Spring 2025 Undergraduate Courses
Undergrad Course Descriptions-Oxford Campus
PDF VERISON: Spring 2025 Undergrad
Eng 199:1 Introduction to Creative Writing
TBD T TH 9:30-10:45
engl@olemiss.edu
Students will be introduced to different creative writing genres.
Eng 199:2 Introduction to Creative Writing
Spencer MWF 1-1:50
ecspence@olemiss.edu
This introductory creative writing course gives students an opportunity to explore the works of contemporary authors and explore the possibilities of their own voice and craft. Students will practice the lost art of daydreaming to foster creativity. Students will write poetry and fiction in this course, and perhaps short creative nonfiction. Through daily assignments and regular workshop sessions, students will become more comfortable sharing their work with a larger community and offering helpful critique for their peers. Students will gain a better understanding of different authors’ craft, style and voice through weekly readings and vigorous class discussion. By the end of the semester, students will compile a 25–30-page portfolio of their own creative work and give a public reading of their poetry, fiction and/or creative nonfiction.
Eng 199:3 Introduction to Creative Writing
Cogswell T TH 11-12:15
crcogswe@olemiss.edu
In this introductory Creative Writing course, students will explore examples of classic and contemporary poetry and short fiction in order to develop their own writing skills. Generative writing exercises will prompt us to exercise our imaginations courageously and play with different literary forms and modes. Through regular workshop sessions, students will practice sharing their work with peers and offering helpful critiques. The result of the semester will be 25-30 pages of revised, fully developed creative work.
Eng 199:4 Introduction to Creative Writing
Parsons MWF 11-11:50
djparson@olemiss.edu
** For BFA in Creative Writing Students Only **
The first in the series of classes for BFA students at University of Mississippi, students will intensely explore poetry and prose through reading of contemporary literature and exploration of craft. Students will draft, workshop, and revise poems, stories, and essays in the course for a portfolio-style final project.
Eng 220:1-6 Survey in Literary History: AI Lit
Raden MW 2-2:50
jraden1@olemiss.edu
Can Artificial Intelligence write a poem or a novel? And what does it mean for humans if the answer is yes? It turns out that these are questions that are much older than 2022, when ChatGPT burst onto the scene. In fact, the idea of automated literary or artistic production is much older than computers. In this course, we’ll look at this surprisingly long history in order to develop a better understanding of the stakes of our AI saturated present. This will help as ask better, more interesting questions about that present. Like, what is a Large Language Model? And why are LLMs so important for AI? What actually happens when a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) turns a text prompt into an image? And what happens when you feed a sound poem into the prompt? Given the rapidly changing status of AI, this course will be fairly experimental (and fun!) in nature.
Eng 220:7-12 Survey in Literary History: Monsters, Aliens, and Other Worlds
Needham MW 11-11:50
kjneedha@olemiss.edu
This fast-moving course surveys literary depictions of imaginary worlds and supernatural beings. How can literature that imagines worlds and beings radically different from our reality tell us something new about our own experiences? What constitutes “beauty” or “monstrosity” and how are those ideas constructed? Can literary depictions of monsters, transformations, aliens, or climate catastrophe tell us things about colonization, race, gender, the self, or our society? In our readings we’ll survey multiple literary forms (lyric poetry, drama, the short story, and the novel) across historical periods (the seventeenth century through the present), including works with canonical status and some very recent works of speculative fiction. Students will learn to closely analyze literary works and will develop their analytic writing. Potential readings include The Tempest, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and contemporary writers such as Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin.
Eng 220:7-12 Survey in Literary History: Monsters, Aliens, and Other Worlds
Needham MW 12-12:50
kjneedha@olemiss.edu
This fast-moving course surveys literary depictions of imaginary worlds and supernatural beings. How can literature that imagines worlds and beings radically different from our reality tell us something new about our own experiences? What constitutes “beauty” or “monstrosity” and how are those ideas constructed? Can literary depictions of monsters, transformations, aliens, or climate catastrophe tell us things about colonization, race, gender, the self, or our society? In our readings we’ll survey multiple literary forms (lyric poetry, drama, the short story, and the novel) across historical periods (the seventeenth century through the present), including works with canonical status and some very recent works of speculative fiction. Students will learn to closely analyze literary works and will develop their analytic writing. Potential readings include The Tempest, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and contemporary writers such as Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin.
