Fall Semester (August 26, 2024 – December 23, 2024)
Monday and Wednesday 10 am–11:50 am (in person) Hawk
What does it mean to be an English major? How do we read, think about, analyze, and critically write about literature and culture? How does close reading help us to engage with the world around us? These are just a few of the questions we will explore in this course, as we explore what “close reading” means for literary studies. Content will include poetry, plays, short stories, essays, and film. Requirements include engagement in class discussions and three essays.
Friday 10 am–10:50 am (online synchronous) Jalalzai
Career Readiness for Humanities Majors, a one-credit course from the RIC English Department, intentionally builds towards success after college. Students prepare their portfolios, participate in workshops with the Career Development Center, and learn from alumni experience.
This course will help students understand their Humanities major, get the most from that major based on their own interests, and prepare for employment post-graduation. English 203 aims to jump start students’ thinking about what they want to do with their degrees while they still have plenty of time to choose particular courses, arrange internships, and investigate possibilities.
Tuesday 10 am–11:50 am (hybrid) Jalalzai
This course examines American national identities and literary production from the first inhabitants, explorers, and settlers to the present day. All along we will explore what constitutes American citizenship and literary production. Who was included, excluded, and why? How did outsiders become insiders? What struggles for inclusion still persist?
We shall follow American literature historically and critically as well as through developments in literary form. Asking how politics and history shape the form as well as the content of literature, our analyses will include the following areas of American literature and culture:
- Exploration
- Puritanism
- Revolution
- Transcendentalism
- American Gothic
- Slavery and Race
- Harlem Renaissance
- Modern/Postmodern America
- Contemporary multiethnic literature
Monday and Wednesday 4 pm–5:50 pm (in person) Quintana-Vallejo
Why do books for young people get banned? What do these bans show about social and cultural taboos? In this course, we will answer those questions by studying adolescent literature by authors including Art Spiegelman, Margaret Atwood, George M. Johnson, and Toni Morrison. This course does not have exams and, instead, requires active class participation, a research paper (3-5 pages long), and a creative adaptation project.
Tuesday and Thursday 2 pm–3:50 pm (in person) Shipers
This course introduces students to some of the basic elements of writing and reading creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. We will spend a lot of time discussing, studying, and practicing the five techniques essential to all three genres: image, voice, character, setting, and story.
Students will complete approximately six formal assignments that will be workshopped by the entire class and at the end of the semester will turn in a portfolio of polished final pieces. Attendance, thoughtful reading of assigned texts, active participation in class discussion, drafting of creative work, and thorough revision are all required elements of the course.
Monday and Wednesday 10 am–11:50 am (in person) Staff
Monday and Wednesday 2 pm–3:50 pm (in person) Staff
Thursday 4 pm–7:50 pm (in person) Staff
Monday and Wednesday 2 pm–3:50 pm (in person) Caouette
What is public and community writing doing for us right now? As we grapple with the legacy of the pandemic and as we work to preserve our democracy, our environment, and our basic human rights, public and community writing is the tool we use to be knowledgeable citizens and activists. Such writing demands a great deal of us as credible authors, researchers, and designers, and knowing how to meet those demands is essential to the progress of our world.
In ENGL 232, we’ll think about writing and rhetoric as tools for advocacy—through our words, our images, our bodies. Students should think of this class very much like a writing lab, with ample time and space to write and receive the support of peers and instructors. The class will engage in individualized, semester-long projects in which students become active, critical participants in a thoughtful public conversation of their choosing. No previous experience in public and/or community writing required.
Thursday 12 pm–1:50 pm (hybrid) Potter
This class examines narratives of cultural contact both “factual” and “fictional,” between European explorers of the Arctic and its Indigenous peoples in the comparative context of European and American colonialism, visual representation, and emergent literatures. Material will include historical accounts, fiction, and film, as well as music and other performative arts. Requirements include attendance, active participation in discussion, a weekly response paragraph, and two 4-6 page critical essays, each of which will go through a draft reading process. Connections Gen Ed course.
