ÁÔÆæÖØ¿Ú

Mondays / Wednesdays / Fridays 10:00 – 10:50 am

Prof. Ann Emmons

LIT 110 is an introduction to the discipline of literary studies. We will consider the core (and complex) questions: what is literature? Who determines "great" literature? What is the relationship between author and reader? What is the relationship between an author and her moment in time? Why is "Introduction to Literature" a general-education requirement?  We will attempt answers within the framework of the University's pledge to train "tomorrow-proof" citizens, able to “think critically" (using Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno as our text), "explore creatively" (using Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion), and "live ethically" (using William Faulkner’s, As I Lay Dying).

By the end of the semester you will be a more perceptive reader of literature in the genres of poetry, the personal essay, and the novel; will have a clearer understanding of the tools that writers use to convey meaning; and will have been introduced to a range of interpretive approaches that literary scholars typically employ.

However, I am aware that most of you are not and do not intend to become English majors. Much of our discussion will therefore focus on the translation of literary “close-reading” techniques and interpretive strategies to all efforts at careful reading and interpretation (and, more generally, to all efforts toward critical thinking, creative exploration, and ethical living).  

Your weekly reading assignments will average 60 pages. This reading -- careful, engaged, on-time -- is your primary responsibility for this course. Writing assignments include an in-class free write and a more formal ~2-page reflection paper on each of our major texts.

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writing Course - Intermediate

Tuesdays / Thursdays 11:00 – 12:20

Prof. Rob Browning

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Part 11: “The Persistence of Memory” (1980)

This course is about interpreting literature, with the primary goal of helping you to read with greater understanding and pleasure. Our focus throughout the semester will be the question of how interpretation works: in short, what makes a given literary text meaningful and (quite possibly) interesting? How should a text’s genre—its adherence to the conventions of drama, epic poetry, or fiction—affect the ways we go about making sense of it? What do the most basic elements of literature (diction, figurative language, voice, sound, and structure) contribute to a text’s potential meanings? How do personal experiences and perspectives affect what each of us sees in a text and the ways we each interpret what we see? How can one’s understanding and appreciation of a particular work of literature change over time?

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writing Course - Intermediate

Mondays / Wednesdays 1:00 – 2:20 pm

Prof. Quan Ha

This course introduces you to American literature between the Civil War and WWI in relation to the literary movements known as American realism and naturalism. You will read and discuss several canonical texts that best represent the literary ideology, socio-historical context, and political climate of America between 1865 and 1914. You will study the major differences between realism and naturalism, as well as the controversies over the complexities of these literary movements.

Required texts:

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1865-1914, volume C
• William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writing Course - Intermediate

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30 – 10:50

Prof. Eric Reimer

As an introduction to British Literature and a gateway to more specialized study within this field, this course will survey a broad range of poets, novelists, dramatists, and essayists; as it does so, you will become acquainted with the significant characteristics of some of the major literary-historical periods (Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Contemporary). Thus, in addition to practicing close reading on individual texts, we will discuss the social and political contexts of the authors and their works, as well as attend to matters of genre, form, and literary tradition. There is no thematic organization for the course, but we will throughout the semester be considering the changing notions of self, language, and nation, especially as they are pressured by Nature, religion, science, and historical trauma. In this course you will write critical essays, work closely with poetic form, and think laterally across a range of traditions and concerns, but everything will begin with (and depend upon) your committed and energetic reading of the assigned readings. The featured texts will include poems across the various periods (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hardy, Yeats, Owen, Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Heaney, etc.), but also fiction by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Sam Selvon, and Salman Rushdie.

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writing Course - Intermediate

Tuesdays / Thursdays 2:00 – 3:20 pm

Prof. Rob Browning

"Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been."  ― David Brin, Through Stranger Eyes (2008)

In this course, we will explore the great unknowns of outer space and the future—both of which in science fiction, as Samuel R. Delany and others have argued—are really about here and now and what may actually be possible in our own lives. This course is both a wide-ranging introduction to science fiction, spanning from H. G. Wells to the present, and a sustained study of how SF artists have variously attempted to make sense of humanity against the backdrops of imagined possibilities. 

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writing Course - Intermediate

Mondays / Wednesdays 10:00 – 11:20 pm

Prof. Quan Ha

This course introduces you to various literary theories and their application to interpreting/analyzing literary texts. You will familiarize yourself with critical approaches that have emerged since the 1900s, and then apply their theoretical frameworks to your interpretation of literature. Some of the issues we will explore include whether interpretation should focus on uniquely “literary” aspects of creative texts, the relationship between texts and the “outside” world (literature’s social and/or historical contexts), what it means to be an author as well as a reader of texts, whether texts reflect human psychology and to what degree they can be regarded as “meaningful” in any stable sense. In sum, just what are we doing when we claim to be interpreting a work of literature?