Eng 220: 19-24 Survey in Literary History: Mad Lit
Cogswell TH 1-1:50
crcogswe@olemiss.edu
This course tracks the evolving meanings of madness—including both madness-as-anger and madness-as-insanity—in British and American literature from the French Revolution through the present day. Alongside madness, we will also interrogate rationality and sanity, to understand the ways in which beliefs and behaviors treated as reasonable actually vary quite a bit over time and space. We begin at the end of the Age of Reason, when a newly modern world saw an explosion of interest in madness. We start with the poetry and engravings of Romantic poet and visionary William Blake as well as Charlotte Bronte’s iconic Gothic tale, Jane Eyre. Students will then trace the afterlives of key tropes associated with literary madness, pondering questions around speech, gender, doubleness, normalcy, architecture, and paranoia. In short, this course explores the knotty issue of how the twin states of “going mad” and “being mad” shape our culture’s narratives about power, authority, and the self.
Eng 220: 25-30 Survey in Literary History: Mad Lit
Cogswell TH 2-2:50
crcogswe@olemiss.edu
This course tracks the evolving meanings of madness—including both madness-as-anger and madness-as-insanity—in British and American literature from the French Revolution through the present day. Alongside madness, we will also interrogate rationality and sanity, to understand the ways in which beliefs and behaviors treated as reasonable actually vary quite a bit over time and space. We begin at the end of the Age of Reason, when a newly modern world saw an explosion of interest in madness. We start with the poetry and engravings of Romantic poet and visionary William Blake as well as Charlotte Bronte’s iconic Gothic tale, Jane Eyre. Students will then trace the afterlives of key tropes associated with literary madness, pondering questions around speech, gender, doubleness, normalcy, architecture, and paranoia. In short, this course explores the knotty issue of how the twin states of “going mad” and “being mad” shape our culture’s narratives about power, authority, and the self.
Eng 220: 31-39 Survey in Literary History: Literature for Leaders
Solinger MW 1-1:50
solinger@go.olemiss.edu
Multi-century survey of a topic in literary history across multiple genres. In this fast-moving and INCREDIBLY FUN multi-media survey of literature and culture, we will focus on the experiences, ethics, and challenges of leadership from ancient times to the present. We’ll study a wide range of cultural artefacts in their historical and cultural contexts and also consider their transhistorical resonances: how we can use this material not only to become better leaders and ethical actors but also to hold accountable those in positions of power. Our class has an interdisciplinary focus, but it is first and foremost a study of literature. You will develop your abilities to talk and write about different genres: poetry, drama, short stories, novels, letters, essays, and film. And you will gain an understanding of how you can use literature in a variety of life situations and professional paths.
Eng 220: 40 Survey in Literary History: Literature of Space and Time
Kreisel T TH 9:30-10:45
dkk@go.olemiss.edu
** For Students of the SBMHC Only **
The famous 18th-century critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that the “fancy” is a “mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” In this class we will consider the relationship between “the order of time and space” and literary creativity. We will read and discuss works considered avant-garde in their treatment of temporality and spatiality in order to understand the building blocks of the various literary genres: plot, character, setting, narration, theme, and figuration. Texts may include: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway \ Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49\ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities \ Samuel Beckett, Endgame \ Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author \ Paul Auster, City of Glass: The Graphic Novel \photocopied course reader
Eng 220: 41 Survey in Literary History: Literature in Sports
Parsons MWF 12-12:50
djparson@go.olemiss.edu
** For Students of the SBMHC Only **
A literary survey of the relationship between literature and sport, we’ll be exploring fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry that deals with sport in different ways. From “Casey at the Bat” to Friday Night Lights, we’ll look at how sport affects American mythology and culture.
