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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.
This course will emphasize close reading skills as it introduces students to literary and critical terminology and the art of literary analysis. We will look at the formal qualities of texts as well as their social, historical, and ideological contexts. The course considers a variety of topics and themes, including the treatment of the “supernatural,” “horror,” and the “weird” in literature and film.
TEXTS will likely include the following: William Shakespeare, Hamlet; 19th century ghost stories by Henry James; stories by H.P. Lovecraft (TBD); selected poems from the Renaissance to the present; Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Stanley Kubrick, The Shining.
ASSESSMENT: class participation, two major essays, quizzes, and a final exam
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 | |||
| Amoroso | TR | 9:30 – 10:45 | Portland |
| 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 |
| Menting | T | 5:00 – 7:30 | Portland |
| Sruoginis | Online (2 sections) | ||
| Waldrep | Online |
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.
This career-oriented writing skills course explores how professional writers accomplish business goals through text. Most often, these goals require writers to craft strategic emotional appeals that prompt a particular demographic to complete a call to action, such as buy, subscribe, schedule, or vote. Specifically, we will complete the responsibilities associated with various professional job titles – including newswriter, content writer, marketer, and job seeker – ultimately learning how to craft text that supports sales and branding objectives. Our guiding concept will be “economy,” which works on two levels. First, we will learn sentence-level composition strategies for economical writing, so that we can write streamlined and digestible prose that produces maximum effect. Second, we will deploy this economical writing to achieve results within a business economy, where organizations make pitches to their audiences to achieve a call-to-action. This class is taught by a professor who worked as a marketer in a past life and should be helpful to any students who want guidance adapting their writing skills to occupational opportunities.
TEXTS: Online resources will include examples from the USM Library Ebooks: Gunelius, Writing the Parts of an Email Message, 157-166 and Handley and Habeshian, Writing for Email, 219-225. Other resources will be assigned by the instructor.
ASSESSMENTS: 3-5 portfolios consisting of smaller documents that work together to complete professional writing goals, including a job application portfolio, a newswriter portfolio that includes a news roundup and various articles, and an advertising campaign portfolio that combines strategy with social media content
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; Fish, Stanley, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, New York: Harper, 2012 .
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 course, we will read a selection of the most influential and interesting works of western writing from the ancient, classical, and medieval eras. Texts to be considered will be drawn from religious writing, epic and lyric poetry, short fiction and travel narrative. Readings will be drawn from ancient lyric poetry, the epic traditions of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, religious writings from the Bible, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and the Qur’an, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The course will emphasize the continuity of these early figurative forms in literary history in the emergence of English literature.
TEXTS: Readings may include The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, and selections from the Bible and the Qur’an.
ASSESSMENT: four response papers (two to three pages) and two five-page essays
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 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 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 the literary research paper.
TEXTS will likely include the following: William Shakespeare, Macbeth; the Norton Introduction to Poetry; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; James Joyce, Dubliners; Lois Tyson, Using Critical Theory; Janet Gardner, Reading and Writing About Literature: A Portable Guide.
ASSESSMENT: essays, class participation, and a final exam
This course introduces students to the practical methods and procedures of literary research and interpretation and the techniques of effective critical writing. It also familiarizes them with several significant theoretical and pedagogical approaches to literary and cultural studies and demonstrates how these critical approaches can be applied in literary interpretation. We will read and discuss a number of literary works from a variety of periods, but there will also be a strong emphasis on writing.
TEXTS: M.H. Abram’s A Glossary of Literary Terms; Stevens and Stewart’s A Guide to Literary Criticism and Research; Shelley’s Frankenstein (Bedford/St. Martin’s); and DiYanni’s Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay
ASSESSMENT: four short (2-3 pages) papers and two 5-page papers
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Using the work of recognized masters as a guide, we will apprentice ourselves to the craft of fiction writing. In small groups and as a class, we will complete writing exercises and share the results. Finally, we will use the workshopping process to evaluate our own short story drafts, to guide revisions, and to further hone our analytic abilities. Lectures will address writing process, revision, and fiction theory.
