English Courses

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)

J. Zerr
T/TH 9:30-10:45 am
3 credits

How do babies learn language? What accounts for your ability to understand something you’ve never heard before? How are thought and language connected? Why do people swear? Why do people have accents? And who gets to decide what “proper grammar” is anyway?

These questions and more are part of our inquiry into language and the field of linguistics. Intro to Linguistics is a survey course designed to give you an overview of language as a system of communication. We will examine the structure of language, consider how people acquire and use language(s), and discuss language variety. As time allows, we will consider how language is encoded into writing systems and how literacy skills relate to language. We will consider examples from many different languages as we seek to understand how language works, however, English will provide the basis for most discussion and analysis.

Students interested in both the sciences and the humanities will find the subject matter appealing and relevant.  Students in this course are encouraged see the connections between linguistics and other fields of study.

Students should expect to complete regular readings, homework, and quizzes.

Required Text:
MindTap: An Introduction to Language (w/ MLA9E Updates), 11th Edition
Authors -  Victoria Fromkin/Robert Rodman/Nina Hyams
ISBN: 9781337559614
Format – MindTap English, 1 term (6 months) Instant Access for Fromkin/Rodman/Hyams' An Introduction to Language (ebook with digital homework platform)

K. Coudle-King
Section 1: MWF 12:20-1:10
Section 2: MWF 1:25-2:15
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

S. Amendolar
MWF 12:20-1:10
3 credits

Ecocriticism

This course will explore how cultural discourses and literary theory engage with questions about nature, the environment, ecology, geocriticism, and notions such as the Anthropocene. While the focus will be primarily on contemporary thinkers and writers, students will also explore the histories that develop our current understanding of the environment. Through reading, writing, thinking, and discussing, students will form new understandings of the natural world.

To assist us in our explorations of eco-literature, we will read an assortment of works including but not limited to poetry, memoirs, novels, critical theory, and narrative science. Through our readings and discussions, we learn to observe patterns across texts, building context and complexity in our thinking. Writing will be the most important tool we deploy to enrich our knowledge of the natural world. At the end of the semester, students will craft a flexible culminating project that reflects their thinking and engagement with literature and the environment.

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

Dr. Koleva
Section 1: MWF 9:05-9:55
Section 2: MWF 10:10-11:00
3 credits

Patriots and Patriotism

In his 1961 inaugural address, JFK famously declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” This historic presidential statement has long become a patriotic slogan for generations of Americans of different social, racial and ethnic backgrounds. The statement links the demand for patriotic attitudes and actions to the needs of the country, and today, it invites us to think again about patriots and patriotism. So, who is a patriot? What does it mean to be patriotic? What is a patriotic act? These are valid questions to help study patriotic views and their influences on various individuals and groups of people. In this course, we will study the ideas, beliefs, and practices associated with patriotism as revealed in cultural products. We will explore how individuals and groups, embedded in patriotic culture, respond to patriotic calls and how their experiences, when read through the lens of the dominant patriotic ideology, are qualified. A look at some inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of the patriotic projects, will help us reflect on their social power and effects. We will work with a mix of sources - novels, films, speeches, posters, photographs, media publications, and ads – to illustrate dominant patriotic visions that have saturated the American cultural space at various moments in time: the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. We will begin by examining cultural messages related to patriotism today and wrap up the course by thinking further how cultural assumptions about patriotism still shape us.

Essential Studies: Humanities/Analyzing Worldviews

Dr. Wigard
MWF 11:15-12:05
3 credits

Game Studies and Social Issues

In this course, students will play, analyze, and write about games (video games, tabletop RPGs, board games, etc.) as a literary medium, as texts that require our participation and play. We will learn about how core game elements like play, design, rules, and form all can represent social issues related to gender, race, sexuality, identity, power, social status, and more. We will then analyze these games through critical writing informed by game studies theories & frameworks. In sum, each week we will learn, and we will play, and we will write, and we will see how those things are really not that different. Students can expect to play 3-4 hours of a game outside of class each week.

