English Courses

1 credit ENGL 100
3 credits ENGL 130

ENGL 100, Section 1
MWF 9:05 – 9:55 a.m.
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130, Section 3)

ENGL 100HON, Section 2
MWF 10:10 – 11 a.m.
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 100HON, Section 49)

ENGL 100, Section 3
MWF 11:15 – 12:05 p.m
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130, Section 10)

ENGL 100, Section 4
MWF 1:25 – 2:15 p.m.
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130, Section 17)

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.
(January 12 – February 11)

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.
(February 13 – May 15)

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)

J. Zerr
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
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)

C. Walker-Basu
Section 1: MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
Section 2: MWF 1:25 – 2:15 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 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

K. Moore
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 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 9:05 – 9:55 a.m.
Section 2: MWF 10:10 – 11 a.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 visions 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

R. Conley
Section 3: T/TH 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
3 credits

Girlhood

I don’t know, I’m just a girl. Girl dinner. Are we all just girls? It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl. Who is a girl’s girl and, more importantly, who isn’t? Contemporary girlhood (and “girlhood”) presents us with a lot of questions. Is girlhood a spectrum or a collective experience? Is girlhood an action that requires agency or an ordeal that must be endured? Is it a performance, an expectation? Is girlhood inherently infantile, the realm of the child only – or are its ideals transcendent, perhaps even timeless?

In this course, we will carefully examine girlhood and how the ideas, beliefs and practices of girlhood shape the worldviews of individuals and groups. This class is centered around inquiry – what is girlhood, who gets to have one, and what shapes it?

We will ask and answer these questions and more by working closely with various contemporary and historical sources and media: literature, poetry, film, television, products, public figures, advertisements and even music. Yes, we will talk about Taylor. These sources will serve as a starting point to help us identify cultural assumptions and ideals about girlhood and ask questions about what it means to be just a girl.

Essential Studies

Humanities
Analyzing Worldviews

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

Graphic Medicine and Graphic Memoirs

This course will explore methods and approaches to studying literature’s representation of social values and the self through the critical study of graphic narratives in two forms: Graphic Medicine, and Graphic Memoirs. The former are comics, infographics, and visual texts that engage with discourses of healthcare, illness, and therapy, among others. The latter are autobiographical comics that zero in on clear, distinct, and powerful moments in the creator’s life, then visualize them in sequential art. We will learn about, then apply, two modes of critical engagement to study these graphic narratives: literary close reading and critical-making. In essence, each week, we will read graphic novels, analyze them, and then make our own graphic medicine and graphic memoirs. We will do so to understand deeply how literature represents social values and identities. This course will end with students creating a short mini-comic designed with critical purpose and educating a public audience through their own art, then write about that mini-comic in a reflective essay. 

Essential Studies

Humanities

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.

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
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 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
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. Wolfe
MWF 10:10 – 11 a.m.
3 credits

This course serves as an introduction to the literature of the US from 1865 to present and it will undertake the impossible task of coming to terms with the literary responses generated by period of dramatic social, political, and economic change in the United States. Rather than searching for a coherent narrative that can explain the story of the modern United States, we will focus on some of the issues and tensions created by the intersections of multiple cultural histories in our shared past. The course will be discussion-oriented.

Essential Studies

Humanities

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

How do we write what’s true? This course will serve as an introduction to the analysis and craft of creative nonfiction writing. We will explore a range of genres and mediums including memoirs, graphic memoirs, reviews, podcasts, documentaries, journalism, and the “essay.” We’ll learn what an essay even is. We'll ask questions about creativity, facts, and memory. We’ll work to understand how authors use rhetorical and creative strategies to write compelling nonfiction, 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 nonfiction writers must balance in order to maintain the distinction of nonfiction. We’ll talk about ethics, morals, truths, and lies. You will practice developing an eye for writing techniques and methods, while also testing out your own voices as memoirists and essayists. As readers and writers, you’ll do research on topics of your choice to help build confidence and authority in your ideas and perspectives. Ultimately, you’ll learn how to write what you know, using the techniques provided by creative nonfiction writers of today.   