Eng 221 Survey of World Literature to 1650
Eng 222 Survey of World Literature since 1650
Eng 223 Survey of American Literature to Civil War
Eng 224 Survey of American Literature since Civil War
Eng 225 Survey of British Literature to 18th Century
Eng 226 Survey of British Literature since 18th Century
Eng 299:1 Introduction to Literary Studies: American Outcasts
Reed MW 3-4:15
preed@olemiss.edu
This course is designed to introduce students to upper-level work in English, emphasizing methods of close reading, textual analysis, and research skills. We will read a selection of American texts, some classic, some not-so-classic, that will offer us a window into American culture through its losers, loners, outcasts, and outlaws. History might be written by the victors, but literature (at least the fun kind, the interesting kind) is often written by “oddballs,” “misfits,” and “weirdos”—people with creative approaches to American life and their own ways of expressing them. While we read these texts and consider their ideas, we will also practice “English major” skills: we will read about how to read, we will practice better writing, and we will think hard about how literature works, what we’re doing when we talk about literature, and how we can become more effective writers and resourceful scholars.
Eng 299:1 Introduction to Literary Studies
Trefzer T TH 9:30-10:45
atrefzer@olemiss.edu
This gateway course for upper-division coursework in English introduces students to methods of close reading and textual analysis. Students will develop the writing and research skills required for literary studies, build their critical vocabularies, and gain experience analyzing the formal features of fiction, poetry, drama. In addition to studying some of the major genres of literature, We will examine the aims and conventions of the literary critical essay and extend this inquiry to literary studies more generally.
Eng 301:1 Poetry Workshop
Nezhukumatathil MWF 11-11:50
acnezhuk@olemiss.edu
ENG 301 is the continued study of forms and techniques of poetry. This is a generative studio class with intensive writing done both in and out of the classroom. This course is for those who are already comfortable with the concept of revision, and who are ready for honest, constructive feedback. More in-depth reading and intensive writing of poetry is expected to further sharpen your editorial and revision skills. The aim is to support you as a writer—both your process and your need to grow and develop through reading, writing, and the study of contemporary poetry. You will maintain and compile a poetry portfolio that celebrates the wide variety and depth of your study of the craft of poetry. w/ Prof. Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Eng 302:1 Fiction Workshop
Sundar T TH 1-2:15
smsundar@olemiss.edu
This generative writing workshop will focus on the craft of fiction. We will open the semester by reading and analyzing a range of short stories, paying attention to the structure of these works, as well as the development of characters—their vulnerabilities, their backstories, and the complexities that make them human.
Eng 302:2 Fiction Workshop
Spencer MWF 9-9:50
ecspence@olemiss.edu
In this course we will read the work of contemporary fiction writers and, through the study of their craft, bring our own voices to the creative process. We’ll explore the essential principles of character development, conflict, plot, setting, dialogue and theme in storytelling and prioritize daily generative writing exercises. Course requirements include keeping a meticulous journal, sharing original work, thoughtful participation in class peer reviews and compiling a collection of your polished work from the semester.
Eng 303 Nonfiction Workshop
Spencer MWF 10-10:50
ecspence@olemiss.edu
In this class, we will explore the craft and power of storytelling through the work of Margaret Renkl, Kiese Laymon, Ann Lamott, Maya Angelou, Rachel Carson, Toni Morrison, and others to discover the path to our own truth. Over the course of the semester, we’ll write a range of creative pieces — including flash nonfiction, memoir, autobiography—and gain feedback from each other in a workshop format. Our final class will allow for all participants to share their work in a public reading at Heartbreak Coffee.
Eng 304 Screenwriting Workshop
Bondurant T TH 11-12:15
mrbondur@olemiss.edu
This course is and introduction to the study and craft of screenwriting through reading and writing. Prerequisite of ENG 199 or ENG 300.