**No game experience or powerful game consoles required! All you need is a smartphone or personal computer.**

Possible texts include Stardew Valley (a cozy farming-simulator video game); 7 Wonders (a board game about building empires); Dungeon and Dragons (a storytelling game where players act as fantastic heroes); Werewolf (a social game based around secret roles and hidden identities).

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 12:30-1:45
3 credits

Have you asked yourself any of the following:

• My parents can’t figure out why I’m taking classes in the English department. “You’re reading novels and poems,” they ask me, “What are you learning?”
• I’ve heard it said that this poem I’m reading can mean whatever I want it to mean. That can’t be true – or can it? Still, why is it that my friends and I have such different feelings about it?
• My English professors keep assigning us readings, and then make us turn in these exercises where we say what they’re about? What are they even asking me to write?
• I have no idea who these people are, that we’re reading in class. Why can’t students read things we’re actually interested in?
• And why do my professors keep calling things texts? That’s such an ugly word. I mean, I’ve read novels, I’ve read stories, I’ve read some poems, heck I’ve even read comic books. What is up with all this texts nonsense?
• I’ve read this book, and I have no idea what it means. I have an essay due on it in two weeks. I have no idea where to start. Anybody?

Our course will address these questions, as well as a few others along similar lines – they don’t all fit in a course description – and a few surprises along the way. To get there, we’ll read a lot, we’ll try out a few approaches to reading, we’ll do some activities and writing exercises, and we’ll work out some ideas about what it means to read and write about texts. I’m partial to literary texts, so there will be some stories as well as poems, maybe even some poems about stories. We’ll read something longer, maybe The Man Who Lived Underground, by Richard Wright (if copies are available). And spells. We’ll take plenty of time to learn a few good ones.

Essential Studies: Humanities/Advanced Communication

Dr. Robison
MWF 11:15-12:05
3 credits

We spend much of our life "interpreting": we try to understand, for example, the actions, behaviors, and words of our friends and family; the political assumptions behind the news we read and see; the values implicit in our laws or in the ethical choices we make; the larger meanings behind the films, books, and television shows we consume.  As important as interpretation is for living a rich and full intellectual life, we should also acknowledge that no interpretation can be fully objective or fully correct: our interpretations are themselves shaped by our own worldviews, by the social and cultural contexts we inhabit.

This course looks closely at the act of interpretation, asking students to become conscious of how they approach literary interpretation and offering students a variety of interpretive strategies with which they can consciously experiment.  We will talk, in this class, about literary interpretation as the act of putting on a new pair of glasses that helps you to see texts in a new way.  As you "try on" these different lenses (psychoanalytic criticism, gender criticism, historical criticism, for example), the course will also help you to understand more about the real-world social, political, and philosophical issues that gave rise to these methods of interpretation.

ENGL 272 is required of English majors and minors but is open to anyone who would like to think more about the act of interpretation—and anyone who would like to consider their own interpretive strategies.  Students, for example, involved in range of creative projects; interested in artistic, educational, or analytical fields; as well as students considering Law School, will find the issues raised by this class to be productive.

The class will be conducted through active discussion, so students should be prepared to stay caught up with reading assignments and to come to class ready to participate and try out new ideas! 

Dr. Flynn
MWF 1:25-2:15
3 credits

This course is an introduction to British literature written after 1800 – to the periods known as Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Postmodernism.  The last two centuries have seen a dramatic growth and a subsequent fragmentation of the reading public in England, and authors writing during this time have had to struggle with the consequences.  Is a writer “a man speaking to men,” or a hero to be worshipped?  Should authors engage the world around them, or escape into their own imaginations?  Can writers reconcile art with popularity, or must they choose one over the other?  Do poetry and prose have natural or appropriate places in the growing split between artistic and popular literature?  Since the proliferation of writing over the last two centuries means that no one can ever read it all, has literary tradition lost its importance?