Essential Studies

Fine Arts
Advanced Communication

(Also offered as CSD 340)

Modern Grammar provides grammatical analysis—descriptions of the language as it exists and as it is used; that is, what the English language “can and will do.” We will look at the linguistic structure of English from two points of view. Topics we will cover include traditional grammatical description and terms, linguistic evidence for the constituent structure of English sentences, arguments for transformations, some basics of modern work on syntax, and controversies over usage. The primary goal is rather to foster the realization that English grammar is a system, and a fairly simple one at that, whose purpose is to encode meanings that are used frequently in language. This course does not review basic mechanical and usage skills.

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

The Art of Merrifield

Have you wandered the halls of Merrifield or other buildings on campus and wondered about the artwork on display? Where did it come from? Who decided what should go where? How did they frame it that way?  

This course is dedicated to answering those questions (or starting to).

After completing this course, you should:

• Have a gained hands-on experience with some preservation, cataloguing, and organization of a physical cultural collection.
• Have participated in the planning, curation, and installation of a cultural collections exhibit.

Our semester project will involve creating (or starting) a high-quality, print art book detailing the curated art exhibit on display in Merrifield Hall for use by UND Art Collections and others across campus. Prerequisite: ENGL 237 or permission of instructor.

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

(Also offered as ENGL 365HON)

Our focus in this semester will be on the work of Black writers and creators who intricately and symbolically portray historical events and varied social issues in their art.  This is not a survey course, but rather a look at some specific topics and times.

• We’ll start the course with the film Black Panther and other works of recent Afrofuturism (film, music, digital media), with an eye toward understanding and interpreting the historical dimensions in these complex artistic works.

Then our other projects within the semester will include:

• A close look at the literary, artistic and historical elements in W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk and selected writings by Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
• An exploration of changes made in selected plays as they are adapted to film: in the work of Lorraine Hansberry (Raisin in the Sun, play and films), Charles Fuller (A Soldier’s Play to the film A Soldier’s Story) and James Baldwin (Remember this House to the film I am Not Your Negro)
• Writers and creators in new media and social media (United States and internationally).

As we work via discussion with these specific writers and artists, their literary/creative genres and their historical contexts, we’ll craft and refine a series of research and discussion questions about how the interpretive lenses of Black and African American writers/creators help us analyze current literary/arts issues, social issues and historical debates.

NOTE: Our course will be structured as a seminar/discussion class, via a required real-time weekly Zoom class meeting. The directions we take as a class will partly evolve as we work together in the seminar.  Toward the end of the course, you will have the opportunity to design an independent project shaped by your own interests.

Students from all majors are welcome in the course.  The course does not presume that you have prior background in Black or African American studies, but the course does require serious interest in doing interdisciplinary work in a dynamic and multi-dimensional subject.  All students will get good experience with close reading, critical analysis of literature and visual art, and you will have many opportunities for thoughtful class discussion and sharply focused writing.

Essential Studies

Analyzing Worldview
Humanities 

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

This course is an advanced study of Creative Nonfiction. We will examine the diverse forms that creative nonfiction can take (memoir, lyric essay, investigative journalism, etc.), and we will also explore several specific traditions within the genre (travel writing, meditations, nature writing, etc.). In this, we will explore the genre from the level of craft, while also understanding the roots of creative nonfiction, tracing them back to St. Augustine and Montaigne, respectively. Students can expect to read the work of established authors, experiment with new forms through guided prompts, and workshop their work with their peers.

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

Literary Theory and Interpretation

How is our interpretation of literary texts affected by changes in the theoretical landscape? This course will look at several notable examples of shifting theoretical perspectives leading to new literary interpretations. We will explore the following “case studies”: feminism and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; deconstruction and Melville’s Billy Budd; psychoanalysis and Shakespeare's Hamlet; gender and sexuality theory and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; and postcolonial theory and Austen’s Mansfield Park. In each case, we will move back and forth between literary, critical, and theoretical texts to explore the connections between them and highlight the process of interpretation. 