Eng 307 Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory
Raden MW 3-4:15
jraden1@olemiss.edu
Literary theory and criticism is animated by a simple but tricky question: how do we know what kinds of critical methods and reading protocols we should use to analyze literary texts? In thinking about this question, we’ll try out a number of approaches –– from structuralist, to historicist, to psychoanalytic, to materialist, and beyond –– and see what happens when we do. We may not be able to decisively answer our question, but you’ll begin to build up a critical tool-kit that will serve you well in higher-level English courses.
Eng 309 Studies in Genre: The Short Story
Hipp Online
mbhipp@olemiss.edu
This course examines short stories by Mississippi writers. It is divided into three modules: early twentieth century, late twentieth century, and contemporary. These three periods allow us to address several key questions about Mississippi short stories. What historical contexts shape these stories? How does place influence subject matter? What strategies have these writers employed to convey their ideas? How does the idea of regional literature change in the contemporary period? By the end of the course, students will be able to address these questions and think and write knowledgeably about the short stories of Mississippi.
Eng 310 Introduction to Cinema Studies
Purcell T TH 2:30-3:45
repurcel@olemiss.edu
The primary purpose of this course is to teach you key terms and methodological approaches to film analysis. To that end, we will spend the first quarter of the course watching films by directors like Maya Deren, Akira Kurasawa, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Spike Lee, Lizzie Borden and others to delve into the basic elements of filmmaking: editing, cinematography, sound, mise-en-scene and film style. We will also spend a significant part of the course bringing our interpretive skills to bear on a particular form of filmic entertainment, the “blockbuster”, a word that moved from describing aerial munitions to identifying one of the most important categories of entertainment of the last 80 years. By exploring the origins of the blockbuster, we will delve into the long, transnational history of cinema as an aesthetic and industrial practice of expression, national identity formation and corporate profit making. This course part of the course will focus on the global film industry from the 1930s to our present and primarily use Hollywood films such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1979), Top Gun (1986), Titanic (1997), Avatar (2009), Barbie (2023) as well as franchises like the Marvel Cinematic University (MCU) as examples of the blockbuster. We will also look at particular genres like the musical and horror film as well as films produced out of other national cinematic traditions (Bollywood, Nollywood and Korean cinema) to analyze how the blockbuster concept works within different genres, national cinematic and sociopolitical contexts.
Eng 316 Introduction to Medieval Studies: Medieval Influencers
Hayes MWF 9-9:50
hayes@olemiss.edu
** Cross Listed with MIII 375 **
This course introduces students to medieval culture and seminal works of medieval literature.
Eng 317 Chaucer
Baechle MWF 10-10:50
sebaechl@olemiss.edu
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in a time of great social, political, and religious upheaval, a time in which the stakes of English writing were uncertain. This course examines Chaucer’s efforts during that period to create sustained fiction in English through his most ambitious and experimental work, The Canterbury Tales. We will learn about earlier forms of English, its sounds, and its poetry, while reading stories ranging from the lascivious to the sacred. Regular quizzes will help strengthen your language and translation skills while short papers and midterm and final exams will allow you to explore and synthesize larger ideas about Chaucer, his times, and his work. Ultimately, we will find out what earned Chaucer the title “Father of English poetry.”
Eng 324 Shakespeare
Raber T TH 11-12:50
kraber@olemiss.edu
What do Shakespeare’s plays have to offer readers or audiences in the 21st century? We will explore some of the ways that Shakespeare’s works continue to contribute to scholarship in our time, especially to the ways we think about environmental crisis, sexuality and identity, race and ethnicity, the nature of tyranny, and other recent cultural concerns. We will read a representative selection of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry; students will write two essays, take short exams on each play and complete a cumulative final exam.
Eng 340 Studies in Antebellum American Literature: Transcendentalism and Reform
Bishop MWF 10-10:50
atbishop@olemiss.edu
This course will offer an in-depth introduction to the nineteenth-century American philosophical, literary, and social movement known as Transcendentalism. As we read literature by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, Rebecca Harding Davis, and other authors associated with—or critical of—Transcendentalism, we will tease out major Transcendentalist values, such as self-reliance and self-culture; analyze some of the movement’s potential blind spots; and consider the relationships between Transcendentalism and other nineteenth-century reform efforts, including feminism, abolitionism, socialism, and the beginnings of environmentalism. We will also spend some time thinking about the connections between Transcendentalism and capitalism, noting the ease with which many Transcendentalist countercultural practices (such as going out into nature and rejecting society) have been repackaged as lucrative consumer products. Major assignments will likely include weekly discussion questions, a response paper, and a final research project.
