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300-level English Literature courses

ENGLIT 301 Methods of Literary Research

This class will provide an experiential introduction to the variety of ways that research is conducted and applied within the field of literary studies. Students will become familiar with the basic relevant research resources, both physical and electronic, and we will practice using them to address a range of questions and problems that arise in the process of close reading and careful literary analysis. We’ll also address some nuts-and-bolts issues, such as how to manage research and effectively organize information. Students will have the opportunity to see and explore real research in action, by way of various guest visitors; and individualized, self-directed assignments will enable students to practice many of these skills on literary topics/texts of their choosing.

ENGLIT 302 Literary Adaptations

STUDENT CHOICE: Students who enroll in this course will have the opportunity to shape the reading/viewing list of texts and films that will make up the principal content of the course. An adaptation of a Shakespeare play will very likely be included but the focus and content will largely be collaboratively built over the summer and will be student-driven

ENGLIT 307 Literature on the Road

Offered for the first time in fall 2025, ENGLIT 307: Literature on the Road explores literature of travel and exploration and the journey motif from antiquity to modernity. Readings extend from Homer’s The Odyssey up to examples of contemporary migration literature, along the way including full and excepted readings from well-known works such as Jack Kerouac’s classic novel from which the course takes its title. While addressing the psychology of travel and its artistic representation through the ages, we will examine narrative and symbolic motifs of direct experience, departure, peril, & arrival, self-reinvention, and literary correlations of expanding horizons with heightened levels of consciousness and being. This hybrid section of ENGLIT 307 meets in person every Thursday, with platform activity due every Tuesday. Students should have reliable internet access as well as good time-management skills for weekly online literary analysis and discussion.

ENGLIT 320 Children’s Literature

Students in this community-minded course will learn how to find outstanding new releases in children’s literature, then spread book-love to children in need. The Books in Every Home service project is a centerpiece of the course, providing mentored, resumé-building experience in project management, leadership, and teamwork. Readings in new and recent YA literature will prompt discussions about current issues such as book censorship, young readers’ exposure to historical events, and negotiations of community and identity. The course meets in person and uses Google Drive for team collaboration. It is open to English majors and minors and any student who has completed ENGL 102 Writing & Rhetoric II. Non-majors are welcome and do not need a permission number to register.

ENGLIT 338 Literature in Translation: Native American Myth and Narrative

This section of ENGLIT 338 is devoted to Native American stories, songs, and myths in contemporary “ethnopoetic” translations by linguists, anthropologists, and poets aimed at restoring and preserving the cultural uniqueness and character of ancient forms of Native American artistic expression. How do Indigenous stories and songs interpret the social and natural environments of the people who created them? What were their original religious and social purposes? How and what do they communicate to us across time and culture, in terms both of the unique experiences of the populations that produced them and of the human condition generally? Along with examining texts grouped by tribal identity and geography, students will study cross-cultural mythic phenomena including Trickster figures and stories of creation. This hybrid section of ENGLIT 338 meets in person every Thursday, with platform activity due every Tuesday. Students should have reliable internet access as well as good time-management skills for weekly online literary analysis and discussion.

ENGLIT 351 Milton

Are you ready to explore the life and thought of one of English literature’s most revolutionary writers? This course offers a rare opportunity to trace the development of a great writer through his whole life as he wrote and published poetry and prose that reflected and shaped not only his own world, but subsequent history. Milton wrote about almost every topic you can imagine! We will take a journey through John Milton’s masterpieces, looking at his political and personal writings, with special focus on “Paradise Lost” – a work that forever transformed English literature.

ENGLIT 358 Eighteenth-Century Literature

This course will focus on the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England. We will cover four novels. Learning activities are an important aspect of this course. We stage a two-week trial based on one of the novels and conclude the class with an activity involving characters from all the major characters in all the novels.

ENGLIT 375 Early American Literature

Exploration and adventure! Religious piety and fanaticism! War and captivity! Slavery and freedom! Gothic tales, seduction stories, and more! This class will cover American literary origins from early moments of first European-North American encounter to the first decades of the nineteenth century. We’ll focus on the periods of European exploration and settlement, Puritanism in the New England colonies, the 18th-century rise of the Enlightenment, and the post-Revolutionary War era, with all the growing pains of new nationhood in the United States. We’ll examine how writers in early America grappled with the vexing complexities of Euroamerican-Native American interactions, the contentious issue of human slavery, and the challenges of forging a national identity during and after the Revolution. Along the way we will study the varied genres that constitute early American literature, including exploration narratives, Puritan sermons, poetry, captivity narratives, political treatises, and (of course) novels, among others. Students should not expect to leave this class with a single, unified definition of “early American literature”—instead, one of our goals will be to explore the richness, complexity, and contested nature of the literatures of this rich and multifarious literary period.

ENGLIT 387 Modern and Contemporary American Literature

This course focuses on the unique style and concerns of modern and contemporary American writers. The overall goal is to learn how to read their work on their own terms and in terms of one another.  The course will also emphasize cultural contexts of the period, which may include gender, ethnic diversity and identity; questions about knowledge, perception, and language; the impact of world wars; and the literary impacts of developments in other arts. You will read all assignments and write interpretive questions and thesis-statements about them, contribute actively to class discussions, write persuasive, complete reading quizzes, and prepare a class presentation on a relevant topic.

ENGLIT 393 Literary Criticism and Theory

Instructor: Dr. Kim Carter-Cram (see Kim Carter-Cram’s faculty profile)
Mode: In person

Learn about psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, Queer criticism, post-colonialism, and many other “-isms” . . . and then learn how to apply them all to your reading of literature! This is a highly interactive class with great discussions!

Return to Fall 2025 Course Offerings