Monday and Wednesday 10 am–11:50 am (in person) Zornado
We will read, discuss, and write about classic literary texts that have transcended culture, time, and space. From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations to the anonymous medieval study The Cloud of Unknowing, to Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, we will read and discuss six classic texts over the course of the semester—including representative films—that take up as their main theme the individual’s search for meaning and agency. We will discuss weekly reading assignments in person, engage in formal and informal writing, and work in small and large groups.
Our readings will introduce us to the basics of Buddhism, Christianity, Stoicism, and psychoanalysis so that we can consider how different traditions from east and west approach the question of individual identity and how it forms through developmental stages of life. As we deepen our understanding of varied philosophical and religious perspectives, we will also cultivate critical thinking, writing, and communication skills through class participation, informal writing, a midterm essay, and a final writing project. Connections Gen Ed course.
Monday and Wednesday 2 pm–3:50 pm (in person) Michaud
In this course we will examine the persuasion of Americans who have worked for social change across centuries and decades. From the abolitionist movement to Black Lives Matter, from Seneca Falls to #MeToo, we’ll study the contexts that have created the need for reform and the arguments and persuasive strategies in which regular Americans engaged to bring it about. Course requirements will include frequent informal responses to course readings, 1-2 short analytical papers, and a collaborative project. Connections Gen Ed course.
Tuesday 12 pm–1:50 pm (hybrid) Potter
This semester our focus will be on British modernism, broadly defined so as to include writers whose principal residence or audience was the UK. We'll look at how literary modernism conceived of itself, with particular attention to women writers such as Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf, alongside modernist innovators in poetry and prose, including Eliot and Joyce. Close reading and analysis in a seminar-style setting will be at the core of this class, along with group and individual research culminating in a substantial final research paper.
Monday and Wednesday 2 pm–3:50 pm (in person) Quintana Vallejo
"Black Women and Feminism" invites students on a journey into Black women's literature. Inspired by bell hooks' insights, this course celebrates the voices of such authors as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Roxane Gay. Through dynamic discussions, students analyze the powerful intersections of race, gender, and identity. Instead of an exam, students are evaluated with an essay and a creative adaptation.
Monday and Thursday 12 pm–1:50 pm (in person) Holl
Famously formulated as “the literature of cognitive estrangement,” sci-fi offers readers radical re-imaginations of our own world that comment upon present realities while prompting us to speculate about new possibilities. This course will delve into histories and theories of science fiction from the 17th century to today. We’ll read about brave new worlds in Shakespeare and Margaret Cavendish; interior landscapes in Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson; time jumping in Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler; and dystopian nightmares in Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood.
Along the way, we’ll read criticism on the ways that sci-fi interacts with issues of colonization, industrialization, gender, race, and sexuality. Course requirements will include active class participation, short response papers, a research paper, and two exams.
Monday and Wednesday 10 am–11:50 am (in person) Abbotson
Many of you will have read some of these plays before, which may allow for a certain familiarity; however, we now need to expand that knowledge into a deeper understanding of why Shakespeare remains so engaging, important and relevant. We shall explore the presentation of Shakespeare’s tragedies and at least one romance through a variety of media, placing each play within its historical, cultural, and intellectual context of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, as well how they have fared in contemporary times.
You will learn how to analyze Shakespeare’s use of language, creation of character, and methods of play construction to build a sense of how his plays work through a variety of solo and group presentations and individual writing, which will include a review of a production and a formal essay that utilizes secondary criticism. Class participation will be essential, and there will be a midterm and a final.
Tuesday and Thursday 4 pm–5:50 pm (in person) Boren
This course focuses on the craft of fiction writing. The primary texts will be student-produced fiction, which we will use to explore various techniques, such as characterization, scene construction, plot, diction, point of attack, dialogue, symbol, imagery, and language precision. In addition to student work–work in progress–we will also examine non-student, published work. Regular attendance, active verbal and written participation, revision of written work, and peer critique through workshop are required elements of this class. At the end of the semester, students will turn in a portfolio of written work.