Eng 347 Studies in 20th and 21st Century US Literature: Poetry Movements Since 1900
Earley Online
tdearley@olemiss.edu
This course may be repeated if topic varies.
Eng 352 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Oxford and the World
Fennelly T TH 9:30-10:45
bafennel@olemiss.edu
This reading-intensive and writing-intensive class will focus on literature–mostly fiction, with some poetry and nonfiction–written in the last twenty years, with a special focus on the literary community of Oxford. We will have class visitors and attend readings and the Oxford Conference for the Book events and immerse ourselves in the challenging and vibrant world of literature around us.
Eng 354 Survey of Southern Literature
Watson T TH 2:30-3:45
jwatson@olemiss.edu
A reading and discussion course intended primarily for majors and minors in English and Southern Studies. Though notexclusively devoted to Mississippi literature, the course will foreground a generous selection of Mississippi writers to convey a sense of the state’s unusually rich literary tradition. The syllabus, which covers autobiography, short fiction, novels, poetry, and film and is arranged in a more or less chronological way, will include the following: Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Southwestern Humor sketches by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris; short stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Mira Nair, dir., Mississippi Masala; Linda Hogan, Power; Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; and Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation. The course grade will be based on class participation, online reader-response journals, a critical essay, a creative assignment, and a comprehensive final exam.
Eng 355 Studies in Southern Literature: The World of Eudora Welty
Trefzer T TH 2:30-3:45
atrefzer@olemiss.edu
** For Students in the SMBHC Only **
Eudora Welty is a master of the American short story. Short stories launched her career in the 1930s, and to this day, her story collections are the cornerstones of her nationally recognized literary achievement. She chronicled life in Mississippi in her four short story collections A Curtain of Green(1941), The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955). This in-depth study offers a sense of Welty’s development as a writer and brings her work into conversation with questions of region and nation, gender and sexuality, disability, race, and social class. It also explores her fiction in relation to her photography. Welty once wrote: “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” We will explore together how Welty in fact “dared” her readers to image the interior lives of others. In addition to regular course work, students will have an opportunity to join the International Eudora Welty conference in Jackson, MS.
Eng 359 Survey in Native American Literature: Indigenous American Literatures of the Mississippi River Valley
Wigginton T TH 11-12:15
cwiggint@olemiss.edu
This class is a survey of Native American literatures and focuses on the Indigenous nations of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. For hundreds if not thousands of years, the Indigenous peoples of the river valley have circulated their art and texts, producing a rich ecological, cultural, and literary network that continues today. With the river as our guide, we will examine texts created by Native peoples living along and engaging with the Mississippi River. We will follow the river’s north to south flow, from its headwaters in Dakota and Anishinaabe homelands to the swamps and bayous of the delta, with its many Native towns, including those of the Chitimacha and Choctaw. We will examine contemporary literature alongside older forms of art and writing and ask how they connect place-based and tribally specific expressions to more expansive geographies.
Eng 362 African American Literature Since 1920
Alexander T TH 9:30-10:45
pealexan@olemiss.edu
** Cross Listed with AAS 342 **
This course surveys twentieth-century African American literature, tracing major developments in the field from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary moment. In terms of genre, we will read widely, examining essays, novels, autobiographies, poems, and dramatic works. While we will examine all assigned works in specific historical and political contexts (including the New Negro, Civil Rights, and Black Arts Movements), we will be particularly attentive to those themes that unify these works, such as the search for voice, the pursuit of freedom, the creation of a Black consciousness, and the remembrance of the forgotten. Authors whose works we will study will likely include James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, J. California Cooper, and Ernest Gaines.
