Course Descriptions | Humanities and Social Sciences | SIU

Instructor: Dekkers
Days/Times: TR 11:00am-12:15pm

Description

A combined course that satisfies core curriculum ENGL 101 and ENGL 102 for students in the Honors Program. 

Archives of Accretion: Composition as Making

Accretion refers to the accumulating pull of matter into a center by which some galaxies are formed. Archives are places of memory and stored knowledge. In many ways, we are each accreting our own personal archives every day of our lives. In this course, we’ll leverage and  consider our own personal accretions and experiences to craft new worlds and futures through  writing and making. We’ll strengthen our critical impulses through deep listening and research. We’ll practice navigating the current era’s cataclysms and apocalypses – terms whose roots suggest both a washing down (as flood) and a disclosing (as revelation) both personal and public – through our academic, critical, and creative pursuits.

In this class, we’ll consider our place(s) and relationship(s) to archives, The Archive, and  composition, written and otherwise. We will pursue and make knowledge together, we’ll consider how we can communicate and compose, and we’ll use our making and tracing of  multimodal and textual lines as the technologies to help us understand our place within the natural and changing worlds while tending to and nurturing the imaginative possibilities of the futures we might dream into being.

Instructor: Dekkers
Days/Times: TR 2:00-3:15pm

Description:

A combined course that satisfies core curriculum ENGL 101 and ENGL 102 for students in the Honors Program. 

Archives of Accretion: Composition as Making

Accretion refers to the accumulating pull of matter into a center by which some galaxies are formed. Archives are places of memory and stored knowledge. In many ways, we are each accreting our own personal archives every day of our lives. In this course, we’ll leverage and  consider our own personal accretions and experiences to craft new worlds and futures through  writing and making. We’ll strengthen our critical impulses through deep listening and research. We’ll practice navigating the current era’s cataclysms and apocalypses – terms whose roots suggest both a washing down (as flood) and a disclosing (as revelation) both personal and public – through our academic, critical, and creative pursuits.

In this class, we’ll consider our place(s) and relationship(s) to archives, The Archive, and  composition, written and otherwise. We will pursue and make knowledge together, we’ll consider how we can communicate and compose, and we’ll use our making and tracing of  multimodal and textual lines as the technologies to help us understand our place within the natural and changing worlds while tending to and nurturing the imaginative possibilities of the futures we might dream into being.

Instructor: TBA
Days/Times: MWF 1:00-1:50pm

Description

(University Core Curriculum) A theoretical and historical examination of American graphic novellas, comic books and "comix" from their origins in the 1930s to the present, emphasizing the opportunities that a new and developing medium makes available for redefining narration, for social critique, and for examining the historical.

Instructor: Davidson
Days/Times: TR 9:35-10:50am

Description

This course examines the narrative structures and ethical implications of true crime across media, including books, podcasts, documentaries, journalism, and television. Students will analyze how real events are shaped into compelling stories, with attention to voice, perspective, and audience engagement. Topics include the construction of narrative authority, the ethics of representing victims and perpetrators, and the cultural impact of true crime storytelling. Through critical readings and media analysis, students will develop skills in interpretation, argumentation, and ethical analysis.

Instructor: Anthony
Days/Times: Off-campus/On-line

Description

Offers interdisciplinary approach to the study of America and American selfhood, and thus to the central question, "What is an American?" Texts range from novels and films to museums and shopping malls. Issues range from multiculturalism to abstract notions such as citizenship and authenticity. Fulfills central requirement for American Studies Minor.

Instructor: Williams
Days/Times: TR 3:35-4:50pm

Description

This class is a rigorous version of one previously offered in the Core Curriculum and developed for an English Special Topics class that will involve reading and viewing of film versions of three key H.G. Wells scientific novels against the literary and cultural context of " fin de siècle" England, noting their relevance not just to the authors’ era but also ours. They are: THE TIME MACHINE, THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, and THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. The term "scientific romances" combines what we would understand as science fiction and the adventure novels of H. Rider Haggard and others.

