English Courses

1 credit ENGL 100
3 credits ENGL 130

ENGL 100, Section 2: MWF 10:10  – 11 a.m.
(must take concurently with  ENGL 130, Section 4)

ENGL 100, Section 3: MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
(must take concurently with  ENGL 130, Section 8)

ENGL 100, Section 4: MWF 2:30 – 3:20 p.m.
(must take concurently with  ENGL 130, Section 13)

ENGL 100HON, Section 5: MWF 11:15 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
(must take concurently with  ENGL 130HON, Section 22)

ENGL 100HON, Section 6: MWF 9:05 – 9:55 a.m.
(must take concurently with  ENGL 130HON, Section 31)

ENGL 100: Humanities Seminar in Self, Citizenship, and Community (1 cr)  is a required co-requisite to Cornerstone ENGL 130. This 4-week intensive Humanities seminar explores the question of what individuals owe their communities. We will explore this question through careful reading and discussion of essays and short stories. Writing assignments will encourage personal reflection by asking students to consider how the readings complicate typical understandings of self and society as they consider their own developing sense of self. (August 25-September 24)

ENGL 130: Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences (3 cr) and its required co-requisite of ENGL 100 asks students to participate in writing, research, and collaboration necessary to solve a community problem. Students will use their experience with the public project to reflect on issues raised by the ENGL 100 seminar. These opportunities for reflection on self and society are connected to the development of leadership skills. (September 26-December 19)

Essential Studies: Communication (2)

3 credits

This course is designed to introduce students to—and to help them practice—the ways that people in a university setting write, read, and think. Through readings and writing assignments, students learn to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts. By the end of the course, students should:

• Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various contexts;
• Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations;
• Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, and critique—to compose texts that integrate your ideas with those from our readings;
• Develop a writing project through multiple drafts;
• Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing;
• Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress;
• Reflect on the development of your composing practices and how those practices influence your writing and reading;
• Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising;
• Practice applying citation conventions systematically in your own work.

To promote these outcomes, the course will also engage students in a real, current, and on-going academic project. In the process, students engage in serious and sustained work, reading academic and popular essays, writing four or five formal papers, and working through many stages of drafting and revising.

Essential Studies: Communication (1)

3 credits

This course, which builds upon ENGL 110, gives students experience with genres and rhetorical situations beyond the academic classroom. In begins with a set of common readings on an important social issue to establish a context for the work of the class. Throughout the semester, students engage in a series of research tasks and writing projects that center on a collaboratively-authored project proposal or recommendation for a specific audience or community. Then, students use the knowledge gained through research and rhetorical awareness to produce documents that will help inform and persuade the public. By the end of the course, students should:

• Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts;
• Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes;
• Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure;
• Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials;
• Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes;
• Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress;
• Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities to address a range of audiences;
• Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions;
• Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts;
• Practice applying citation conventions systematically in your own work.

Through all of its projects, the course builds students' ability to work rhetorically--to think carefully about the audience, purpose, persona, and genre, as well as the impact that writing can have in the community. Like ENGL 110, this course requires revision, peer review, group projects, and writing workshops.

To promote these outcomes, the course will also engage students in a real, current, and on-going academic project. In the process, students engage in serious and sustained work, reading academic and popular essays, writing four or five formal papers, and working through many stages of drafting and revising.

Essential Studies: Communication (2)

C. Walker-Basu
Section 1: MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
Section 2: MWF 11:15 – 12:05 p.m.
3 credits

Writing is a muscle and good writers exercise regularly. ENGL 226 is an introductory course open to students of any major who are interested in exercising their writing muscles by reading, writing, and talking about reading and writing. The class will be discussion-based and focused on reading and writing assignments done both inside and outside of the classroom. Students will additionally be required to compose numerous, original creative works of their own, including short fiction, playwriting, and poetry. These works will be shared and critiqued in group workshops so that they may be revised as part of the student’s creative portfolio.