Essential Studies

Capstone
This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

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

Pre-Modern World Drama

This course provides a historical survey of theatre across the globe, covering early theatrical forms through the 15^th Century. Through traditions in Western Europe, Asia, and the Americas, we will examine a variety of theatre forms and styles, as well as individual plays, playwrights, and designers. We will study theoretical texts on theatre and performance from the periods and locales covered. We will also consider the influences on theatre from different cultural, social, political, and economic contexts, and the manners in which theatre has engaged critically and politically in different societies.

Readings for the course will include ancient/Classical Greek and Roman theatre, Sanskrit theatre, traditional Japanese forms, Mayan pre-Columbian drama, Persian drama, and medieval miracle plays.

Essential Studies

Capstone
This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Donehower
T/TH 2 – 3:15 p.m.
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. Kersten
M/W 3 – 4:15 p.m.
3 credits

This course is an advanced study of Creative Nonfiction. We will examine the diverse forms that creative nonfiction can take (memoir, lyric essay, investigative journalism, etc.), and we will also explore several specific traditions within the genre (travel writing, meditations, nature writing, etc.). In this, we will explore the genre from the level of craft, while also understanding the roots of creative nonfiction, tracing them back to St. Augustine and Montaigne, respectively. Students can expect to read the work of established authors, experiment with new forms through guided prompts, and workshop their work with their peers.

Dr. Flynn
Thursdays 3:30 – 6 p.m.
3 credits

South Asia in British Literature and Britain in South Asian Literature

The first half of the course will be a broad survey of the representation and function of the Indian subcontinent in British literature of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (possible authors:  Thackeray, Collins, Kipling, Forster).  The second half will focus on the representation of Britain in South Asian literature in English in the 20th and 21st centuries (possible authors: Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Sunjeev Sahota, Shehan Karunitilaka, among others).  Primary focus will be fiction, with some nonfiction and poetry, to be read alongside criticism/theory.

Dr. Donehower
Online Asynchronous
3 credits

Non-English Majors Only

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. Wigard
Online Synchronous
3 credits

Non-English Majors Only

Afrofuturism

This course explores literary and cultural narratives that highlight the complex interactions between humans and technology within a specific framework: “Afrofuturism,” a Black speculative practice of Black history (future, present, past), imagination, liberation, and technology. In this course, we will engage with Afrofuturism in a variety of narrative forms and historical-cultural contexts, ranging from 19th and early 20th century African American literature (novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, narratives by enslaved peoples) to soundscapes (oral histories, albums, concerts, breakbeats), visual culture (film, game, comics, art, architecture), and more. Our guiding focus will be investigating the role that technology plays in this speculative practice.

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

Required for master's degree 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. Alberts
Tuesdays 4:30 – 7 p.m.
3 credits

Literature Pedagogy

You’ve taken literature classes…but how do you teach one? As a graduate student in English, you’re required to take a class in pedagogy related to composition; in fact, most of you are composition instructors. Both the course and classroom experience are extremely helpful, but neither fully prepares you for teaching students how to read and write about literature.

This class intends to start to address this issue: it will focus heavily on literature pedagogy, and the final project will consist of designing a course from start to finish (formulating a teaching philosophy, writing a course description, creating a syllabus, selecting texts, building an effective schedule, and, perhaps, working on sample lesson plans). While any literary content of this course is likely to focus on texts published in what is now the US, the pedagogical methods can be applied to any literature (British, for example) of almost any period, and I will be open to transnational literary surveys.

As such, another goal is that by the end of the semester each student will have a sample syllabus for an undergraduate level literature course of your choosing that could be used in a teaching portfolio or presented as part of a proposal for doctoral students teaching an ENGL 227 or 230 course here at UND.