Required texts:

• Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide
• David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
• Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
• bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

Gen Ed Attributes: Writing Course - Advanced

 

 

Mondays / Wednesdays 12:00 – 1:20

Prof. Robert Baker

          LEAR: . . . you see how this world goes.

          GLOUCESTER: I see it feelingly. 

This course is an introductory study of Shakespearean comedy, tragedy, and romance. We will read As You Like It, a comedy; Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and King Lear, three tragedies; and The Winter’s Tale, a romance. Comedy is a genre that celebrates the energies of youth, eros, and revived community against the forces of age, law, and deadening custom. Above all it affirms the place of romantic love in a flourishing life. Tragedy is a genre that represents the breaking of life, or the going under of life, and all the blindness, fury, isolation, and destruction that this so often involves. Yet it represents these bleak realities in a way meant to stir in us a larger perspective on human suffering, a deeper understanding of the intertwining of character and fate in a life. Romance, a genre of magic and wonder, the fabulous and the miraculous, love and grace, tells of the breaking and mending of life. It discloses powers of renewal that sometimes allow us to begin again on the other side of disaster.

Alongside five of Shakespeare’s plays we will read three contemporary short stories (still to be chosen). This will give us a chance to address the way essential concerns of Shakespeare’s plays are taken up by writers of fiction in our time. My hope is that thinking about the plays in the light of the stories, and thinking about the stories in the light of the plays, will help us to see further into all these works and, too, further into the abiding human concerns they wrestle with.

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit and Artistic Studies (L); Writing Course - Advanced

Tuesdays / Thursdays 11:00 – 12:20 

Prof. Brady Harrison

LIT 391 explores some of the greatest—and darkest, most chilling—works of Gothic fiction. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s foundational novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), and Lord Byron’s closet drama, Manfred (1816-17), we’ll then turn to a handful of the most famous (and perhaps greatest) novels of all time, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Bram Stoker’s vampire thriller, Dracula (1897), and Jean Rhys’ famous reply to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Alongside the novels, we’ll also have opportunities to read sometimes creepy, sometimes comic, often harrowing tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H.P. Lovecraft, William Faulkner, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and others, and we’ll look as deeply as we can into the gloomy settings, strange characters, bizarre happenings, and extreme psychological states that mark this perennially popular genre.  As the course proceeds we’ll also have opportunities to apply different critical theories to the primary texts and to discuss critical studies of the authors.

Texts (Subject to Revision!)

• Baldick, Chris. Ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. (Oxford.)
• Brontë, Charlotte.  Jane Eyre 3^rd Ed.  (Norton Critical Edition.)
• Brontë, Emily.  Wuthering Heights 4^th Ed. (Norton Critical Edition.)
• Byron, Lord.  Manfred.  (Wilder.)
• Rhys, Jean.  Wide Sargasso Sea.  (Norton Critical Edition.)
• Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (Penguin Classics.)
• Walpole, Horace.  The Castle of Otranto.  (Oxford World Classics.)

Tuesdays / Thursdays 2:00 – 3:20 pm

Prof. Eric Reimer

Although “music and literature” has yet to find its footing as an exact mode of inquiry, this course explores the intuition and the evidence that the two arts meet in significant ways. Mindful that music was of special importance to the Romantic poets, students begin the course by examining some of the great odes in the context of Walter Pater’s famous claim that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” The balance of the course involves traversing an eclectic but exciting reading list with the goal of assessing how music operates as a structuring device, as a metaphor, and as a guiding aesthetic principle in works of poetry and fiction. The musical contexts of the course find students visiting the classical, blues, jazz, folk, and popular music traditions. Texts include such twentieth century novels as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent, as well as selected poems from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods, various essays and theoretical texts, and one feature-length film. Students conclude their work in the course with the option of writing a conventional argumentative essay or a more creative multigenre essay.