Essential Studies: Fine Arts

D. Olobaniyi
MWF 10:10 – 11 a.m.
3 credits

Eco-Literature

This course examines how cultural narratives and literary theory shape our understanding of nature, the environment, and ecology, engaging with concepts such as the Anthropocene. While we will primarily focus on contemporary writers and thinkers, we will also explore historical perspectives that have influenced how we perceive the natural world (our environment) today.

Through reading, writing, discussion, and analysis, we will form and develop new ways of thinking about the environment. Our exploration of eco-literature will include reading a diverse selection of works like poetry, memoirs, novels, critical theory, and narrative science, and other similar readings. From these readings, we identify, observe, learn patterns across the text, and build deeper more complex insights. Writing will serve as a key tool for refining and expanding our ideas of the natural world.

By the end of the semester, students will complete a flexible final project that reflects their thinking; one that demonstrates their engagement with literature and the environment in a meaningful way.

Essential Studies: Humanities; also cross-listed core curriculum in Environmental Studies.

Dr. Koleva
Section 1: MWF 11:15 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
Section 2: MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
3 credits

Education and Schooling

The idea to receive good education and attend school is an integral part of the American belief system. It appeals to generations of Americans with its promise for social and economic advancement, personal growth, and self-betterment. But what educational plans were conceptualized and implemented over time and to whose advantage?

In this course, we will study how American ideas of good education gained cultural traction and influenced the worldviews of individuals and groups of people at different times. We will ask what good education is and who is entitled to it. We will reflect on how schooling experiences shape one’s sense of worth and suggest ways to participate in community and social life. We will trace how ideas of good education transpire into schooling practices and educational methods, designed both to spread select knowledge and to advance visons of social organization and social relations.

We will work with a mix of sources – literature, film, media publications, and others – to illustrate the dominant cultural views on good education and schooling in different periods of the U.S. history. We will begin by identifying cultural assumptions about good education today. Then, we will plunge into the examination of specific historical experiences of schooling and education. We will finish the course by thinking further about the power of cultural assumptions about good education on us.

Essential Studies: Humanities/Analyzing Worldviews

Dr. Wolfe
MWF 1:25 – 2:15 p.m.
3 credits

Community and Identity

How do we become who we “are”? And how are our identities shaped by our communities and the social forces that surround us? In this course, we will read and discuss works of literature that highlight those questions. While the reading list is still under construction, it will likely include Shakespeare’s Hamlet (both text and film versions)—the story of a young man whose sense of himself is in intractable conflict with his social and familial obligations—Frederic Douglass’s Narrative, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. We will read slowly, with plenty of time for discussion and exploration. Writing in the course will be largely response-based, and will include opportunities for students to reflect on their own identities and relationships to their communities.

This course will count as an Essential Studies Breadth of Knowledge course in Humanities and as a Core 2 course for students interested in the new Cornerstone Minor in Applied Humanities.

Essential Studies: Humanities/Literature and Social Issues

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
3 credits

What is technology? What is literature? What does each term allow us to understand about the other? Using these questions as a sort of jumping off point, we’ll explore a selection of texts, which help us better understand technology, and how we can use literature to help us better engage with it. Some topics we’ll touch on:

• Our world, and what happens after the end of it?
• Other worlds, and how we get there?
• What if we find a dragon or something?
• How will we dress for all of it?

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Henry
T/TH 2 – 3:15 p.m.
3 credits

We know how it feels to encounter a book or a literary magazine—the feeling of the physical book’s heft in your hand and the visual appeal of its font and margins, or the joy of seeing an online mag that carefully selects fonts and widgets. While the book and magazine are, of course, beautifully crafted aesthetic objects, they’re also products of collaborations between writers, editors, designers, and publishers. The magazine and the book are also products produced by an industry that has constantly evolved to confront the new realities of industrialism, mass media, and—in our own era—the emergence of digital platforms. So what is the history of this profession? What does it mean to be a writer or an editor in the evolving publishing industry? And what, exactly, goes into producing a publication?