TEXT: The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners (ISBN: 9780593689608)
ASSESSMENT:
(1) Weekly writing assignments (2-3 pages)
(2) We will workshop two significant (at least 14-page) story drafts.
(3) Students will write a 1-page letter to their peers in response to each workshopped piece.
(4) A final portfolio containing revisions of one workshopped piece as well as one shorter assignment.
(5) 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 300 or instructor’s permission
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
This is a writing intensive workshop class for fiction students. In addition to reading and discussing published stories, students will be writing and revising two longer works of their own. Over the course of the semester, students can expect to write and revise more than thirty pages of fiction.
TEXT: The Best American Short Stories 2025 (ISBN: 9780063399846)
ASSESSMENT: class attendance, participation, peer critiques, writing assignments and subsequent revisions
Fulfills ENG 305 Requirement
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
This course treats writing as both content and practice. Focusing on discursive, critical prose, students will develop a theoretical grasp of rhetoric, syntax, and style as a basis for effective writing, editing, and revision as well as enhanced clarity and grace. We will focus on sentence-level writing as a specific skill and as the foundation for larger structures, developing knowledge of theory and style as well as expertise in editing. Specifically we will work on the following objectives: 1) to understand syntax as rhetoric, that is, to see grammar and sentence-level writing as central to meaning rather than as arbitrary rules, 2) to develop an understanding of grammar and syntax as a range of choices that allow complexity as well as clarity and style, 3) to develop an understanding of these choices as possibilities for meaning rather than as a way of avoiding error, and 4) to use these skills to write a full essay that is rhetorically effective, stylistically sophisticated, and intellectually distinctive. Anyone who signs up for this course should be interested in writing and in becoming a better writer.
TEXTS: Tufte, Artful Sentences; electronic reserves; remaining books TBD.
ASSESSMENT: assigned readings; class writing assignments and exercises on sentence structure, style, and paragraph forms; term paper developed in sequence over the semester that demonstrates ability to use course concepts. Because this is a workshop, attendance is crucial. Class time will consist primarily of discussion, writing, and joint editing of student writing; be prepared to share and critique your own and classmates’ work.
Fulfills ENG Elective Requirement
The Anglo-American ghost story emerged as a distinct genre in the early 19th century and reached its zenith in the Victorian era, where it became one of the period’s most popular literary forms (if not the most popular). We will examine the rich and complicated ways in which ghost stories reflect, resist, and comment on dominant cultural norms and values. Topics include women writers of ghost stories and the representation of dominant gender norms; ghosts and the cultural norms governing male-male sociality (especially as those norms are defined in relation to the social institutions of work, business, and empire); the phenomenon of the child ghost; ghosts and differing cultural concepts of trauma, mourning, and emotional connection. We will also consider more recent ghost stories from the United States and Nigeria to see how and in what ways the genre has changed since its golden era in Victorian England.
TEXTS: Novels and short stories by, among others, Scott, Gaskell, Le Fanu, Dickens, Bierce, James, Kipling, Wharton, and Jackson.
ASSESSMENT: a combination of in-class writing, quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This course investigates the relationship between modern subjectivity and political power in 20th century dystopic fiction. Utilizing theories of Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan, course discussion and assignments will address questions concerning individual freedom and the common good, sexuality and subversion, religion and the state, and ideology and psychological identity.
TEXTS: Works to be considered include Eugene Zamiatin’s We; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
ASSESSMENT: three 5-page papers and one longer research paper
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement
This course will look at major schools and figures within criticism and theory, especially as they impact the modern period. Individuals and movements will include Plato; Aristotle; Sir Philip Sidney; Marx and Marxism; Pater and Wilde; Saussure and linguistics; gender studies and Foucault; Derrida and deconstruction; post-colonial theory; cultural studies.