Monday and Wednesday 2 pm–3:50 pm (in person) Shipers
This class is an intermediate poetry workshop where we will read, discuss, and steal techniques from a wide variety of contemporary poets, including some whose work is delightfully weird. Along the way, we will read individual poems, short craft essays, and books by three debut authors, as well as devote a substantial portion of class time to discussing student work. Attendance, thoughtful reading, poem drafts, commenting on classmates’ work, collaborating in small groups to lead class discussion, and thorough revision are all required elements of the course.
Wednesday 10 am–11:50 am (in person) Shipers
This course focuses on the basic principles of producing RIC’s own literary journal, Shoreline. Topics include what a literary magazine is and does; various forms of marketing; inviting and judging submissions for the annual fall literary contest; and sponsorship, promotion, and attendance at a literary event (reading, discussion, or workshop).
Requirements include attendance and active participation, informal writing assignments, and a class presentation. Because some of the Shoreline production work will occur outside of our weekly class sessions, students will need to plan accordingly in order to complete their tasks.
Monday and Wednesday 4 pm–5:50 pm (in person) Michaud
How do professional writers…write? What skills, knowledge, practices, and dispositions do they bring to their work? Practically, how do they conceptualize, develop, research, and write a publishable piece? These are the questions we’ll take up in this class as we practice writing with one another. This is a practice class.
Students will produce two substantive pieces of writing on topics of their own choosing and engage in all the necessary steps of the writing process (i.e., planning, drafting, revising, seeking feedback, collaborating, editing, publishing, etc). When they’ve completed the course students will have experienced what professional, practicing, publishing writers experience when they write and gained confidence in themselves as writers.
Tuesday and Thursday 10 am–11:50 am (in person) Hawk
English 460 offers students opportunities to reflect upon their experiences as English majors and apply the skills and strategies they have acquired toward the next steps in their academic and professional careers. In this semester-long, culminating workshop, we will revisit and revise past work; craft an educational narrative; prepare a professional profile for life beyond RIC; and draft an individualized capstone project that explores students’ own interests and showcases their achievements in reading, writing, and research. Requires registration through the department after consultation with your adviser.
TBD (in person) Michaud
If you are interested in an internship, please read the overview about the process on English Internships. If you would like to move forward and apply, fill out the form under “How Do I Get the Process Started?”
If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to Dr. Michael Michaud.
Thursday 4 pm–6:50 pm (in person) Holl
As a graduate-level introduction to theory, this course will explore some of the key questions and methodologies that animate literary and cultural scholarship today—questions about ideology and identity, about the objects and affects of cultural value, about the processes and structures of meaning-making.
As we approach these theoretical schools as an ongoing dialogue in critical thought, perpetually informed through revisions in theoretical and cultural assumptions, we will examine how these theories provide a varied set of tools and lenses that we can apply to readings in poetry, drama, film, and cultural texts. Course requirements include active class participation, a discussion-leading presentation, two short papers, and one research paper.
Wednesday 4 pm–6:50 pm (in person) Duneer
In this course we will explore the resonances of literary naturalism in contemporary global literature and film. The most salient aesthetic principle of literary naturalism is the exploration of what it means to be human—how to maintain our humanity when social, economic, and/or environmental conditions elicit survival instincts of the animal within.
We will begin with the prominent 19th-century French novelist and social activist, Émile Zola, and a brief philosophical and theoretical grounding by turn-of-the-century American practitioners, before exploring diverse uses of literary naturalism to express the global struggle for human dignity under a range of intersecting forces—socio-economic inequity, labor exploitation, territorial expansion, and environmental threats—that disproportionately affect marginalized individuals and communities. Readings may include novels, stories, and a film or two set in South America, the Caribbean, India, Denmark, and South Korea. Requirements include class participation, informal writing, a presentation, and a seminar paper.
Monday 4 pm–6:50 pm (in person) Boren
This course focuses on fiction and literary nonfiction writing. The primary texts will be student-produced prose, which we will use to explore various techniques such as characterization, scene construction, plot, diction, point of attack, dialogue, symbol, imagery, and language precision.
In addition to student work–work in progress–we will also examine craft by considering non-student, published work through the writer’s eye, discussing theories of narrative craft, and viewing/hearing readings from published writers. Classes will include group workshop, one-on-one tutorials, and individualized reading lists so students may pursue their areas of particular interest.