Tuesdays / Thursdays 3:30 – 4:50 pm

Prof. Katie Kane

“Partition is the expedient of tired statesmen” –Conor Cruise O’Brien

This course will explore and work through cultural and literary responses to partition, the devolution of power under the divide and conquer protocols of British Empire, in three important geographical spaces: Ireland, which was divided into north and south in 1921; the Indian Subcontinent, which was partitioned in 1947; and the territory known as Palestine, which was divided in the same year into two states—Israel and Palestine.  In addition to familiarizing ourselves with the histories behind these three interlinking events of cleavage, and with a limited set of entailed critical theory, we will read poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that responds both to the violent division of communities and land at issue and to the continuing impact of those cataclysmic cartographies.  Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney’s poetry and Anna Burns’ Milkman will be among the Irish texts we will read.  Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and Country without a Postoffice by Agha Shahid Ali will allow for a dissection of the division of the Indian Subcontinent into India and Pakistan.  Edward Said’s The Last Sky, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent book The Message (2024), and the award-winning and recent poetry of Mosab Abu Toha—Things You May Find in My Ear— will provide us with working cultural contact with the history of the partition of Palestine.

 

Mondays / Wednesdays 1:30 - 2:50 pm

Visiting Prof. Heid Erdrich

 

Thursdays 3:30 – 6:20 pm

Prof. Brady Harrison

LIT 495, a capstone in the tradition of Problem Based Learning (if you’re not familiar with PBL, don’t worry: all will be explained), explores an issue at the foreground of contemporary American life:  in recent years, individuals, groups, and/or organizations have sought to have books removed from curricula, classrooms, and libraries.  According to CBS News, in the 2021-2022 school year, “more than 1600 books were banned from school libraries”:  “the bans affected 138 school districts in 32 states,” with Texas and Florida leading the nation.  In the “Key Findings” section of its report, “Banned in the USA:  The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools,” PEN America—an organization that, according to its mission statement, “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide”—finds a clear pattern across the US:  “More books banned.  More districts.  More states.  More students losing access to literature.”  As readers and students of literature, our goals will be to discover what efforts are being made to ban books, and why; we will also consider how and why some communities have pushed back against efforts to ban books and to limit free speech and the dissemination of knowledge.  Along the way, as case studies, we’ll investigate why the books on our reading list number among the most-banned books in America.

Texts (Subject to Revision!)

• Alexis, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (Little, Brown.)
• Atwood, Margaret.  The Handmaid’s Tale.  (Knopf.)
• Kobabe, Maia.  Gender Queer.  (Oni Press.)
• Morrison, Toni.  The Bluest Eye. (Vintage.)

 

Thursdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Robert Baker

In this course we will read three or four works by each of three great writers of fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Toni Morrison (1931-2019), W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), and Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003).

Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, a classic account of the emergence of realist representation in modern European literature, says that the nineteenth-century realist novel has two essential features: first, it represents ordinary people as “tragic, ambiguous, and problematical,” and second, it embodies a “historical” understanding of both the past and the present, exploring the way particular individuals are caught up in larger historical dynamics they only partially understand. Auerbach concludes his book by tracing the way the realist novel is developed, recast in multiperspectival forms, in the modernist period of the first half of the twentieth century. The novel of our time, be it largely realist or largely modernist or somehow both at once or yet something else, is still often shaped by these dimensions of the realist and modernist novel.

Morrison, Sebald, and Bolaño are concerned to represent not only the interiorities and tragic predicaments of characters but also the sweep of historical forces and events that bear on these characters’ lives. Each tends to concentrate on a different region of history: Morrison on American history, in particular African American history, from the time of slavery through the present; Sebald on the history of European modernity and, within this history, the Holocaust; Bolaño on Latin American history of the second half of the twentieth century, in particular the conflict between egalitarian hope and counter-revolutionary reality that marked the region throughout this period. All three differ considerably in style, in voice, in the form they give their works. Yet they are all deeply concerned with history, violence, trauma, forgetting, memory, and vision, on both individual and collective planes of experience. We will try to see what their works disclose.

Provisional reading list: Morrison, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise; Sebald, The Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz; Bolaño, A Distant Star, Chile by Night, Amulet, The Savage Detectives.