TEXTS: TBA
ASSESSMENT: TBA
Fulfills Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement
Fulfills General Education Culture, Power, & Equity/Diversity Requirement
In the age of digital connectivities (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X), we are constantly encountering and engaging in transnational circuits of ideas and knowledge production. How do we see the connectivity that happens on digital sites such as Facebook and X happen in literature? How do we see the production of identity that occurs on YouTube occur in literary texts? This course will focus on fictional, dramatic, and poetic accounts of the experiences of gender and sexuality as seen through the eyes of different writers. In reading literary texts written throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—and written from various parts of the world—we will interrogate how knowledge about gender and sexuality gets produced and circulated through writing and textual representation. We will address questions such as: How are writers defining femininity and masculinity? How do gender roles and ideas about sexuality get performed, negotiated, and subverted in these texts? How do ideas about gender and sexuality “move,” as some of the characters within the texts migrate across national borders? How do we understand gender and sexuality within the interlocking systems of race, class, and nationality? And finally, how might we understand gender and sexuality within the context of a transnational, global world constituted by histories of colonialism and racism?
TEXTS: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; Untouchable, Mulk Raj Anand; M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang; E-mails from Scheherazade, Mohja Kahf; Other course texts (short stories, supplemental articles, pop culture pieces) will be provided as electronic documents/links.
ASSESSMENT: three major papers; an oral presentation; discussion posts; class participation and peer response; generative/in-class writing
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
This course serves as an introduction to the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and to medieval literature and culture; students need not have prior experience with the Middle Ages nor with Middle English—the particular form of English in which Chaucer wrote. We’ll spend the first few class sessions orienting ourselves in the Middle Ages. This will include engaging not only with literature but with medieval art, science, and theology. We will begin with Chaucer’s poetry, and our work will expand to include discussions of the Black Plague, alchemical treatises on the Philosopher’s Stone, and mystical encounters with gods and demons.
In reading Chaucer, we’ll explore his extraordinary innovations in the fields of art and philosophy. Works like the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale mark one of the earliest forays into science fiction; poems like the Knight’s Tale are among the earliest tragedies written in English. These experiments didn’t happen in a vacuum: even as Chaucer experimented with new forms of writing, his literary experiments took place in a world of economic, social, and political upheaval. His writing reflects his attempts to ask how we as humans can live and thrive in a volatile world—a question still relevant today. By the end of the course, students will have developed both the tools to read historical literature and a richer sense of how the medieval past continues to shape the present.
TEXTS: Geoffrey Chaucer: short poems, Book of the Duchess, and The Canterbury Tales (all in the Norton Chaucer); poetry from Patience Agbabi (Telling Tales) and Jos Charles (feeld)
ASSESSMENT: two essays, one multimodal project (with presentation), reading journal (informal writing, assessed four times in the semester), class participation
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
This course will begin with close readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets and then move to a study of the language, dramatic forms, themes, and characters in plays 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; William Shakespeare: Sonnets; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Henry IV, Part 1; Twelfth Night; Antony and Cleopatra
ASSESSMENT: two essays, a group performance, quizzes, final exam, and class participation
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
Fulfills the General Education International Requirement
The New World was not empty waiting to be discovered—it was already full of worlds.
What really happened when Europeans first arrived in the Americas? This course explores the dramatic encounters that reshaped cultures, histories, and identities across the Atlantic world.
Through travel writing, exploration narratives, and Indigenous accounts of first contact, we will examine the “discovery” of the New World as a series of dynamic contact zones where peoples met, clashed, exchanged knowledge, and created new cultural forms. Our readings include writers such as Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Jean de Léry, Bartolomé de las Casas, Guaman Poma de Ayala, and Olaudah Equiano, who imaginatively revisit these encounters.
We will explore how discovery narratives were shaped by exploration, empire, technology, global trade, slavery, and racial discourse, while also examining Indigenous perspectives and the often-overlooked role of women in these histories.
Students will analyze these texts in their historical and cultural contexts while developing strong writing and research skills. The course also features a multimodal digital component, where students combine traditional humanities research with creative digital storytelling, using tools such as WordPress, StoryMap, and video, to present their ideas in innovative ways. No prior technical experience required.
