the forms and cultural functions of science fiction using films, books, and computer-based fictional spaces (Internet, video games, etc). Honors version available.
ENGL 58First-Year Seminar: The Doubled Image: Photography in U.S. Latina/o Short Fiction3
Course will examine the aesthetic and cultural functions and implications of textual images of photography and photographs in United States Latina/o short stories from the 1960s to the present. Honors version available.
Offered as part of summer study abroad programs in Oxford, London, and Stratford-on-Avon. Students experience plays in performance and as texts, and discuss their literary, dramatic, cultural, and historical aspects. Honors version available.
ENGL 59First-Year Seminar: Black Masculinity and Femininity3
This first year seminar will use literature, film, and popular culture to explore different expressions of masculinity and femininity in the African American and Black diasporic context. Students will evaluate how artists use gender and sexuality for social critique and artistic innovation.
An opportunity to gain credit for an internship in a field related to the study of health humanities, such as science writing, health non-profit work, and qualitative research. Available to majors with at least a 3.0 GPA. Requirements include regular journal entries, meetings with a faculty advisor, and a final report of 10-15 pages.
This course introduces advanced undergraduate and graduate students to topics, methods, and concepts in health humanities through practical learning experiences.
ENGL 611Narrative, Literature, and Medicine: Advanced Interdisciplinary Seminar3
Sociologist Arthur Frank asserts that "whether ill people want to tell stories or not, illness calls for stories." This seminar explores narrative approaches to suffering, healing, and medicine's roles in these processes. Students learn literary and anthropological approaches to examine medically themed works from a range of genres.
ENGL 62First-Year Seminar: The Rhetoric of Wellness3
In this class, we study of the ways people write and talk about wellness. We practice a variety of research to investigate the language of wellness in books and online forums related to self-help. We use this research to inform the creation of communication projects. And we engage with one another through oral communication in multiple forms.
ENGL 620Introduction to Old English Language and Literature3
Students will learn to read Old English, the Germanic language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons in Britain from about the middle of the fifth century until the time of the Norman Conquest. Students will study Beowulf, "Caedmon's Hymn", and other selections in poetry and prose.
This course will focus on issues of intellectual freedom and censorship, with particular attention to the ways in which these issues are racialized. Why do people ban books? What makes a book "scandalous" or "immoral"? Honors version available.
This course will examine drama written and performed in England from 1570 to 1640, situating Shakespeare's plays in relation to others in his generation.
An investigation of important texts by 19th-century women writers that considers issues of gender in relation to other important considerations--tradition, form, culture--with an introduction to the chief scholarly and critical problems of this period.
A study of literary works written in English concerning World War I, or the Spanish Civil War and World War II, or the Vietnam War. Honors version available.
ENGL 66First-Year Seminar: Blake 2.0: William Blake in Popular Culture3
William Blake, the visionary poet, artist, and printmaker of the British Romantic period, has had enormous influence on modern art and popular culture. Using the Blake Archive, a hypertext of Blake's poetry and art, we will study key Blake works as well as the digital medium that enables us to study these works in new ways and performances and adaptations of them.
The focus is on Shakespeare's various treatments of war in his plays: all his Roman histories, most of his English histories, all his tragedies, even some of his comedies.
A history of literary criticism from the Greeks to mid-20th century, focusing on recurrent concerns and classic texts that are indispensable for understanding the practice of literary criticism today.
ENGL 665Queer Latina/o Literature, Performance, and Visual Art3
This course explores literature, performance art, film, and photography by Latinas and Latinos whose works may be described as "queer" and that question terms and norms of cultural dominance.
ENGL 666Queer Latina/o Photography and Literature3
This course explores Latina/o literature about photography in relation to photography by "queer" Latina/o artists and, through this double focus, poses certain questions about identity, subjectivity, and culture.