In this course, we’ll answer that question, and we’ll also study and practice the art of editing. Through critical readings, narrative nonfiction, and hands-on experience, we’ll learn more about editing as a potential career track, the role of editors in the publishing industry, and the professional relationships between editors and writers. We’ll also draw inspiration from some of the publishers and publications represented in our UND literary community, like the Digital Press @ UND, North Dakota Quarterly, Modern Language Studies, and/or our student-run, campus lit mag Floodwall. Through a variety of individual writing assignments and classroom activities, we’ll also learn many of the skills that will allow you to forge your own path in editing and publishing.

Dr. Alberts / S. Heitkamp
MW 1:25  – 2:15 p.m.
3 credits

Outside the realm of STEM, most of the time we know what we think we know because someone has told us a story, taken a photo, painted a picture, saved letters, sewn a quilt, shared a recipe, or some combination of the above. Those who are asked to care for these items for future generations—formally or informally—are serving as curators of a “cultural collections.” Some of us are lucky enough to see and use more formal collections every day from libraries to museums to the art on the walls of buildings across UND’s campus.

This course will involve discussions on methods of curation and research, particularly in light of community-based approaches. The course will also introduce students to the legal, ethical, and cultural protocols that impact the management and stewardship of cultural collections in a variety of institutional settings.

After completing this course, you should:

• Have a familiarity with some of the principles of acquisition, assessment, preservation, cataloguing, organization, presentation, and storage of a physical cultural collection.
• Have been introduced to copyright law and the ethics of working with cultural collection.
• Have been introduced to writing policy for collections management and use.
• Have been introduced to writing grant proposals.
• Have learned how to plan, curate, and promote a cultural collection.

One possible project for this class is to create a print, art book focused on the works on exhibit in Merrifield Hall (the project will be completed in the spring semester in the practicum portion of this class, but students may take one or both classes).

This course is a required class for the new Certificate in Indigenous Digital Humanities and Cultural Collections Care. It does not count toward the English major or minor.

Dr. Wigard
MWF 10:10 – 11 a.m.
3 credits

In this course, students will learn about the field of digital humanities (DH), which is much what it sounds like: using digital tools and methods for humanities projects, and likewise, applying humanities interpretation, analysis, and critique to technology. As an introductory course, no programming nor humanities experience is required. Each week, we will complete some new coding exercises alongside of reading histories of technology, data, and information. In essence, we will gain a broader understanding of digital technologies we interact with every day (websites, databases, generative AI, email, etc.) and analog/print technologies (the printed page, motherboards and wires, electrical signals, etc.). 

This course features a combination of learning modes that aligns with the flexible and active field of DH, including: instructional lecturing; individual coding and programming; digital “hacking;” group-based project work; and humanities-based research. You do not need a high-powered computer, and no textbook purchase will be required. 

Essential Studies: Humanities/ Digital Information Literacy

Dr. Alberts
MWF 11:15 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
3 credits

This class is designed to take your reading and writing to the next level. While it is the first part of our introduction to the English major and required for the Creative Writing Certificate, the skills taught—critical thinking, effective argumentation, and clear communication—are useful regardless of major or career goals.

This class will help prepare you for upper-level courses by training you in the close reading of texts—fiction, poetry, plays, music videos, and films. In other words, it teaches you to move beyond the important, but often vague and emotional reactions we all have to written texts ("I hate that character!" or "This must be true!" or "This must be a lie!") and to analyze instead the language choices writers make in order to elicit those reactions (sometimes called the craft of the text) and create meaning. This course will ask you to read literary texts across a variety of genres in more detail than you are likely to have done in the past. It will require you to consider not only the content of those texts (that is, what they say), but also their form (that is, how they say what they say), and how the two work together.

If the “reading texts” portion of the course is breaking down texts into their various parts, the “writing about texts” portion is about putting those parts back together again in a new way. The course will ask you to practice the sort of expository writing that you’ll eventually do in upper-level courses: it will focus on framing appropriate arguments about literary texts, rather than emotional responses to them; on constructing strong statements that clearly communicate debatable claims; on selecting, interpreting, and organizing textual evidence to support those claims and to persuade your reader.