TEXTS: John Gillis’ The Human Shore; Christopher Columbus’ Letters; Hernan Cortes’ Letters; The Saga of the Greenlanders; Erik the Red’s Saga; Ari Þorgilson’s Íslendigabók; Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s The Conquest of New Spain; Jean de Léry’s Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise called America; Guaman Poma de Ayala’s New Chronicle and Good Government; Ólafur Egilson’s The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilson.
ASSESSMENT: several writing responses to the readings; active class participation; using digital tools to create projects; writing analytical, research-driven essays; using materials from the Osher Map Library on the Portland campus: learn about New World cartography and incorporate Osher library materials into multimodal class projects
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner’s Gavin Stevens observes that “The past is never dead, it isn’t even past.” Indeed, the best southern writers seem to know that when the past changes, the present changes and, conversely, when the present changes, the past changes. Central to this course are the following questions: what has the South taught its writers, what have they taught the world, and what can they teach us, not merely about the writing of literature but also about the power of the past in the present, the tragic consequences of enforced poverty and unfounded prejudice, the models of human endurance represented in the economic and moral struggles to which the South has long been a witness?
We will approach the field of Southern literature by genre: after an introduction to the region, we will consider plantation narratives (with a focus on the Gothic), detective/crime fiction, the queer South, and environmental/catastrophe literature. Our textual focus is upon seminal Southern novels, short stories, and essays, but we will also consider film, television, music, and magazines.
TEXTS: William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946); Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1953); Ernest J. Gaines, Of Love and Dust (1967); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker (2001); Karen Russell, Swamplandia! (2011); Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
ASSESSMENT: reflective writing, analytical papers, multimodal research projects, discussion leadership and class participation
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This class will expose students to James Joyce’s full canon of work including a collection of his non-fiction essays, select poems, his one play – Exiles – Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. We will end the class by reading short excerpts and criticism of Finnegans Wake. The class will situate Joyce’s work within Modernism and Irish history, and explore its relationship to empire, rebellion, and both literary and semiotic experimentation. With the wealth of excellent and disparate scholarship available on Joyce, the required supplementary criticism for this class will foreground the feminist scholarship of Joyceans like Suzette Henke, Sandra Gilbert, Hélène Cixous, Bonnie Kime Scott, Margot Norris, and Karen R. Lawrence.
TEXTS: Exiles; Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses (Gabler edition)
ASSESSMENT: two discussion leads, two papers, one presentation
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 Criticism and Theory Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Ethical Inquiry, Social Responsibility, and Citizenship
What happens to reading, writing, and knowledge when media technologies change?
This course explores the digital age by using the invention of the printing press, one of history’s most transformative media shifts, to think critically about our own technological moment. Rather than offering a historical survey, the course treats print culture as a conceptual lens for understanding digital culture. By examining how the printing press reshaped reading practices, authorship, intellectual authority, and the circulation of knowledge during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, we develop tools for interpreting today’s digital transformations.
The course then turns to the present, exploring the digital as a computational form of culture that is changing how texts are created, analyzed, and interpreted. Students will encounter emerging approaches such as distant reading and macroanalysis; we will also examine several defining forces shaping contemporary digital life, including the Googlization of knowledge, surveillance and data collection, drone warfare, and artificial intelligence, to consider their implications for power, privacy, democracy, and individuality in a globalized world.
Throughout the course, students will experiment with digital tools while engaging key humanistic questions: Who controls knowledge? How do technologies reshape culture and authority? What happens to reading and writing in the age of algorithms?
TEXTS: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Gregorie Chamayou, Theory of the Drone; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity; Siva Vaidyanathan, Googlization of Everything; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis; Franco Moretti, Distant Reading; David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, The Watchman in Pieces. Most texts will be available online at the course’s Brightspace site.
ASSESSMENT: several reflection pieces, class presentations, mid-term paper, and final research project, which will incorporate one or two digital tools