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ENG 140 Reading Literature is a required foundation course in the English major that satisfies the General Education Cultural Interpretation requirement. It emphasizes close reading of texts from different historical periods and introduces students to literary conventions and terminology as well as to library and Internet resources available for research. It is a prerequisite for ENG 245 and all other ENG 200-level and higher courses. This course does not count as credit toward the English major.
ENG 140 introduces students to the principles, techniques, concepts, and vocabulary of literary analysis and emphasizes close reading of a range of literary genres, including poetry, prose fiction, drama, and creative non-fiction (close reading can also just as easily be called “critical reading” or “in-depth textual analysis,” or “careful reading”). The texts to be covered will be drawn from a variety of different national literatures in English and from several historical periods. Students will examine how meaning(s) in literary texts are related to formal literary devices, social and cultural paradigms, and historically wide-ranging language systems, and explore the ways in which national and historical contexts shape literary meaning. Student writing will focus on the mechanics, techniques, and strategies of literary analyses, including both practical details such as quotation and citation form and more philosophical issues such as the art of finding and developing thoughtful, original arguments about rich and often complex literary texts.
TEXTS: Texts will include the Norton Anthology of Literature (Shorter Edition).
ASSESSMENT: papers, quizzes, in-class writing, and participation
In this class, we’ll learn the mechanics of literary analysis through familiarization with library resources and deep close reading of a range of different texts. To achieve these results, we’ll read a variety of genres from different historical periods and learn the appropriate literary conventions and terminologies necessary for being good close readers of these texts. You will also learn the useful practices that will prepare you as readers and writers for the English major, including note-taking exercises that set the foundation for three major essays.
TEXTS: All texts are uploaded to Brightspace, though you may want your own copies of the Penguin Deluxe Classics edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (translated by Peter Ackroyd), Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
ASSESSMENT: three essays of 4-8 pages
This course is an introduction to the principles and practices of writing fiction and poetry; other genres may be added at the discretion of the instructor. Students will be exposed to a variety of writing modes through exercises and engagement with literary texts. Emphasis is on using imaginative and precise language, on developing critical skills through workshops, and on assembling a portfolio of revised student writing.
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
NOTE: ENG 201 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
| Professor | |||
| Bendzela | MW | 9:30 – 10:45 | Gorham |
| Bendzela | MW | 11:00 – 12:15 | Gorham |
| Cheung | TR | 11:00 – 12:15 | Gorham |
| Cheung | TR | 1:45 – 3:00 | Gorham |
| Kelly | Online | ||
| Mayer | MW | 9:30 – 10:45 | Portland |
| Menting | M | 5:00 – 7:30 | Portland |
| Sruoginis | Online (2 sections) |
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Engaged Learning Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
NOTE: ENG 204 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
In this course, you will learn to create reader-centered texts for a variety of audiences and more effectively communicate within professional modes and genres such as letters, ads and campaigns, proposals, reviews, grant applications, and other multimedia texts. You will engage with issues such as multiple readers, hierarchy of information in messaging and narrative, visual design, specialized and non-specialized writing, and information overload. As writers, you will develop your voice and tone to adapt your message to fit different audiences and contexts that can span beyond the workplace and be applicable to daily life. Note: There will be particular focus on writing that is required of the creative writer and artist, such as artist and bio statements, query and submission letters, conference abstracts, proposals, and writing for grants, residencies, and other awarded opportunities.
TEXTS: In this participation-driven course, we will collaboratively examine the contexts for and rhetorical dimensions of a range of documents. Some of these will be published examples assigned in class, texts you observe in your various surroundings and disciplines, as well as the work you produce throughout the semester for this course. Additional readings and resources on professional writing will also be assigned.
ASSESSMENT: weekly assignments, project portfolios, and active participation in in-class discussion and peer review
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
NOTE: ENG 205 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
Knowing how to write, revise, and shape sentences will help you negotiate the varied writing contexts you will encounter as a student and as a professional. You can use this knowledge to shape your style according to audience and genre, so that your sentences contribute to clear, effective communication. Being able to identify and manipulate sentence structures and types will prepare you for new writing situations that call for particular styles of writing.
TEXTS: Bacon, Nora, The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013; Hacker, Diana, A Writer’s Reference, 10th Ed. New York and Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2021. [An earlier edition from College Writing or another course will serve for this class.] Other readings will be available on Brightspace.