We’ll work through a series of both short and formal writing assignments: "prewritings" will be a way of collecting and assessing literary data; short responses use that data to get ideas started; then we’ll draft, conference, and revise short essays assignments. You'll note the use of "we:" this will be a small class with frequent feedback, the intent of which is to help you refine your own use of language as you discuss that of other writers. 

Essential Studies: Humanities/Advanced Communication

Dr. Wolfe
MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
3 credits

This course will survey the complex cultural interactions that emerged out of the European “discovery” and subsequent colonization of the “New World” of North America.  Long before “America” meant the “United States,” the project of European colonization brought together Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans; therefore, this course will explore the origins of the United States as growing from the crossings of these multiple cultural histories.  In addition to poetry, fiction, and autobiography, our readings will include many texts that stretch the boundaries of what we might typically consider “literature”—Native American oral traditions, European narratives of exploration and colonization, Puritan and other religious texts, Captivity narratives, slave narratives, and political tracts. 

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Kersten
MW 3– 4:15 p.m.
3 credits

ENGL 306 deepens the study of fiction writing begun in ENGL 226. In this course, you will hone your craft by studying the short story in some of its historic and contemporary forms, including examples of mainstream literary fiction and genre fiction. Moreover, this course will introduce you to some of the key techniques used to create compelling characters, plots, and narrative structures in fiction. While expanding your knowledge of short-form fiction, you will also practice various creative methods and techniques through writing prompts, workshops, drafting exercises, and so on. In peer workshops, you will also develop your critical eye and learn how to apply editorial strategies to your own work. In addition to reading and writing short stories, you will also be introduced to “craft essays,” which explain literary techniques or probe pressing topics in editing, publishing, and literary citizenship. This course will offer you an encouraging and supportive environment in which to develop your voice and vision as a fiction writer; you will have opportunities to share your work both in class and during open mic nights scheduled throughout the semester. Prerequisite: ENGL 226 or instructor’s permission.

Dr. Kielmeyer
Section 1: T/TH 9:30– 10:45 a.m.
Section 2: T/TH 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
3 credits

This course will serve as an introduction to the analysis and craft of non-fiction writing. We will explore a range of genres including travel and science writing, literary journalism, memoir, criticism, observational and argumentative essays, and humor and satire. We will work to understand how authors use rhetorical and creative strategies to write compelling non-fiction, and then use what we learn about effective reading strategies to work through the process of crafting your own essays.

Through close readings and workshops, we will spend the semester trying to understand and recreate the tension between traditional creative writing strategies (plot, narrative, character development, conflict) and the accuracy that creative non-fiction writers must balance in order to maintain the distinction of non-fiction. You will practice developing an eye for writing techniques and methods, while also testing out your own voice as an essayist, in order to help build confidence and authority in your ideas and perspectives as readers and writers.

This course will be discussion-based and will require regular participation through active and engaged reading and writing.

Essential Studies: Fine Arts/Advanced Communication

J. Zerr
Mon 3– 5:30 p.m.
3 credits

Grammar is a word that can quickly conjure up negative associations. English speakers often say that they are “not good at grammar” without any trace of irony; however, the ability to declare such a thing in English relies on knowing English grammar intuitively.

As a course, Modern Grammar seeks to turn what we know intuitively of English into an explicit understanding about English. Using various approaches to the structure of modern English, we will analyze how English works and how it is used. While our study will be grounded in description, we will also critically explore persistent prescriptions about “good” and “bad” grammar. However, this course is not a review of mechanical and usage skills.

By the end of the course, you will have a new vocabulary for talking about grammar, more confidence in your ability to explain English structures, and a better appreciation for the system that allows us to “do things with words.”

