This course will introduce students to the field of English Studies and the kinds of reading, writing, and critical thinking practices central to the field today. English Studies, consolidated as a field in the 19th century in European and American Universities, has evolved well beyond its initial focus on English-language literatures, language practices, and socio-linguistic concerns while retaining its primary concern with literature, language-arts, linguistics, rhetorical practices, and their participation in broader national and global cultures and subcultures.

In this course, students will study literature, movements, and writers within their cultural contexts and in relation to modes of literary production and circulation. Students will hone their skills as attentive readers and will engage with literary analysis and cultural criticism. The class will incorporate various literary, cultural, and interdisciplinary theories--such as psychoanalytic theory, feminist and queer theories, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory. Using these theoretical frameworks in order to study texts, students will gain a strong foundation for analyzing the ways literary language functions and exploring the interrelations among literature, culture, and history. In doing so, they will engage issues involving culture, identity, language, ethics, race, gender, class, and globalism, among many others.

This course explores the evolution of an influential literary form (the short story, drama, poetry, autobiographical literature, or the novel). Reading a series of variations on this literary form, likely bridging cultural or historical contexts or themes, the course develops critical perspectives and artistic insights into this genre of writing. Criticism and theory appropriate to the genre will be discussed as a way to understand the form, its social functions, and its cultural and political significance. The course can be taken up to two times, for a total of 6 semester credit hours, as long as the topics are different.

This course introduces students to the field of adaptation studies and explores the changes that occur as particular texts such as print, radio, theatre, television, film, and videogames move between various cultural forms and amongst different cultural contexts. The course focuses upon works that have been disseminated in more than one medium.

Who studies game studies? Writing in games can often be hit or miss, so relying on an established story can provide support and allows the medium to evolve to cover more interesting stories than the typical mass-offering affairs. Still, literature and games are fundamentally different media- and as such these differences must be accounted for when mapping literature onto video games. Will game studies ever be as highly regarded as is critical scholarship on, say, literature? Can a video game possess substantial literary merit? Can a video game offer the same depth of characters and insight into the human condition as a novel? Do video games invite the player to do the same things that works of great literature invite the reader to do: identify with the characters, invite him to judge them and quarrel with them, and to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own? In this course we will have these conversations and then go beyond. We will examine works that have visually evocative and varied settings; narratives that make readers wonder what is going to happen next; and a rapidly changing culture that prompts even more questions than it answers.

Students will use the capstone as an opportunity to design a project that integrates the knowledge they have gained throughout their English program with experience in the professional track. Students will work with faculty to develop, manage, and execute a project that will culminate in the creation of an academic research paper, analysis of text using digital methods, construction of an argument across media, demonstration of theoretical and/or aesthetic language use in digital form, portfolio of previously written coursework that is revised with reflective introduction, or creative work in text or digital form . Students will work with course instructor and/or faculty mentor on project design, creation and reflection . Students will present their project in a venue appropriate to their specific work.