This mixed graduate and undergraduate course introduces students to the basic elements of the thought of Karl Marx and the reception and transformation of these elements in later philosophies and theories of culture. In addition to the work of Marx, students may expect to read work by such thinkers as G. W. F. Hegel, W. E. B. DuBois, Rosa Luxembourg, Antonio Gramsci, Fredric Jameson, Sylvia Federici, Michel Foucault, C. L. R. James, and others.
This mixed graduate and undergraduate course selectively surveys recent contemporary theory by asking how certain debates, controversies, or conversations have shaped the terrain of literary and cultural studies in the present day. Though the particular topic of the course will vary, select iterations may involve the diachronic study of influence; the apposition of different methodological approaches; or the survey of recent work in a given area, such as affect theory or postcolonial studies.
ENGL 670Being and Race in African American Literature3
An examination of phenomenology, the "philosophy of experience." Taking the perspective that literature helps clarify our experience, we will engage in readings of various genres--poetry, autobiography, fiction, and drama--as we examine how literature not only records experience, but also shapes it through a distinct method of reasoning.
Digital literature explores how literary works are composed for, shaped by, and studied in electronic environments. Course texts range from books to electronic fiction and poetry to video games. Hands-on activities give students a chance to develop their own literary projects--either as electronic literary works or as digital scholarship.
This course explores issues and methodologies related to online teaching. Topics include instructor-student dynamics in the online classroom, opportunities for extending the classroom through online platforms, trends in online pedagogy, and development of online teaching portfolios.
Students will investigate theories and practices of editing in multimedia, digital environments. Students will explore histories of textual editing, research major humanities projects, examine trends and toolsets related to developing scholarly digital materials, and collaborate with one another and with campus entities to develop an online digital humanities project.
This course provides a rigorous introduction to various theories (aesthetic, narrative, historical, political, psychological, philosophical) inspired by cinema.
This course examines aesthetic and social aspects of contemporary cinema, television, and/or other media. Previously offered as ENGL 580. Honors version available.
Multidisciplinary examination of texts and other media of the Americas, in English and Spanish, from a variety of genres. Two years of college-level Spanish or the equivalent recommended but not required.
This mixed level undergraduate and graduate student course examines queer LatinX literature from the 1970s to the present as it intersects with ecological and environmental concerns. We pay close attention to LatinX cultural productions that approach ecology and environmental justice from queer perspectives and that queer ecological concerns from minoritized perspectives.
ENGL 69First-Year Seminar: Entrepreneurial on the Web3
This course explores trends in online communication, emphasizing composition for the Web. The study of these writing activities is linked with a focus on innovation and on entrepreneurship.
Restricted to senior honors candidates. First semester of senior honors thesis. Independent research under the direction of an English department faculty member.
Restricted to senior honors candidates. Second semester of senior honors thesis. Essay preparation under the direction of an English department faculty member.
ENGL 693HCreative Writing Senior Honors Thesis, Part I3
Restricted to senior honors candidates. The first half of a two-semester seminar. Each student begins a book of fiction or creative nonfiction (25,000 words) or poetry (1,000 lines). Extensive discussion of student work in class and in conferences.
ENGL 694HCreative Writing Senior Honors Thesis, Part II3
Restricted to senior honors candidates. The second half of a two-semester seminar. Each student completes a book of fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry. Extensive discussion of student work in class and in conferences with instructor.
Guides students through the processes of developing an original research topic, conducting research, and analyzing research, leading students to produce a high-quality presentation of their findings. Topic varies by instructor but may focus on literary studies or closely-related arenas such as medical humanities, digital humanities, and creative writing, among others.
Subject
ENGL
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
May be repeated for credit; may be repeated in the same term for different topics; 9 total credits.
ENGL 70First-Year Seminar: Courtly Love, Then and Now3
This course examines the medieval concept of courtly love, or fin amour in a range of classical, medieval, and early modern texts. Questions that it might consider include the following: How does courtly love differ from modern visions of ideal love? Why is courtly love so often adulterous? And what is the relation of sex to love, in both the present and in the past?