Required Text:
Analyzing English Grammar, 7^th edition, 2013

Authors: Klammer, T. P., Schulz, M. R., & Della Volpe, A. ISBN-13: 9780205252527

Dr. Sauer
T/TH 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
3 credits

King Arthur & Robin Hood

Two of the most popular figures in medieval literature are King Arthur and Robin Hood. Ostensibly, one (Arthur) is a hero, while the other (Robin Hood) is a criminal. Yet, each could be considered either a hero or an outlaw at times. We will discuss how narratives about Arthur and Robin Hood have shifted over time and how these stories both reflect and shape beliefs and anxieties about the social and historical moments in which they were created. For instance, Robin Hood’s (supposed) ethos of taking from the rich to feed the poor remains popular, and this sentiment means he often reemerges during times of economic hardship. King Arthur will supposedly make a messianic return in the hour of Britain’s greatest need. (Since he hasn’t yet appeared, I guess we are safe for now.)

This course will investigate the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood as they were constructed in England throughout the Middle Ages, from around the sixth century forward. Both characters are popular and have persisted in our popular culture and imagination, showing up in modern literature and movies to this day. Alongside the texts, we will consider the concept of chivalry, the institutions and literature of chivalry in the Middle Ages, and the cultural impact of chivalry from the Middle Ages to the present. We will look at versions of their stories in many languages (though in translation, of course): English, French, Latin, Dutch, German, Welsh, Scottish, and Old Norse for a start. Finally, we will consider both legendary characters against the desire to define “Britishness” and what it meant to be part of the culture, as well as how the opposing narratives work together as resistance to overbearing monarchial and state authority, alongside the ideals of friendship and loyalty that these narratives evoke.

Dr. Carson
Wed 3 – 5:30 p.m.
Online Synchronous
3 credits

Bibles as Literature and in Culture

(Also offered as ENGL 369HON)

This class will allow us to pursue two interwoven projects of study: 

1. We’ll read and analyze “as literature” several key texts from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament.  Our work in this context will be to analyze these biblical texts using the same critical approaches we would use with other literary works, with special attention paid to narrative, plot, characters, symbolism, metaphor, irony, humor, tragedy, point of view, setting and “performance spaces,” etc.  We will also look at the historical contexts of these writings as they first appeared in antiquity, and as they have been interpreted over many centuries. We’ll look at literary genres such as creation narratives, gospels, and “letters as literature.”  We will also cover special topics such as “law as literature” and “apocalyptic imagination.”
   
   
2. We’ll analyze the various ways in which selected writers, visual and new media artists, filmmakers, musicians and others have worked with the biblical story world within their own art.  Our shared focus will be some 20th and 21st century works, but students will have an opportunity to explore other eras of interest to them. Here we’ll look closely at the ways that biblical stories and characters are interpreted within various artistic works, paying special attention writers and visual/film artists who seem interested in creating works of art as social commentary.   
   

This is not a broad survey class of biblical literature: rather we will be working most closely with: Genesis, Exodus, Mark, Matthew, Luke/Acts, Philemon, James, and Revelation, and we’ll talk about selected non-canonical texts such as the Gospel of Thomas.

Required Texts: (in addition to the many open-access digital sources provided in the course)

1. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. Robert Alter. W. Norton Company, 2008.  Paperback.  ISBN: 978-0393333930
2. The New Testament. Richmond Lattimore. North Point Press. 1997.  ISBN: 978-0865475243
3. The New Testament as Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Kyle Keefer. Oxford University Press. 2008. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0195300208

This course is open to all majors and does not require previous experience with the topic, but will require energetic reading and an interest in thinking critically across time and place.

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Kersten
M/W 1:25 – 2:40 p.m.
3 credits

In his elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden follows his ironic pronouncement that “poetry makes nothing happen” with a declaration that poetry lives. “[I]t survives,” Auden writes, “a way of happening, a mouth.” In Auden’s formulation, poetry is both the mouth that speaks to lived experience, and it is the actual unfolding of experience. Poetry may not “make” anything occur, but poetry itself does happen, does conduct its own electric vitality.