This course will examine a handful of major authors since 1800 as they ask and answer these questions.  Since it is a broad survey, we will not be able to read every writer of importance in the four periods under consideration.  Instead, we will read selected works in order to get a sense of the general characteristics of those periods – a sense of what Romantic authors have in common, for example, or of the ways in which Modernist literature is a rejection of Victorian values and aesthetics.  Such grounding in historical and literary contexts is useful for students planning to take upper-level courses in English, but the writers we’ll be studying are also of broad humanistic interest, and their answers to the questions above have helped shape the cultural experience of everyone living in the English-speaking world today.

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Kersten
MWF 10:10-11:00
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

M. Knoll
T/TH 11:00-12:15
3 credits

Creative nonfiction, the writer Lee Gutkind once said, might be the most freeing mode of creative expression. Everybody has a story to tell—and creative nonfiction gives you a range of tools for shaping and sharing your personal experiences, your outlook, and your passions. Even more importantly, creative nonfiction empowers writers, by freeing them to foster deep, significant connections with their readers. This course, “The Art of Writing Nonfiction,” is for any writer who wants to tap into their creativity and explore the freedoms of nonfiction writing.

In this class, we’ll explore how different creative forms and strategies can let us shape the stories we want to tell about ourselves, the world around us, and the topics we’re passionate about. We’ll identify different techniques for crafting creative nonfiction by studying works by practiced writers who represent a variety of different backgrounds, career paths, and interests. As we do so, we’ll practice writing in different genres and forms that nonfiction writers often use. Some potential forms we might study include the personal essay, lyrical essay, braided essay, constraint essay, immersion journalism, or others. As we practice in these forms, we’ll also find ways to experiment with the traditional elements of narrative creative writing, like character, point of view, plot, setting, tone, figurative language, and more. We’ll also learn tips for sustaining a creative writing life, enriching our knowledge on questions important to us, and honing our creative work. These tasks will be supplemented by regular reflections on your writing goals, your creative approach, and the creative strategies that you’re using. We’ll also have numerous opportunities to revise different pieces in response to feedback from your fellow writers and the instructor. Through in-class practice writing, workshops, peer critiques, and more, this class will help each writer develop their voice and their creative vision.

Essential Studies: Fine Arts/Advanced Communication

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 9:30-10:45
3 credits

(Also offered as ENGL 315HON)

As a figure whose iconic status far exceeds whatever he accomplished as a professional writer, it is refreshing to take up Shakespeare at a moment when his life and career were shrouded in obscurity, when his critical reception (such as it was) was a mixed bag, and when as a professional writer he clearly struggled with his craft. Indeed, in the case of plays that have become cultural institutions in their own right – think Romeo and Juliet, with its adaptations, its tourist industry, its appeal to big-haired big-stadium rock musicians – we can observe the playwright directly in the process of revising work that failed to satisfy him. At other moments we can observe him in daring experimentation, willing to take on risk (perhaps even fail) for the sake of discovering just what the public stages could do. But we also can observe many of his experiments as they pay off, in some instances perhaps even catch a glimpse at the process of his transformation from a successful playwright to the legendary figure he would become in subsequent centuries.

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Caraher
T/TH 3:30-4:45
3 credits

The best way to learn to be an editor or publisher is by ... editing and publishing. This class will introduce you to some basic skills associated with editing and publishing as well as the publishing industry more broadly. More than that, we'll work together to put those skills into practice with both with UND's century‐old literary magazine North Dakota Quarterly and an ongoing project to celebrate Grand Forks's 150th birthday.

Over the course of the semester, you will learn about all stages of producing a bi‐annual literary magazine and a book and contribute to the publication of an issue of NDQ and a creative new book celebrating the history of our city. 

Dr. Sauer
T/TH 11:00-12:15
3 credits

For YA/Adolescent literature readers, the narratives they read often offer glimpses into a diversity of life experiences that they otherwise may never consider or gain exposure to. Because of the circumstances life hands them, the characters in these texts have no choice but to, in the words of children’s literature scholar Roberta Trites, “disturb the universe,” which we will consider in relation to the diversity of characters presented. Each text we examine in this course features characters that experience life in specifically diverse ways, and often include challenging issues including disability, rape, suicide, racism, homophobia, life after death, etc. Although the target audience for these texts include younger readers, this is not a class about teaching adolescent literature in the middle school or high school classroom. Rather, our focus will be on reading and interpreting adolescent literature from a college level, critical analysis, literary point of view.