Introduction to medieval studies for graduate students in any department. Intended to expose students to research problems, tools, and techniques in fields other than their own.
A study of rhetorical theories and practices from classical to modern times. Emphasis is on translation of theories into instructional practice for teaching in the college writing classroom.
This course introduces the history of technologies used to produce and circulate literature, from medieval Europe to the twenty-first-century. Proceeding chronologically, this history provides a broad overview of the material conditions of possibility for the emergence of literary form and genre in the Anglophone tradition.
This course explores the human struggle to make sense of suffering and debility. Texts are drawn from literature, anthropology, film, art history, philosophy, and biology. Honors version available.
This course provides students with an introduction to the landscape of digital humanities history, theories, tools, and methods with a focus on humanities data. We will explore the affordances and constraints of approaches to humanities data in archives and metadata, text analysis, data visualization, mapping, and game studies. Within each of these areas, students will assess leading theories and learn hands-on tools and methods in order to create a digital humanities seminar paper on a topic of their choosing.
An introduction to Old English language and literature that also attempts to relate that language to Modern English and to the larger context of the history of the English language.
This first-year seminar will introduce students to college-level critical analysis, writing, and oral communication by exploring representations of the 9/11 attacks and the "war on terrorism" in literature and popular culture.
Required preparation, a working knowledge of Old English. The translation and interpretation of Old English poetry including works such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, The Dream of the Rood, and Beowulf.
A study of Chaucer's major poetry, including Troilus and Criseyde, at least some of the 'dream' poems such as Parliament of Fowls, and most of The Canterbury Tales.
ENGL 73First-Year Seminar: Literature of War from World War I to the 21st Century3
This is a course about literature and war and what they might teach us about each other. Our work will be oriented around one central question: what, if anything, can a work of art help us see or understand about war that cannot be shown by other means? Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 73 and ENGL 161.
ENGL 74First-Year Seminar: Epic/Anti-Epic in Western Literature3
In this course, students will study epic and anti-epic strains in Western literature, reading key texts in the epic tradition from Homer and Virgil through the 20th century in light of various challenges to that tradition and tensions within it.
ENGL 75First-Year Seminar: Interpreting the South from Manuscripts3
The aim of the course is to give beginning university students the requisite research skills to allow them to appreciate and to contribute to an understanding of the past by directly experiencing and interpreting records from the past. Students will actually get to work with historical documents, some more than 200 years old.
An introduction to myriad texts, topics, controversies, institutions, and personalities that make up the ongoing knowledge projects that are loosely affiliated under the rubric "cultural studies."
ENGL 763Introduction to Methods in Health Humanities3
Permission of the Instructor. This course introduces students to topics and methods in health and humanities. Students will read classics in the field, engage texts from different disciplines and genres, and conduct intensive research into a condition or disability of their choosing.
This course examines texts by medical professionals who practice in perilous venues, as well as their sponsoring institutions (Christian missions, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders), investigating the texts' representational strategies and the historical and ethical settings of both texts and institutions.
ENGL 76HFirst-Year Seminar: Biography: People and Places, Chapel Hill3
This seminar focuses on biography, specifically on persons and places in Chapel Hill. Students will engage in basic research to create a final project around a person or place of their choice from any field or profession. Students will design and produce the biography in any format, from print to digital.
The main emphasis of the course will be on mastering the basic grammar of the language. There will be some readings from selected Old Irish glosses and from Aislinge Oenguso.
Readings from a variety of genres of Old Irish literature: Stories from the Tain, Crith Gablach, Cambrai Homily, Early Irish Lyrics, Scela Mucce Meic Datho.
ENGL 786Introduction to Graduate Study in English and Comparative Literature3
This course introduces students to the field of literary studies in English and comparative literature. Students will survey a range of approaches, methods, and controversies that have emerged from the field. The focus on critical and institutional histories will provide a foundation for graduate work and for developing professional objectives.