In this workshop course, we will read poems that show us how poetry itself is happening, and how poetry itself carries out the vital work of mediating the crises of our own contemporary world. Then, in a semester of writing and workshop critique, we’ll explore how our own writing can experiment with form, figurative language, the visual field of the poem, and more to generate our own vivid experiences for readers. Readings may include collections or works by such poets as Natalie Diaz, Juan Felipe Herrera, Caki Wilkinson, Sharon Olds, and Victoria Chang, amongst others. Prerequisite: ENGL 226 or instructor’s permission. Repeatable to 6 credits.

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Robison
MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
3 credits

The Literary Debate over Slavery

This course will begin by looking at how literary texts were was used in the nineteenth century to debate US slavery.  We will read narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and the most popular American novel of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  We will also read pro-slavery arguments to better understand these texts in a larger cultural and rhetorical context.

The course will then move to postbellum and early 20^thcentury representations of US slavery to consider the cultural uses to which slavery was being once it had legally ended. We will read stories by Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page that celebrate plantation culture and we will read Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Stories as a response to those stories.  We will then consider how popular film in the 20^th century worked to keep alive the story of slavery told by white southern writers like Harris and Page

Finally, we will end the course by discussing more recent representations of the US slave past.  This will include Beloved, The Underground Railroad, and, if we have time, the film adaptation of 12 Years a Slave.

Throughout the course we will consider how these texts both mirrored and molded the culture in which they were produced. In addition, I will encourage us to think about the complicated politics of representation: what difference does it make that the version of slavery that most antebellum white northerners had was filtered through Harriet Beecher Stowe—whose own familiarity with slavery came mostly from other written narratives?  What difference does it make to recognize that the popular version of slavery that many twentieth-century white Americans had never thought to question originated in a set of pro-southern stories that were written, in part, to create national reunion? How do recent narratives productively acknowledge the reality of slavery in the past to create a more equitable present

Essential Studies: Capstone

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
3 credits

Don't Teach Poetry: A Course about Some Poems and Where They Fit in Higher Education

Poetry textbooks are soooo twentieth century. I mean what were they thinking, these professors and publishing companies, when they started putting these massive collections together and marketing them to students?

On the opposite side, were readers any better off when they were introduced to poets who wrote “in direct opposition” to the qualities associated with academic verse?

Starting with these questions, we’ll explore the notion of poetry as a topic for study in college classrooms. We’ll do a brief historical survey, we’ll review some objectives, we’ll consider which writers got promoted and overlooked, and we’ll pay attention to other venues, where poets have gathered as a sort of refuge from the university.

Essential Studies: Capstone
This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

E. Ostrem
Wed 9:05 – 11:55 a.m.
Fri 9:05 – 11:55 a.m.
3 credits

The English methods course for middle/secondary education, this class prepares students to teach English in their student teaching placements and in their careers as teachers. We will discuss and practice the hows and whys of assessment, standards, assignment design, teaching writing and reading processes, and teaching grammar, usage, and style. By the end of the course, students should understand the ways literacy instruction can develop adolescents’ abilities as thinkers, readers, and writers, and be able to make informed choices about their own teaching practices. Assignments include a collaborative unit plan, demonstration lessons, and the development of materials to be used in the field.

Co-Requisite: T&L 486, Section 8, Field Experience (60 hours). 

Dr. Wigard
M/W 1:25 – 2:40 p.m.
3 credits

In this course, we will explore applying specific computational methods to humanities data with an emphasis on North Dakotan (ND) literary heritage. Each major project will focus on a different aspect of ND literature: markup and digitization of UND special collections material; geospatially mapping out ND novels and authors’ lives; quantitatively analyzing corpora of ND newspapers, journals, or photographs at scale; investigating the potential and limitations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in these endeavors.

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Flynn
T/TH 4:30 – 5:45 p.m.
2 credits

This course will explore a variety of issues within the field of English studies, from the history and contours of the discipline to the rhetoric of literary criticism, from the skills involved in literary research to activities associated with professionalization in the field.