Essential Studies: Humanities

Dr. Henry
T/TH 12:30-1:45
3 credits

On Stories and Storytellers

Each episode of Jim Henson’s The StoryTeller opens with a gravelly narration, orated in the inimitable voice of John Hurt’s portrayal of the show’s title character. There, Hurt’s storyteller tells us that we have used stories to remember the past, to make sense of the present, and to foretell what the future might hold. In the long and varied arc of the history of fiction, though, the figure of the storyteller has appeared time and again as a genius, a muse, a trickster, a prophet, and even a structural device in the very fiber of narrative itself.

In this spring’s advanced fiction workshop, we will study and practice writing short stories in which the figure of the storyteller—whether that’s a human character, a computer, a supernatural entity, an artificial intelligence, or so on—plays a central role in the narrative. We will also encounter stories in which a retold story shapes the narrative we’re reading. As we do so, we’ll evaluate how this strategy plays out across a range of genres (though you’ll notice, here, a strong representation from such “speculative” genres as magic realism, fabulism, ghost stories, and fairy tales). In addition to selections from the authors visiting campus for the spring 2025 UND Writers Conference, we will also read work by a range of authors, which may include work by Karen Russell, Margaret Atwood, Amanda Leduc, Haruki Murakami, Kelly Link, Lauren van den Berg, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and many others. (Final reading list is TBD.) To supplement these readings and further develop strategies for our craft, we will read selected craft essays and scholarly essays on this topic. As ever, we will center our understanding of the creative strategies encountered in these pieces by writing and revising our own original stories, which we’ll then share and develop through our in-class workshops.

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Kersten
MWF 12:20-1:10
3 credits

From Seneca to Suleri: The Span and Shape of Creative Nonfiction

This course examines creative nonfiction and its subgenres, such as autotheory, the lyric essay, memoir, and new journalism. We will analyze formal elements that differentiate subgenres from one another and examine how topics move thematically across decades and centuries, pairing contemporary texts with their historical predecessors. Students will practice writing critically about creative nonfiction and will also write creative nonfiction that combines personal narrative with research and critical theory. Possible authors/texts include Seneca, Montaigne, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf,  Joan Didion (The White Album), Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts), Claudia Rankine (Just Us), and Carmen Maria Machado (The Dream House).

Essential Studies: Capstone

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Wigard
MW 1:25-2:40
3 credits

Studies in Graphic Narrative

This course examines the history, culture, function, and form of North American comics as crucial representations of the US literary tradition. Students will discover how the connective tissue between text and image generates an infinitely rich literary medium that includes newspaper comic strips, graphic novels, personal graphic memoirs, and webtoons. Together, we will explore how cartoonists visually and narratively represent gender, race, ethnicity, belonging, identity, and more. No prior experience with comics or graphic novels required.

Possible primary texts include Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Walden’s On A Sunbeam, Tamaki and Tamaki’s This One Summer, Butler, Jennings, and Duffy’s Kindred, Terry’s Come Home, Indio, Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Lewis et al’s March, Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Smythe’s Lore Olympus. Possible critical texts include McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Sousanis’ Unflattening, and Karasik and Newgarden’s How to Read Nancy.

Essential Studies: Capstone

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Donehower
T/TH 2:00-3:15
3 credits

This course is an introduction to theories and methods of teaching college English. It is required of Graduate Teaching Assistants in English. Its goal is to familiarize you with a variety of theories and pedagogical models that influence the teaching of literature, creative writing, and composition at the college level, with an emphasis on composition. By the end of the course, students should be able to articulate different approaches to the teaching of college English and support their particular stances on these approaches. Students will also gain some background in classroom-based research.