ASSESSMENT: frequent quizzes, style imitation exercises, personal style reflection, genre exercises
ENG 220 World Masterpieces is a required course in the English major that will cover the major works of Western and non-Western literature from the classical, medieval, and early modern eras and provide an historical foundation for subsequent coursework in literature and theory.
Fulfills Elective Requirement (Requirement Term Spring 2015 or prior)
Fulfills English Major Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2015 or later)
In this survey course, we will examine some of the most cherished and influential works of world literature, philosophy, and religion from classical antiquity to the late Middle Ages. We will discuss how and why these works have been important to the history of English literature.
TEXTS will include: the Epic of Gilgamesh; Homer, the Odyssey (in its entirety); Virgil, the Aeneid; Ovid, the Metamorphoses; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe; the Hebrew Bible; the New Testament; works by Laozi and Zhuangzi; Augustine, the Confessions; Boccaccio, the Decameron, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. We will use the Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volumes A and B.
ASSESSMENT: two substantial essays, quizzes, a final exam with a long essay, and class participation
This course must be taken early in the major. It introduces students to the terminologies, methodologies, and writing strategies necessary to pursue a major in English. Through readings of both critical essays and literary works, we will study and compare a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to textual analysis and explore the relationships between literature and culture. There will be a strong emphasis on writing assignments that teach skills necessary both for effective critical thinking and for writing advanced literary analysis. The course also includes a research component. ENG 245 is a prerequisite or corequisite for all ENG 300- and 400-level courses except for ENG 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306, 307, and 308. Ideally, you should take this course with other 200-level major requirements, such as ENG 220 World Masterpieces.
This course will introduce literature as a unique form of cultural expression and an academic field of study. Using the New Criticism model, we will practice close readings of poetry and plays, highlighting their formal, textual features. We will analyze Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl as embodying the American genre of the slave narrative. We will assess how Donald Barthelme’s Snow White foregrounds postmodernism as an aesthetic response to modernism. The course will also take up digital literature as a new form of literary production, like Twitterature and video poetry. We will study essays by T.S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf, and selections from the work of Andrew Marvell, Denise Lows, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Langston Hughes, Matthew Arnold, Robert Frost, and Leo Tolstoy.
Throughout the course, these questions will be our chief concern: What makes a text a literary text? How can we study its unique textual and aesthetic elements? Can literature reflect and shape social and cultural mores? If so, how? How can we draw from New Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Feminist theory, and Postcolonial discourse to enrich our understanding of literary studies? How are digital technologies influencing the production and reception of literature in the contemporary moment?
Researching, writing, and rewriting thesis-based papers, with a bibliography and diverse sources, are strongly emphasized throughout the course.
TEXTS: Snow White, Life of a Slave Girl, several poems/essays available online or on Brightspace
ASSESSMENT: weekly informal responses to readings; three formal critical analyses of literary texts; regular class discussion. At least one required Zoom conference with the instructor to discuss class progress and content.
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
The aim of this class is to provide you with tools to help guide you through the process of writing a revising works of fiction, with a focus on the short story. We will focus on the craft and technique of writing fiction through a series of miniature units on character, point of view, dialogue, structure, voice and revision. This class follows a workshop model in which students will submit their own works in progress to the class, giving and receiving written and oral feedback on their stories. By the end of the semester, each student will draft two short stories and take them through the revision process. The goal here is to think about writing as a process of discovery and experimentation and to push our writing beyond the constraints of its original conception.
TEXTS: We will read assorted short stories, pieces of flash fiction and craft lectures by a number of writers including Grace Paley, Edward P. Jones, Flannery O’Connor, George Saunders, Steven Millhauser, Charles D’Ambrosio, Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthelme, Tobias Wolff, Amelia Gray, Amy Hempel and more.
ASSESSMENT: short writing assignments; longer workshop submissions; written and oral feedback during workshop; revision of a short story; and class participation.
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
This course is designed to acquaint students with the basic elements of poetry writing. We will function as a workshop in which each student submits poems to the class as a whole for comment and critique. Emphasis will be on the imitation of contemporary writers, exercises that stress the elements of poetry, and the development of personal approaches.