Dr. Donehower
Fri 1:30  – 3 p.m.
1 credit

English 501L is the required practicum for new Graduate Teaching Assistants in English. We meet weekly to discuss and plan our lessons for teaching first-year composition for the coming week. We also practice grading and giving feedback to student writing. S/U grading.

Dr. Wolfe
M/W 4:30 – 5:45 p.m.
3 credits

This course is designed to explore some of the key theoretical and critical developments of the past fifty years, which should, in turn, help you better understand and situate your own work. We’ll begin by reading an overview of some of those developments (Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory) before moving on to closer examination of prominent interchanges that highlight interesting points of contestation in contemporary critical and theoretical fields: a selection from the series of texts that developed out of Jacques Lacan’s “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’” and Jacques Derrida’s subsequent critique of Lacan; and some of the debates surrounding Stephen Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” essay and the practice of New Historical criticism.

Our goal will not be to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of “theory” (an impossible task in any case), but to dig in to these contested issues, to think about what is at stake in the practice of theory and criticism, and to deepen our understanding of some of the most pressing questions of the past few decades in English Studies.

Dr. Donehower
T/TH 2 – 3:15 p.m.
3 credits

Rhetoric for Writing, Reading, and Teaching

“Rhetoric,” Aristotle wrote, “may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art” (Rhetoric, I.2). Today, “rhetoric” has expanded beyond persuasion to encompass how rhetors (writers or speakers) use language (and other symbol systems) to try to achieve a variety of purposes with their readers/listeners.

This course uses selected readings from the history of rhetoric to explore the ways rhetorical concepts might help us in our everyday lives as writers, readers, and teachers. We will read, respond to, and discuss selections from The Rhetorical Tradition, 3^rd edition, and apply that material to self-examination of our writing, reading, and teaching processes. The course project will ask you to expand on a rhetorical concept’s potential in some or all of these areas.

Dr. Alberts
MW 3 – 4:15 p.m.
3 credits

Post-1945 Indigenous Literature

In “Can We Teach More Complete Histories of Native Peoples?” (2023), Rebecca Crooks-Stratton (Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community) points out: “Most education about Native Americans does not acknowledge the existence and vitality of modern Native communities. We have been mostly invisible.”

According to a 2015 study by Penn State University, 86.5% of state mandated k12 educational content only taught Indigenous histories and cultures in a pre-1900s context. While I don’t have a study or statistics, it seems like the same might be said about the teaching of Indigenous Literatures, even at the college level. There might be some coverage of literature up to the “Native American Renaissance” (circa 1968-1995), but 21^st century Indigenous literatures and cultures? What’s being published now? These works often do not get assigned.

In this course, we will read Indigenous literatures published almost exclusively after 2015. These texts can be political (or attempt to avoid politics completely); they push formal boundaries; they give voice to current urban, island, Arctic, and reservation experiences; they might be genre fiction (e.g., horror, fantasy) or YAL. Regardless, with approximately 1,200 Indigenous Nations in the US and Canada alone, these literatures are not one, so there will be no monolithic “Native American Literature” in this class, In fact, some would say that what we’re doing is just reading “Literature,” although it happens to be written by citizens of Indigenous nations in what are currently known as the United States and Canada.  

Possible texts to include:

• House Made of Dawn (1968), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa)
• Love Medicine (1983), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe)
• Moon of the Crusted Snow (2017), Waubgeshig Rice (Wasauksing First Nation)
• The Marrow Thieves (2017), Cherie Dimaline (Métis)
• There There (2018) and Wandering Stars (2024), Tommy Orange (Southern Cheyenne)
• The Only Good Indians (2020), Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet)
• Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021), Angeline Boulley (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Ojibwe)
• The Removed (2021), Brandon Hobson (Cherokee)
• Fire Exit (2024), Morgan Talty (Penobscot)
• Poetry excerpts by Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay), and Jennifer Foerster (Creek), among others