George Pal's 1960 film version of THE TIME MACHINE and the 1932 ISLAND OF LOST SOULS illustrate later cinematic developments of the theme within their specific cinematic contexts. The 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of WAR OF THE WORLDS will also feature in the class Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” also belongs to this category with its dark Gothic romantic overtones evident not just in the 1932 Paramount film version but later adaptations.

The class concludes with examining Nigel Kneale's televised mini-series QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-59) or the Hammer Studios 1967 film version.

Requirements

Four written assignments, six pages, minimum. No tests, quizzes, or make-up exams allowed.

Instructor: TBA
Days/Times: TR 12:35-1:50pm

Description

Nature of language and linguistic inquiry. Dialectology, usage, and chief grammatical descriptions of present day American English. Required of teacher training candidates (that is, ENGL TEP students). Prerequisite: ENGL 102 or 120H or equivalent.

Instructor: Netzley
Days/Times: TR 11:00am-12:15pm

Description

This course is a survey of British literature from the first major epic, Beowulf (8th-10th centuries), to the Romantic period. Yes, that’s a thousand years in fifteen weeks. Its primary aim is contained in the title: to give students a sense of the history of British literature from its origins in the early medieval period through the end of the Enlightenment. We’ll approach these works through three generic groups, paired with pivotal concepts: epic and analogy; satire and irony; lyric and apostrophe. The rationale here is that by reading medieval, Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century works in the same genre students will be better able to discern the differences between the literatures of these broad periods and identify shifts in subject, emphasis, tone, theme, and form. This course asks you to become an informed reader of not only individual literary works, but a specifically literary history (not just a history that influences or provides the subject matter for literature). That will require you to read quite a lot, so please plan ahead. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to narrate how literature develops over this long historical period, especially how it becomes the sort of thing one studies as a significant cultural object. You’ll also be able to humiliate interlocutors who think that self-reflexivity, meta-narrative, and other literary innovations started in 1918 and that Beowulf is just like Game of Thrones.

• Epic/Analogy
  • Beowulf
  • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost
  • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
• Satire/Irony
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
  • Thomas More, Utopia
  • Ben Jonson, Volpone
  • Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• Lyric/Apostrophe
  • Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella
  • Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
  • John Donne, Songs and Sonnets/Divine Poems
  • Aemilia Lanyer, “A Description of Cook-ham”
  • Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”
  • Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”
  • Anne Finch, “A Nocturnal Reverie”
  • “The Dream of the Rood”
  • Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings
  • Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe
  • George Herbert, The Temple
  • Richard Crashaw, Carmen Deo Nostro

Texts

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 11th ed., Vol. A, B, C (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-324-07280-5. Paper copy. No e-book or other electronic substitutions.

Requirements

Three short answer and essay exams; three memorizations/recitations; one literary historical report (15 pages) and oral defense of your report; no phones, laptops, or tablets in class.

Instructor: Chen
Days/Times: TR 2:00-3:15pm

Description

This survey course explores movement, migration, and travel—domestic, transnational, and interplanetary—in African American literature and culture. Through a transhistorical and transtemporal lens, the course traces African American literary traditions from the slave narrative to the Harlem Renaissance, the protest tradition, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary works, including the new African migration novel and Afrofuturist expressions. Authors and filmmakers include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Rivers Solomon, NoViolet Bulawayo, Mati Diop, Saul Williams, and Anisia Uzeyman.