TEXTS: Behn and Twichell, eds., The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach; Ramazani, Ellman, and O’Clair, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 2; handouts on poetics
ASSESSMENT: comments/critiques of classmates’ poems, class participation, exercises, final portfolio
Prerequisite: ENG 301 or instructor’s permission
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Poetry Workshop is for students who have engaged in the practice of poetry and who want to continue developing the skills and style they’ve already established, while at the same time challenging that style and exploring new possibilities. The writing of poetry begins with reading, so we will proceed largely by reading 20th-and 21st-century poems, writing new poems of our own, and giving each other feedback on drafts. Exercises and/or close reading of poems will happen every week. Students will produce a portfolio of revised poems.
TEXTS: The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris; The Poem is You, edited by Stephanie Burt; Rocket Fantastic by Gabrielle Calvocoressi; Post-Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz; So to Speak by Terrance Hayes; Night Owl by Aimee Nezhukumatathil; and other poems as needed.
ASSESSMENT: weekly exercises (30%); attendance and participation (20%); book discussion leader (20%); final portfolio (30%)
Prerequisite: ENG 201 or instructor’s permission
Fulfills ENG Writing Requirement
This course offers you the opportunity to create art from life! We will focus on the use of memory—key scenes, remembered characters, and evocative seasons of life—as source material for the writing of personal essays. Students will work with prose narrative that tells a story as opposed to analytical essays or expository writing, and the boundaries between fact and invention in this course will necessarily sometimes blur.
TEXTS: Readings will be drawn from the works of contemporary writers prominent in the field of memoir and creative nonfiction and from texts on memoir as a literary genre.
ASSESSMENT: This course requires the completion of at least two creative nonfiction essays or a substantial part of a memoir.
Fulfills ENG 305 Requirement
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
Writing, like playing the piano, is a skill achieved through practice, but also, like music, writing requires knowledge of fundamental units. Just as one cannot play the piano without understanding scales, chords, and phrasing, one cannot write without knowledge of words, phrases, clauses, and patterns of sentences. While it is possible to play or write by ear, most musicians and writers need to learn basics first. And in both cases, teaching the skill requires theoretical understanding of those basics. Writing is thus both a content and a practice. This course aims to conceptualize writing as form, skill, and convention as well as process, and to develop a theoretical grasp of rhetoric, syntax, and style as a basis for editing and revision as well as enhanced clarity and grace.
TEXTS: Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style; Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies”; Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen”; Plato, Gorgias; other examples of ancient and modern rhetoric; essays on rhetoric; Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference
ASSESSMENT: short assignments, class participation, three essays, and an exam
Fulfills ENG Elective Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate Elective
HON 315 Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
Our modern world provides so many ways to take in information: digital articles, podcasts and video, to name a few. Yet all of these forms of publication have one thing in common: writing. This course will explore the production of various modes of digital storytelling, from the idea and drafting stages to the finished product. Students will interview and connect with various experts in complex fields to tell the stories of their work and research to a general audience. This coming semester, students will connect virtually with researchers at Reykjavik University to write about themes connected to health, climate change, and sustainability. Students will refine their interview skills, explore podcasting/video, and practice long-form digital writing. Final products will be considered for publication on the Reykjavik University website.
TEXTS: We will read a variety of digital articles and profiles from prominent professional writers, critically evaluate video content, and listen to documentary-style podcasts from Radiolab, TED Radio Hour, The New Yorker, and more.
ASSESSMENT: Students will conduct interviews with scholars at Reykjavik University, complete research for an annotated bibliography, write a digital profile essay, and create a documentary-style podcast or video.
Fulfills ENG Elective Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate Elective
HON 315 Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
This course offers students hands-on publishing experience through the Honors literary journal, Island Ink. Students will engage in all steps of the publication process, including reading and responding to submissions, corresponding with contributors, editing work, pairing visual art with writing, and publishing work and bios on our website. Students will explore modern literary journals for ideas about how to best share creative work with an audience and think critically about the importance of creative work in a time when STEM is often prioritized. By the end of the semester, students will share the final product with our USM community.
TEXTS: All reading assignments will be shared in class and/or on Brightspace.
ASSESSMENT: reflective writing, analysis, and student-led discussion; attendance, participation, and engagement; our primary goal: to publish an excellent literary journal. Engaging with contributors and your editorial team are integral parts of your learning for this course.