 

Mondays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Katie Kane

"I propose the following definition of the nation [region]: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.  It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation [region] will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation [region] is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”--Benedict Anderson [re-tooled]

This workshop-seminar hybrid will take up and examine the culturally constructed places that we live or believe we live: not, however, as we have been at the academy accustomed to do, on the national scale, but rather in the neglected terms of our more vibrant habitude, the densely imagined and contested terms of the local.  We will start with the construct of the Deep North, the ÁÔÆæÖØ¿Ú of our current life, a cultural and geographic sub-region of the United States cognate with the Deep South—both national sectors in which white supremacism not only has flourished but has also found a home.  The Deep North includes those states and provinces that are part of or importantly adjacent to the current “Oil Extraction Belt” (North Dakota, ÁÔÆæÖØ¿Ú, Wyoming, Alberta, South Dakota, Idaho, and Manitoba), where capitalist settler colonialism is perpetually extractive, forever located in the phase of primitive accumulation in which dispossession of land, resources, personhood, and sovereignty is an ongoing and constitutive feature.  After reading about region in the texts of critical theory, we will familiarize ourselves with some of the ways in which ÁÔÆæÖØ¿Ú is written into culture: Jim Welch’s Winter in the Blood, Heather Cahoon’s Horsefly Dress, and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s short stories, along with “ÁÔÆæÖØ¿Ú classics” such as A River Runs Through It, and The Story of Mary MacLane will be important to our work .  We will range afield from the state of ÁÔÆæÖØ¿Ú by engaging with texts from workshop-seminar participants’ “home” regions as they are suggested by the community (so a significant section of the  syllabus will be constructed by us during the early part of the semester).  As an instance of reading in region, I would propose Eileen Myles Chelsea Girls (New England), excerpts from Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies (The Piedmont), and Sean Hill’s Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (Georgia).  Art and writing of the collective—theoretical, archival, exploratory, lyric, poetic—will, in all genres, be read weekly. 

Tuesdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Louise Economides

In this seminar, we will explore visions of our ecological future as reflected in contemporary literature, and how such texts negotiate pressing environmental issues in the Anthropocene era. We’ll also pair literary texts with cutting-edge environmental theory which challenges our received notions of what constitutes “nature,” and which considers the future viability of “nature” within the context of biotechnology, global climate change and neo-liberal capitalism as large-scale forces changing the ecosphere. 

Some of the questions we’ll consider include:  why are majority of speculative narratives about our ecological future dystopian, rather than utopian?  In what ways does contemporary fiction reflect what Fredric Jameson characterizes as a “crisis” of utopian vision in late-capitalist societies and what does this say about the state of contemporary eco-politics?  Are concepts of dystopia and utopia equally inadequate for mapping our socio-ecological future? Can speculative literature imagine future ecological paradigms that overcome the limitations of “nature” as it is theorized within modernist and/or humanist frameworks?  Or does most speculative literature simply reflect the limitations of current ecological thought by tracing the probable outcomes of our flawed social systems?

 

This beginning writing workshop emphasizes the reading, discussion, and revision of students' short fiction. Students will be introduced to the technical elements of writing fiction. No prior experience in writing short fiction required.

Gen Ed Attributes: Expressive Arts Course (A)

3 Credits

This beginning writing workshop focuses on the reading, discussion, and revision of students' poems. Students will study and use models of poetic techniques. No prior experience in writing poetry required.

Gen Ed Attributes: Expressive Arts Course (A)

3 Credits

A study of the art of nonfiction through reading and responding to contemporary nonfiction and the writing of original nonfiction works. Focus is on creative expression, writing technique and nonfiction forms. Students begin with writing exercises and brief essays, advancing to longer forms as the semester progresses.

Gen Ed Attributes: Expressive Arts Course (A)

3 Credits

Mondays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Robert Stubblefield

Tuesdays / Thursdays 12:30 – 1:50 pm

Prof. Robert Stubblefield

Prereq, completion of CRWR 210A with a "B" average or better. An intermediate fiction writing workshop. Students will be expected to finish 3 or 4 substantial stories for the course. Although some outside material will be considered, the primary emphasis will be analysis and discussion of student work.

Tuesdays / Thursdays 12:30 - 1:50

Prof. Kelly Schirmann

Prereq., CRWR 212A or CRWR 210A. An intermediate nonfiction workshop. Students read and respond to model essays, in addition to creating and revising original essays for workshop review. Assignments and exercises focus on writing craft and research techniques.

Mondays 3:00 – 5:50 am

Prof. Maxim Loskutoff

Prereq., junior standing and CRWR 310. An advanced writing workshop in which student manuscripts are read and critiqued. Rewriting of work already begun (in CRWR 310 classes) will be encouraged.