Instructor: Hoffman
Days/Times: TR 2:00-3:15pm

Description

This class will equip student writers with the tools to tell their stories, by introducing them to foundational techniques of fiction-writing form: characterization, plot, point of view, style, dialogue, tension, setting, worldbuilding, details, endings, openings, and much more. We will discuss and explore these elements of craft guided by readings of published fiction, focusing on contemporary writers. Along with traditional narrative craft that is integral to all fiction, we will also dive into innovative forms, such as flash fiction, borrowed/found fiction, surrealism, magical realism, slipstream, and other genre experiments and explosions. Readings and lessons on form will inspire students to write many of their own works of risk-taking fiction, including a full-length work that they will share in workshop and then extensively revise. The class will also introduce guidance for how to get your work published.

Assignments

The class will culminate in a workshop where each student will write a complete work of fiction and share it with the class. In workshop, all students will offer detailed editorial feedback, putting to practice all they’ve studied about craft and form. A major revision project will be due at the end of the semester, along with a reflection essay. Short, generative creative writing exercises will be required throughout the semester, along with a short essay that will challenge students to explore an element of craft that most fascinates them.

Required Texts

1. Williford, Lex and Michael Martone, eds. The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. 2nd Edition. Simon & Schuster: New York, 2007.
2. Stern, Jerome. Making Shapely Fiction. W. W. Norton: New York, 1991 Additional readings will be posted on D2L.

Instructor: McGrath
Days/Times: MWF 9:00-9:50am

Description

How is it that over 400 years ago an obscure young man from rural England, who possessed the equivalent of a high school education and whose parents could not even write, composed at least 36 plays whose intellectual depth, moral complexity, humanity, and linguistic virtuosity effectively changed the course of Western culture? We’ll try to answer this question—and question some of the assumptions it makes—through rigorous close reading of five of Shakespeare’s most remarkable achievements: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. How does a mind like Shakespeare’s work? What accounts for the richness and difficulty of Shakespearean language What makes Shakespeare’s exploration of common themes such as power, sexuality, gender, madness, and evil unique? Is Shakespeare really that good?

Instructor: Branum
Days/Times: TR 3:35-4:50pm

Description

In this course, we will participate in the fundamental human act of storytelling. Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall says, “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and in this class we will ask ourselves the questions: in what ways is storytelling essential to our sense of self? How do stories help us make sense of our own lives and the lives of others? Which narratives best serve as navigational tools as we move through the world? We will attempt to locate the various motivations for storytelling: to make people laugh; to make people think; to escape to another reality; to explore a complicated emotion; to address what it means to be a person, in a body, in the world. We will identify the stories that we find ourselves returning to over and over again. We will mine our own  preoccupations and obsessions in order to produce our own well-crafted short stories.

Instructor: Joseph
Days/Times: TR 12:35-1:50pm

Description

This is an entry-level creative writing course focusing on the reading and writing of poetry. Students enrolling in this course need not have previous poetry-writing experience, but should be actively interested in reading, writing and studying poetry and in learning poetic terminology.

Requirements

• Portfolio of 9 original poems written over the course of the semester, generated from assignments from our texts, submitted on time for class discussions, and all revised by semester’s end, plus author’s essay of 2-4 pages (worth 60% of final grade)
• One major exam on poetic terminology (worth 20% of grade)
• Active and thoughtful participation in class discussions, completion of all assigned readings (worth 20% percent of grade)

Texts

• The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio (Norton)
• Crab Orchard Review (will be provided)

Instructor: TBA
Days/Times: TR 2:00-3:15pm

Description

This course considers what it means to write for "the public." It explores various genres and forms of, as well as contexts and audiences for, writing that aims to effect change. Students in the course will produce portfolios of writing on public concerns that are meaningful to them.

Prerequisite: C average in ENGL 101 and ENGL 102; or C in ENGL 120H; or equivalent.

Instructor: Dougherty
Days/Times: MWF 2:00-2:50pm

Description

This undergraduate literature seminar will focus on Black speculative fiction as integral to the tradition of Black American literature, revelatory about the Black experience in the United States, and illuminating the racial politics of the “Western” world. We will read and discuss short stories, novellas, and novels by authors George Schuyler, Charles Chesnutt, WEB DuBois, Samuel R. Delany, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, Derrick Bell, Jewelle Gomez, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Colson Whitehead, Henry Dumas, and others, and look at and discuss films by directors Julie Dash, Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and others.