Work in the course consists of weekly response papers to readings and a course project that is designed to introduce students to classroom-based research, to literature in the field of writing studies, and to writing as a reflective pedagogical practitioner. It is modeled on the “Instructional Note” genre featured in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC). To successfully enact this genre, students must establish an exigency (identify a teaching problem to be addressed); situate the strategy in the context of existing research (compose a brief literature review); describe how to implement the instructional strategy that was designed by the writer and tried in the classroom; and offer clear outcomes by providing evidence of change in English 110 students’ processes, products, knowledge, and/or beliefs. Early in the semester, students determine an area in which they wish to experiment in their teaching in the spring semester. These experiments lead to the instructional note.

Dr. Sauer
Tuesdays 5:00-7:30 pm
3 credits

Materiality and Space in Literature and Culture

People make things, but do things also make people? Similarly, do people make spaces or do spaces define people? How does the material world create social and literary realities? Can objects have agency? Do spaces and places differ? In literary and cultural studies, the last two decades have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which space and place inform aesthetics, culture, and politics, and how the material world shapes literary and cultural thought and temporality. Many of the social and political issues that have become increasingly central within literary studies have a fundamentally spatial dimension (e.g., imperialism and colonialism; gender and sexuality; digital cultures; ecopoetics; etc.).  Space, moreover, has arguably proven to be a fruitful foundation to larger explorations of time, history, and material culture for the interweaving of connections between different disciplines and modes of inquiry. This course will attempt an overview of some of the thinkers, themes, and issues that animate this broadly interdisciplinary nexus of inquiry. While the nature of the course will be interdisciplinary, drawing upon philosophy, geography, sociology, anthropology, and architecture, we will take care to understand how these many different disciplines and discourses can inform literary studies. 

Dr. Donehower
Online, Asynchronous
8-week session, January 13-March 7
3 credits

For graduate students in the sciences and other technical fields.

Science Writing is designed for graduate students in the sciences and related fields, and offers instruction and practice in communicating technical material via writing to the general public, corporate and governmental audiences, and within the larger community of experts. Capped at 18 students, the course provides one-on-one feedback and support. It includes a brief introduction to the rhetoric of science and one substantive writing project. Writing assignments are customized for each student, depending on discipline and interests. This course is offered asynchronously online with synchronous one-on-one conferences with the instructor scheduled at the student’s convenience.

The course objectives fall into three categories:

• Gain a rhetorical understanding of writing, analyzing writing projects for purposes, audiences, and context.
• Gain a rhetorical understanding of common genres in science writing.
• Build sound writing practices and routines adaptable to a variety of writing situations.

Dr. Wolfe
T/TH 2:00-3:15
3 credits

Required for M.A. students pursuing the portfolio option, this course explores rhetorical strategies of academic writing in the discipline of English, and support students through the development of the portfolio project. 

Dr. Carson
Wednesdays 4:00-6:30
Hybrid/Online, Synchronous
3 credits

Literary Criticism and Biblical Literatures

This seminar will engage us in close encounters of far-ranging kinds with the depth and complexity of biblical texts as works of ancient literature. We’ll work with a number of literary-critical approaches to selected texts from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, using a “survey” approach to some of the critical options available to literary interpreters.  This initial overview of critical possibilities will give you all kinds of resources to pursue an independent project of particular interest to you. 

Our collaborative work in the seminar will be based in close work with English translations of following biblical texts:

• Genesis 
• Exodus
• Segments of Leviticus, Deuteronomy
• Gospel of Mark: narrative segments of Matthew, Luke, John (and Gospel of Thomas if time)
• Philemon
• James
• Revelation 

We will also be taking some time to work collaboratively with critical issues including: 

• “violence and the sacred”: biblical texts as war literature and textual representations of violence  
• landscape, architecture, nature
• performance space/staging 
• apocalyptic imagination

Along the way we’ll also look at the ways a wide range of more recent writers, visual artists and filmmakers have worked with biblical tropes, images and narratives.  

The seminar requires serious and sustained study but does not require previous experience with the texts or subject matter. 

Our probable texts: (in addition to digital sources and article handouts) 

Erich Auerbach: “Odysseus’ Scar” (chapter from Mimesis)

Robert Alter   The Five Books of Moses: A Translation and Commentary 

Richmond Lattimore   The New Testament   

Ian Boxall and Bradley Gregory, eds.   The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (2022 edition)