Fulfills ENG Elective Requirement
From Macbeth,Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy of witchcraft and ambition, to Jen Silverman’s 2018 Witch, a tongue-in-cheek drama of a woman’s deal with the devil, few figures have had as lasting an impact on literature as the witch. Our task in this course will be to consider the aesthetic, religious, and social structures that have made the witch such an enduring figure. We will study the cultural fascination with witches by exploring their literary representation from the premodern to the present day in a range of works including plays, novels, and poems. To contextualize our reading, we will pair our literary study with analysis of archival documents produced by witches (testimonies, spell work) and about witches (trial records, witch hunt manuals, and true crime pamphlets).
TEXTS: Trial records (Salem Witch Trials, the Norway Witch Trials); Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba; Witch Hunting manuals (Malleus Maleficarum); Jen Silverman’s Witch; William Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies; Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch; Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches
ASSESSMENT: one presentation, one multimodal project, two essays, informal reading quizzes, class participation
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate Elective
Memes, podcasts, video essays, social media platforms, AI-generated content—the list of writing genres and practices shaped by digital technologies is constantly growing. Such genres and technologies have led to many claims about the changing nature of writing and constructing meaning in digital, interactive, and nonlinear environments. But what do these writing spaces actually offer us as writers, readers, and thinkers? In this writing course, you will explore ways in which writing practices are changing in light of emerging digital technologies, including social media, algorithmic systems, and generative artificial intelligence. Recognizing that the act of writing can no longer be confined to the production of printed words alone, you will engage in the analysis and production of digital multimodal texts that blend alphabetic, visual, aural, and interactive components. You will learn key rhetorical concepts (e.g., argument, arrangement, appeals, audience, context, delivery, invention, circulation), which can guide both the reading and writing of digital multimodal texts. Through these kinds of analyses, we will examine digital technologies’ relationship to and reconstruction of notions of identity, community, and democracy (e.g., how race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship are negotiated, affected, and challenged in digital spaces). Ultimately, we will question whether digital technologies create new opportunities for creativity, participation, and public discourse and/or replicate existing power structures in new guises.
TEXTS: Readings will be available electronically.
ASSESSMENT: four multimodal projects (accompanied by short writing assignments); an oral presentation; class participation and peer-response; generative/in-class writing
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement
Fulfills General Education Culture, Power, & Equity/Diversity Requirement
This course introduces you to major schools of literary criticism and theory spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. They include structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, feminist theory, Marxist criticism, cultural criticism, posthumanism, and the digital humanities. By studying the differences between criticism and theory, we can develop theory-informed criticism and theoretical analyses of socio-cultural formations that influence ideas and attitudes towards taste, aesthetic judgement, and cultural critique.
Learning outcomes:
a) Develop strong familiarity with various schools of criticism and theory
b) Study literature as a work of art in itself and a cultural product using a range of methods and approaches
c) Understanding the core assumptions about art and experience within each theory and the limitations and advantages vis-à-vis other theories
d) Analyze literary works and genres according to principles established in the theories studied
e) Demonstrate (in writing and class discussions) clarity, complexity, interpretive insight, and the ability to work with conflicting ideas to develop your own ideas
TEXTS: Julie Rivkin’s Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies) 3rd edition; Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today, 3rd edition; Other selections will be available via Electronic Reserves or on Brightspace.
ASSESSMENT: two 5-page essays, final 7-8 page paper, weekly written responses to prompts, regular class discussion
Fulfills Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement
Fulfills General Education Culture, Power, & Equity/Diversity Requirement
Our class will look at a wide range of material in which sexual assault figures prominently. We will focus on texts in which sexual violence is justified (via prophecy, fate, divine will), obscured (via magic, transformation, narrative framing) or erased (through redaction, omission, reinterpretation) and where survivor accounts are minimized or distorted. Required texts range across various mediums and include excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter, Anderson’s Speak: The Graphic Novel, Fennell’s Promising Young Women, and Michaela Coel’s I Will Destroy You. The course will also look at recent sexual assault discourse from Weinstein’s trial to Gisèle Pelicot’s testimony to the “Cornell 7.”
Trigger Warning: Our material deals with sometimes graphic depictions of sexual violence.
TEXTS: No textbook. All readings will be uploaded.
ASSESSMENT: three short papers, two formal discussion leads, and one multimodal project
Fulfills Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies
What is the connection between place and culture? Is culture a purely mental construct? How does geography influence cultural formation? A country denotes a physical space, the nation an imagined community. How do nations and countries, culture and place, overlap?