Assignments/Requirements

Students will maintain a commonplace book with quotes from each of the readings, write a final paper, sit a final exam, and participate in a multimodal group project.

Instructor: Amos
Days/Times: TR 9:35-10:50am

Description

Throughout the more than eight hundred years comprising the Middle Ages, popular literature included lyric celebrations of life and God, ballads of fantastic heroes and lovers, and dramatic stagings of secular and sacred issues. This course looks at the earliest English developments of three genres of popular literature: lyric, ballad, and drama. We will explore the different social, civic, and religious functions these genres served and examine how the presuppositions of medieval literature align with and differ from their modern counterparts.

Genres

• Lyric: Ranging in subject from the Blessed Virgin Mary to Mary the Lusty Milkmaid, medieval lyrics lament, encode, and celebrate developments of English thought and culture from their Old English beginnings as 'Elegiac Lyrics' through their Middle English incarnations as 'Love Poems Religious and Erotic.'
  
  
• Ballad: Originally oral narratives, anonymous ballads represent the varied ways popular imagination engaged contemporary social and political interests through adventurous tales -- most notably our central focus, the popular hero Robin Hood.
  
  
• Drama: From biblical reenactments to farcical romps, throughout Europe and England for 500 years before Shakespeare, public drama was an integral part of society at every level. Written, staged, and performed by ordinary citizens, townspeople, and clerics, noble interludes and sex farces, liturgical plays and mystery cycles, morality plays and humanist dramas drew little distinction between actor and audience, in marked contrast to modern drama, with its carefully effaced and passive audience.

As we examine the trajectories of these three genres we will attend to the discourses of life and thought in the Middle Ages, examining presentations and critiques of religious / faith institutions, social structures, and ideological systems. These multi-layered medieval texts functioned at once as repositories of biblical and legendary histories, as purveyors of contemporary social lessons, and spiritual guideposts, disparate uses which could not always be reconciled. While seemingly written to celebrate and to validate a Church-and-king centered hierarchy, medieval popular literary texts call into question the inherited traditional and monolithic view of the world as divinely divided into three estates – those who work, those who pray, and those who fight – and interrogate the structures and functions of these discourses which sought to define institutional beliefs and individual actions.

Modus Operandi & Assignments

We will ground our study in close reads of primary texts – all in modern English or heavily-glossed editions. In our examinations we will examine and deploy ancient, medieval, modern, and post-modern methods of critical reading including philological, biographical, New Critical, historicist (both old and new), materialist, feminist, and most consistently, the methodologies of Cultural Studies (with their emphasis on high/low distinctions, production and consumption, and performance and performativity). Class time will be a confection of lecture, student presentations, and discussion. To provide a range of opportunities for involvement, assignments will be distributed among a variety of written assignments (including response essays, formal essays, reviews of scholarship) and an oral component including formal participation and formal presentations.

No prior experience with medieval languages or literatures is assumed, and non-specialists are encouraged to use this course as a gateway to this fascinating and rewarding literature.

Instructor: McGrath
Days/Times: MWF 10:00-10:50am

Description

This class asks future teachers to think about why and how they will teach literature. What assignments, class activities, and methods of evaluation will you employ as a teacher of literature? For this class, the literary texts that will serve as the objects of our inquiries will be Shakespeare’s Othello and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As a teacher, how do you approach Othello, often regarded as “difficult” at best and “irrelevant” at worst? By contrast, how do you teach a work, such as The Great Gatsby, that many students may assume they already know well? In addition to practical issues, we will also consider more abstract questions of pedagogical approach. For example, how and when should one employ a performance-based approach to Shakespeare, perhaps supplementing class discussion with film clips and/or asking students to act out scenes; how and when should a teacher introduce biographical and historical facts to illuminate a literary work; how useful is an approach that asks students to “translate” Shakespeare’s language as a way of understanding all its rich complexities? How can you incorporate formal commentary on the structure of a novel into an accessible lesson plan? How do you approach issues such as racism and gender violence in Shakespeare and Fitzgerald? The examination of these different pedagogical methodologies, alongside the practical duties of teaching (writing and grading assignments), will allow the course to explore both abstract and logistical problems encountered when teaching literature.