Tuesdays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Sean Hill

Poetry is the art of connection—yoking disparate things together with metaphor, stringing sounds together in patterns of rhythm and rhyme, employing the power of syntax with a chain of words. In this course, students will analyze published poems for specific strategies of connection and discuss the ways the poet uses these various techniques to establish motivation and emotional depth, and create linguistic music, among other things. Writing in the class will focus primarily on the generation and revision of the students’ own poems. Students will participate in evaluating their own work and the work of their peers. The goal of this course is to deepen and expand the students’ poetry writing skills and knowledge developed in previous creative writing workshops. Each student will produce an end-of-term portfolio of revised poems.

Prereq., junior standing and CRWR 311.

Level: Undergraduate-Graduate

Wednesdays 4:00 – 6:50 pm

Prof. Robert Stubblefield

 

Although we will make generous use of the UM Archives to study samples of letterpress printing as well as our collection of work in studio, CRWR 491 will be largely a studio course in which students will familiarize themselves with the pressroom and the printing process. Over the course of the term, students in CRWR 491 will work collaboratively to identify texts to design, typeset, and print on the U of M’s Hacker Test Press. By the end of the term, students will have printed multiple texts in various forms.

Thursdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. David Axelrod

Level: Undergraduate-Graduate

Wednesdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Emily Ruskovich

Prereq, consent of instr. A creative writing workshop focused primarily on fiction.

Level: Graduate

Wednesdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Maxim Luskutoff

Prereq, consent of instr. A creative writing workshop focused primarily on fiction.

Level: Graduate

Tuesdays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Visiting Prof. Heid Erdrich

Level: Graduate

Wednesdays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Amy Leach

Prereq., consent of instr. A creative writing workshop focused primarily on personal essay and narrative nonfiction. Attention given to writing and publishing professional magazine essays. Students complete two substantial essays.

Level: Graduate

Tuesdays, 3:00 - 5:50 pm

Prof. Emily Ruskovich

Prereq, consent of instr. 

Level: Graduate

 

Mondays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Chris Dombrowski

Prereq., consent of instr.

Level: Graduate

Thursdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Sean Hill

Combining “eco” from the Greek oikos (house) and “poet” from the Greek poietes (maker), an ecopoet asks what can be made of this gas-wrapped sphere we call home, the Earth? In this course, we will study and write poetry that engages with this house of ours—its biomes, its ecosystems. We will consider our neighbors, the plants and animals who share our home with us. We will explore the connectedness and interdependency of all things—living and non-living—plants, animals, soil, rivers, and oceans, etc. We will consider diverse perspectives of our connected relations through such lenses as gender, race, class, and culture. We will explore the intersections such as that of the non-human world, history, and science. We will read contemporary poets such as Camille Dungy, Jennifer Chang, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Ed Roberson as models and guides.

Reading List:

• Cascadia Filed Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield
• Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille Dungy
• Once Removed by Elizabeth Bradfield
• Some Say the Lark by Jennifer Chang
• Trophic Cascade by Camille Dungy
• Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis
• Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
• Asked What Has Changed by Ed Roberson
• Meltwater: Poems by Claire Wahmanholm

Prereq., consent of instr.

Level: Graduate

 

Prof. Traolach O'Riordain

Prereq., IRSH 101. The primary objective of this course is to build on the foundations laid in Elementary Irish I. Students will expand their vocabulary with a special focus on verbs; they will also engage new themes that demand a corresponding increase in their store of nouns, adjectives, idioms and expressions. Students will also learn more songs and poems from the Irish tradition and thus increase their idiomatic and syntactical knowledge of the language. This course is housed in the English Department. The GenEd Foreign Language requirement can be fulfilled by successful completion of 102.

Gen Ed Attributes: Language Requirement

Prof. Traolach O'Riordain

Prereq. IRSH 201 or its equivalent from another university. Students will expand their knowledge of Irish language verbs: they will study the five declensions of the nouns; and acquire the vocabulary and language necessary to engage more abstract ideas and topical issues on an intellectual level. For proficiency equal to the 202-level, students must take the four semester sequence (101, 102, 201, & 202) of Irish language study. 

Gen Ed Attributes: Language Requirement

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30 - 10:50

Prof. Erin Costello Wecker

This course is designed to provide students with the rhetorical knowledge and cultural perspectives necessary to be successful writers at the college-level and more specifically within the field of Irish Studies. This course emphasizes the importance of critical thinking, reading, and composing in an academic context. To do this, students will explore research practices within the field of Irish Studies and related disciplines (such as feminist rhetorical practices, women’s and gender studies, and postcolonial studies) and successful composing methods to bring these insights to the page. Students will expand their purview by examining the literary, historical, national, and gender contexts for interpreting Irish texts.

Ed Attributes: Writing Course - Intermediate. 