In American Nations, Colin Woodard argues that American culture is not a homogenous whole, because its national culture is made up of eleven diverse cultures linked to geographies that cross national boundaries. What, then, makes American culture unique such that it appeals to millions around the world? How does a focus on place alter our understanding of American history and its global role today?
Taking its cues from Woodard, the course begins with two texts from the 19th century: one, a Norwegian novel about American frontier experience (O.E. Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth); the other, a slave narrative about southern US culture (Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl). Shifting to the 20th century, we will read about the Great Migration from south to north at the turn of the century, and the emergence of the blues as a musical genre imbued with Black traditions in August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; we will consider Appalachian culture in J.D. Vance’s HillBilly Elegy. We will also learn, in Roberta Fernandez’s Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories, about the enduring presence of Amerindian cultures in the US-Mexico borderlands, spaces that cross national borders. The course ends with a focus on digital culture’s influence on place, identity, and community in America.
This course teaches cultural criticism as a distinctive interdisciplinary study of human behavior, a study that draws on geography, literature, history, political science, and cultural studies.
Learning Goals:
- Understand culture as an analytical category and field of inquiry
- Learn the different approaches to cultural analysis in sociology, anthropology, history, and literature
- Study and apply the concept of cultural geography
- Critique rigid, homogenous racial codes to explain variable social and cultural behavior
- Understand how knowledge and power overlap, with subtle cultural gradations of influence, control, and domination
- Examine how digital technologies are changing communicative practices and cultural interaction
- Generate thesis-driven writing that incorporates research
- Engage in writing and content creation as revisionary, recursive practices
- Consistently use a documentation format and create a bibliography
TEXTS: Colin Woodard’s American Nations, O.E. Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, J.D. Vance’s HillBilly Elegy, Roberta Fernandez’s Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories. Other assigned readings will be available at Ares Electronic Reserves or at the course’s Brightspace site.
ASSESSMENT: three term papers, reflection papers, and class participation
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
Medieval literature is sex obsessed. From scientific and religious texts seeking to demarcate sexual norms to literary romances and autobiographies that flagrantly challenged those norms, gender, sex, and sexuality critically shaped the medieval literary landscape. This course works to understand medieval literature through a study of sex and gender, exploring both how medieval authors understood these categories as well as how they sought to construct and deconstruct norms. Reading assignments include selections from Old and Middle English literature including romances, saints’ lives, riddles, drama, and autobiographies. We’ll contextualize these readings by engaging with larger European and Mediterranean cultural discourses, reading medical treatises, philosophy, and trial records. Subjects addressed include gender stereotypes and ideals, power relations related to sex and gender, and queer identity.
TEXTS: Marie de France’s Lais;Heldris of Cornwall’s Roman de Silence; Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose; Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; John Gower’s and Geoffrey Chaucer’s short poems (Narcissus, Florent, Philomela); Margery Kempe’s Book of Margery Kempe
ASSESSMENT: one presentation, one multimodal project, two essays, informal reading quizzes, class participation
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
In this course we will discuss the language, dramatic forms, themes, and characters in plays and poems from different periods of Shakespeare’s career. We will attend to the historical context of his work and make use of a variety of critical theories that address issues of class, gender, sexuality, and race. Students will also perform a scene from one of the plays covered after rigorous preparation.
TEXTS: Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare; Richard III; Much Ado About Nothing; Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest
ASSESSMENT: two substantial essays, presentations (including a group performance), quizzes, final exam with long essay, and class participation
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
The Romantic period is one of the richest and most varied in English literary history. In a context defined by the French Revolution across the channel, in just a few years writers of the Romantic era initiated profound changes in how English literature was written and read. The course is dedicated to understanding that richness and variety, which includes both writing dedicated to everyday suffering and sympathy for the laboring poor and writing dedicated to high prophetic vision. Topics include both the revolution in poetic language; responses to the social and political revolution in France; the emergence of women writers and their challenges to prevailing conceptions of gender; the Romantic investment in travel writing, natural landscape, and sublime aesthetics as sources of a new visionary humanism; and Romantic opposition to the slave trade.