Instructor: TBA
Days/Times: R 5:00-7:30pm

Description

Introduction to strategies for teaching English in the secondary school with emphasis on writing and language. Introduction to assessment of writing perception and skills. Assessment and tutoring of child from the community in writing. Ideally, course should be taken two semesters prior to student teaching. Restricted to: Admittance to Teacher Education Program through School of Education.

Instructor: Paz
Days/Times: TR 11:00am-12:15pm

Description

This course applies theories from writing studies, education, and professional consulting to the practice of writing consulting. Students in the course will develop consulting skills in one-on-one and collaborative writing sessions. The course includes experiential learning through assignments in the SIU Writing Center. Prerequisite: minimum grade of B in ENGL 101 or ENGL 120H. Special approval needed from the instructor.

Instructor: Branum
Days/Times: TR 3:35-4:50pm

Description

In this advanced fiction workshop, we will move beyond the foundational elements of craft and enter more fully into the sustained, rigorous practice of revision, risk, and artistic intention. If “Beginning Fiction” asked why stories matter, this seminar asks how they endure – how they are shaped, sharpened, and made strange enough to feel necessary. Centering our conversations around Anne Lamott’s craft text, Bird by Bird, we will consider writing not only as inspiration but as discipline: a practice built sentence by sentence, draft by draft. Alongside Lamott’s reflections on process, we will read and discuss several works of published short fiction that illuminate the craft topics at hand: character, structure, point of view, voice, obsession, and the process of revision.

This course will be primarily workshop-based, meaning that the heart of our work will be the careful reading of one another’s stories. Together, we will cultivate a serious, generous critical practice aimed at helping each writer refine their aesthetic vision and deepen their engagement with language, form, and theme. Students will be expected to produce substantial new work, to revise ambitiously, and to participate actively in sustained discussion. By the end of the semester, you will not only have a portfolio of polished fiction, but you’ll have also sharpened your understanding of yourself as a writer – your habits, risks, and recurring questions – and the particular stories only you can tell.

Instructor: Jordan
Days/Times: W 5:00-7:30pm

Description

This advanced workshop is designed for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students who want to explore what nonfiction can do when it is written with the urgency, structure, and lyric power we often associate with poetry or fiction. Creative nonfiction asks us not only to tell what happened, but to shape experience into art: to use scene, voice, reflection, research, structure, and image to make meaning from fact.

In this course, we will read and discuss contemporary essays that range from lyric and braided forms to researched narrative and hybrid structures. Writers such as Lia Purpura, Jo Ann Beard, Cheryl Strayed, Maxine Hong Kingston, John McPhee, and others will serve as models as we examine how nonfiction moves, how it builds tension, how it braids memory with research, how it balances personal perspective with cultural and historical context, and how it transforms lived experience into layered, resonant writing.

Instructor: Williams
Days/Times: W 5:00-7:30pm

Description

With initial attention given to the influence of John Buchan on Alfred Hitchcock in the light of Graham Greene's essays on the author, the class will focus partially on the British films of the director with special attention devoted to his official and unofficial adaptations of Buchan such as The 39 Steps (1935), Saboteur (1942), and North By North-West (1959). The first practical film exercise after a study of Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide To Writing About Film will be on Strangers on a Train (1951).

Other films screened will include The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Notorois (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and Frenzy (1972).

Assignments

Four written assignments, six pages minimum. No tests, quizzes, make-up exams.