Tuesdays / Thursdays 11:00 - 12:20

Prof. Erin Costello Wecker

Do you like music? Are you curious about how music informs cultural identity? Do you need to satisfy your Intermediate Writing requirement for General Education?

If you said yes to any of these questions IRSH 382 is the course of your dreams!

In IRSH 382 we will explore the concept of “Irishness” through generative works of music by artists such as Seán Ó Riada, The Wolf Tones, The Pogues, Sinéad O’Connor, U2, The Cranberries, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, and Soulé (not an exhaustive list). We will examine traditional Irish music as a cultural form. Next, we will move through genres and decades charting political and cultural shifts as represented in folk, rebel, rock, punk, and pop music. We will explore concerns of authenticity and hybridity in Irish popular music and apply theoretical ways of understanding the reproduction and marketing of “Irishness” in a global context.

Ed Attributes: Writing Course - Intermediate. 

Tuesdays / Thursdays 3:30 – 4:50 pm

Prof. Katie Kane

“Partition is the expedient of tired statesmen” –Conor Cruise O’Brien

This course will explore and work through cultural and literary responses to partition, the devolution of power under the divide and conquer protocols of British Empire, in three important geographical spaces: Ireland, which was divided into north and south in 1921; the Indian Subcontinent, which was partitioned in 1947; and the territory known as Palestine, which was divided in the same year into two states—Israel and Palestine.  In addition to familiarizing ourselves with the histories behind these three interlinking events of cleavage, and with a limited set of entailed critical theory, we will read poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that responds both to the violent division of communities and land at issue and to the continuing impact of those cataclysmic cartographies.  Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney’s poetry and Anna Burns’ Milkman will be among the Irish texts we will read.  Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and Country without a Postoffice by Agha Shahid Ali will allow for a dissection of the division of the Indian Subcontinent into India and Pakistan.  Edward Said’s The Last Sky, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent book The Message (2024), and the award-winning and recent poetry of Mosab Abu Toha—Things You May Find in My Ear— will provide us with working cultural contact with the history of the partition of Palestine.

Online / Asynchronous

Prof. Hannah Collins

The objective of this course is to provide students with a basic knowledge and historical perspective of Irish traditional music. Irish traditional music is an aural tradition which and has been passed down through the generations. This course aims to impart students with a foundational knowledge of Irish traditional music, its' origins, instrumentation, features and regional styles. We will engage in as much listening as possible in this session, enabling students to identify and understand the various features of this rich tradition. At the end of this course, students will be very familiar with Irish traditional music and will be comfortable with many of the foundational elements of the tradition covered in the course.

Gen Ed Attributes: Writing Course - Intermediate

Offered every term. Prereq.,  or proof of passing score on writing diagnostic examination, ACT English, 22-27, ACT Combined English/Writing 18-31, ACT Writing subscore 7-10, SAT Writing Score 440-690, SAT Essay subscore 7-10, ACT Writing subject score 19-32, ACT English Language Arts (ELA) score 18-31, SAT Writ/Language Test score 25-36. Emphasis on rhetorical understanding, textual analysis, and genre flexibility.

Gen Ed Attributes: Introductory Writing

Offered autumn and spring. Prereq., placement or C or better in ; ACT English 28 or higher; ACT Combined English/Writing 32-36; ACT Writing subscore 11-12; SAT Writing Score 700-800; SAT Essay subscore 11-12; ACT Writing subject score 33 or higher; ACT English Language Arts (ELA) score 32 or higher; SAT Writ/Language Test score 37 or higher. Offers instruction in rhetorical reading and writing, particularly the study and practice of written argumentation in different academic and civic contexts.

Gen Ed Attributes: Intermediate Writing, Introductory Writing

Wednesdays 5:00 - 7:50

Offered autumn and spring. Prereq. or Coreq., , . Emphasis on various approaches to teaching reading and literature in grades 5-12. Research about the development and maturity of readers, strategies for teaching reading comprehension and vocabulary, strategies for diagnosing reading abilities and criteria for reading assessment, reading workshops/literature circles. Emphasis on various approaches to teaching literature: genre, inquiry, thematic, chronological and interdisciplinary. Includes techniques for developing responses to fiction, nonfiction, prose, poetry, film and other media. Focus on the design of lesson plans and curriculum using traditional/classic, contemporary, young adult, and multicultural literature in grades 5-12. Required of students pursuing secondary English major and minor teaching licenses.

Level: Undergraduate-Graduate