TEXT: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries (Longman)
ASSESSMENT: a combination of quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This course examines how 21st century authors rewrite foundational 19th century texts. Engaging three pairs of text/adaptation, we ask: why do writers keep returning to the same stories? Why do these novels capture the imagination of 21st century American writers? How are they writing and speaking back to the cannon? What do adaptations have to teach us, about both the 19th and the 21st century?
Grounding our work is Toni Morrison’s seminal lecture series, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993). We then pair Edgar Allan Poe’s racial obsession and dread in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) with Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011)—a cutting satire of identity, academic canon-building, and racial fantasy (or nightmare). Next, we turn to Louisa May Alcott’s domestic narrative in Little Women (1868) and examine its dark underbelly in Geraldine Brooks’s March (2005), which exposes the trauma, racial complicity, and moral hypocrisy of the Civil War.We conclude with Mark Twain’s iconic river picaresque The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which we read alongside Percival Everett’s James (2024)—a tour de force of counter-narrative that shatters the original’s “minstrel” dialect to reveal Jim’s covert literacy, intellectual brilliance, and his dangerous fight for freedom and humanity.
Each pairing exposes the structural silences around race, gender, and agency; each pairing fosters questions about perspective, storytelling, and narrative authority. Throughout the semester, we will explore what it means to write back to the canon. This course emphasizes close reading, engagement with literary theory, and comparative analysis. We will both deepen our understanding of our nation’s founding literature as well as its contemporary literary productions.
TEXTS: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allen Poe ISBN 978-0393972856 (Norton Critical Edition); Pym, Mat Johnson ISBN 978-0812981766; Little Women, Louisa May Alcott ISBN 978-0393976144 (Norton Critical Edition); March, Geraldine Brooks ISBN 978-0143036661; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ISBN 978-0393284164 (Norton Critical Edition); James, Percival Everett ISBN 978-0593686867
ASSESSMENT: reflective writing, formal essays, in-class presentations, discussion leadership
Prerequisite: ENG 302, 303, 304, or 306
Requires: Permission of Creative Writing Advisor
Students work one-on-one with an advisor to complete a thesis comparable to an MFA application portfolio. Typically, students revise ten to fifteen poems or twenty-five to fifty pages of fiction. May be completed concurrently with second workshop course.
Must be completed for student to receive Creative Writing Minor.
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Engaged Learning Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor Elective
This internship is an opportunity for qualified English majors to gain experience in professional writing outside the classroom. Duties may include researching, drafting, and editing articles or press releases while learning other technical aspects of professional writing. Students have held internships with businesses, non-profits, and a wide variety of publishers, including Alice James Books, The Bangor Daily News, The Gorham Times, and many others.
PREREQUISITES: Serious interest in professional writing and an application filed with the Coordinator of Internships are required. Guidelines for the application are on the Department’s website or in hard copy in the English Department’s office. The application should be submitted to the Coordinator during priority registration, or, at the latest, before the end of the current semester.
ASSESSMENT: Completion of the semester’s work at internship site. An internship report supported by published work of the semester is required for a Pass/Fail grade. Guidelines for the final report are available from the Coordinator.
Fulfills Capstone Seminar or Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement
Bread is one of the most ordinary objects of everyday life, and one of the most culturally, politically, and symbolically charged. This seminar examines bread as a recurring site of meaning in literature and culture, asking how the making, sharing, consuming, and refusing of bread illuminate larger questions about gender, labor, class, race, religion, community, and power. Drawing on feminist rhetorical studies and new materialist rhetoric, we will consider bread not only as a symbol or representation but also as both a material object and a rhetorical practice shaped by bodies, ingredients, technologies, environments, economies, and networks of human and nonhuman actors.
Moving from nineteenth-century texts to contemporary literature and digital culture, we will read literary works alongside cookbooks, advertisements, medical and religious writing, popular culture, and social media to explore how bread has been used to define domestic roles, represent scarcity and abundance, sustain communities, and negotiate cultural and national identities. Particular attention will be paid to the gendered labor of breadmaking and the ways bread becomes a vehicle for different forms of resistance, resilience, nostalgia, and political action—from historical debates about women’s domestic labor to pandemic-era sourdough and the contemporary revival of traditional domesticity online. The course will emphasize interdisciplinary research, sustained critical inquiry, and the development of an independent research project that brings literary, rhetorical, and cultural analysis into conversation with students’ own intellectual interests.
TEXTS: TBD
ASSESSMENT: three shorter projects; one final project