This course will explore the concept of globalization by focusing on the Asian diaspora, particularly the artistic and cultural productions that document, represent, and express Global Asians.
ENGL 801Research Methods in Composition and Rhetoric3
Course introduces graduate students to methodologies of research in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Emphasis is on theoretical and practical concerns that improve teaching and help develop research agendas.
Focus varies by semester, but generally investigates intersections of literacy, pedagogy, and rhetorical theory. Courses range from explorations of technology and literacy, to investigations of forms of writing and pedagogy.
ENGL 81First-Year Seminar: Jane Eyre and Its Afterlives3
Class members will reflect upon Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) in its original contexts and study subsequent novels and films that engage with it. What makes a literary work a "classic"? How do later readers' concerns affect their responses? Lovers of Jane Eyre are welcome, as are newcomers and skeptics.
Study of English from its Proto-Indo-European origins through the 18th century focusing on historic events and the major changes to the structure and usage of English they occasioned.
Intensive study of major Middle English authors or genres or of medieval cultural influences. Topics have included Malory, Piers Plowman and its tradition, drama, and intellectual backgrounds of medieval literature.
ENGL 828Perspectives on Renaissance Literature and Culture3
Students will study Renaissance literature while assessing the usefulness and status of a theoretical approach, such as feminist theory, queer theory, cultural materialism, new historicism, or psychoanalytic theory.
Sections: 1) Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 2) Byron, Shelley, Keats. Examination of the major Romantic poets, supplemented by readings in other Romantic authors.
Examination of important 19th-century British novels, such as those by Austen, Scott, Dickens, the Brontes, sensation novelists, Gaskell, Carroll, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, Doyle, Hardy, Meredith.
Topics vary: e.g., New England Puritanism, New England response to American literary nationalism; Emerson; Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe and the development of the American short story.
ENGL 85First-Year Seminar: Economic Saints and Villains3
Our objective throughout will be to analyze how literary art simultaneously demonizes and celebrates the "miracle of the marketplace" and those financial pioneers that perform its magic. Honors version available.
ENGL 857Studies in 20th-Century English and American Literature3
Studies in special modern and/or contemporary topics; e.g., the Irish literary renaissance, Latina/o Studies, Asian American Studies, cultural, visual culture, postcolonial, gender, and/or ethnic studies, and British and/or American Literature.
Seminar with varying topics, focusing on recent developments in literary and cultural theory, including narratology, feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and materialist theory.
Advanced exploration of myriad tests, topics, controversies, institutions, and personalities that make up the ongoing knowledge projects that are loosely affiliated under the rubric 'cultural studies.'
ENGL 864Studies in Latina/o Literature, Culture, and Criticism3
Representative work by Latina/o writers and critics in relation to major social and historical trends and critical models-border theory, biculturalism, mestizaje, tropicalization, diaspora, pan-latinidad, Afro-Latina/o disidentifications, and LatinAsia Studies.
ENGL 872Studies in African American and African Diasporan Literature3
An intensive study of a particular aspect of African American literature, such as speculative fiction, subject formation, comparative diasporan literatures, gender issues, theoretical and critical approaches, or formal innovations.
ENGL 874Literature of the U.S. South: Special Topics3
An in-depth treatment of selected topics (e.g., the Southern Renaissance, postmodern southern fiction, the racial conversion narrative) in Southern literature.
Seminar examines and engages with critical race theory and the various texts (narrative, cultural productions) that are in conversation with theories of race and that reflect representations of race.
ENGL 88First Year Seminar: The Legacy of the Japanese American Internment: from WWII to 9/113
This course will explore stories about the Japanese American internment from first person memoirs to contemporary fiction. We will also examine the ramifications, historic and legal, of the internment post-9/11.
This course will examine the relationships between Irish writing, culture, and modernism, in the context of international developments in literature and art.