Eng 367 Blues Tradition in American Literature
Earley Online
tdearley@olemiss.edu
In this course, we will study the intersections between blues and jazz music and African-American literature through an examination of novels, short stories, essays, plays, documentary films, and the music itself. The course will provide the student with a working background of blues culture and history, explore how the blues and jazz are represented in literature and how they correspond to, critique, and reflect important historical, cultural, and literary concerns. Students will develop the necessary close reading and critical thinking skills to interpret literary texts from a variety of perspectives.
Eng 393 Studies in Popular Culture: Speculative Worldbuilding
Wang T TH 1-2:15
mxwang@olemiss.edu
This honors section is a combined literature and creative writing class, focusing exclusively on speculative fiction. We will read different works, both literary and genre novels along with story collections, and discuss the history and range of fiction that can be classified as “speculative.” In addition, in small groups, you will build your own speculative worlds, laying out the foundation and populating it with a diverse range of places, peoples, and things. Assignments for the course will include close-reading essays and reading responses along with creative exercises situated in the worlds your group has built together.
Eng 400 Advanced Poetry Workshop
Ginsburg T TH 2:30-3:45
mginsburg@olemiss.edu
Students in this advanced poetry workshop will join a creative community of talented writers. We will engage in generative writing assignments designed to bolster your connection to your unique creative life. We will play with various poetic forms and techniques, ranging from sonnets and villanelles to erasures, AI generated poems, and other collaborative experiments. In addition to reading and critiquing classmates’ poems , we will read lots of published poems and one full-length poetry collection. Students will attend poetry readings in and around Oxford, write and revise at least 12 new poems, and sequence this work into a chapbook at the end of the semester.
Eng 401 Advanced Fiction Workshop
Wang T TH 9:30-10:45
mxwang@olemiss.edu
In this workshop, students will submit at least two fiction pieces for critique and revision. Participating as engaged, helpful readers of each other’s work, students will write detailed feedback that aims to aid the writer to better achieve their own vision of the work. In addition, we will discuss published stories with a breadth of different effects and join in generative exercises that help a writer find their own voice.
Eng 405 Nature Writing
Nezhukumatathil MWF 1-1:50
acnezhuk@olemiss.edu
This is not your parents’ nature writing class. This class will help you produce nature writing full of love and gratitude, serious environmental dangerous concerns, all with exuberance and heart. You will be introduced to both canonical and contemporary writers who ignite a sense of protection for their planet, very much in the veins of Rachel Carson who said, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” When this class is over, I want you to have less taste for destruction. We will try a variety of forms of nature writing (fable/short story, essay, lyric essay, and poetry) and actual first-hand explorations of nature through various short field experiences. Through the close reading, critical thinking, and experimenting required in this course, we will investigate the extent to which literary and cultural forms shape the ways that people engage their beliefs and attitudes toward the natural world.
Eng 409 Special Topics in Genre: Hybrid Genres
Fennelly T TH 11-12:15
bafennel@olemiss.edu
In today’s increasingly heterogeneous landscape, cross-genre works that blend inheritances from multiple literary parents have a new urgency and popularity. In this advanced level literature class, we will become familiar with the history and possibilities of various hybrid forms, including short-form nonfiction, zuihitsu, graphic novels, aphorisms, lyric essays, and forms that are hard to label. In addition to reading the individual works, texts about craft, and some theory, this class with have a hybrid element in that we will adapt and adopt some techniques from the creative writing classroom, so in addition to more traditional written papers and craft analyses, students will also produce a mini portfolio of genre-busting hybrid work.
Eng 409 Special Topics in Genre: I’m the Problem, It’s Milton: The Invention of the Anti-Hero
Friedlander MW 3-4:15
ari@olemiss.edu
This course has this thing where it examines the life and work of arguably the greatest English poet of all time: John Milton. Known as the creator of the epic poem Paradise Lost, with its famous depiction of Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Milton was also the author of brilliant sonnets, pastoral poetry, and dramatic literature, as well as an extremely consequential author of political theory (everybody agrees). We will look directly at Milton’s work alongside his life and times in order to understand what compelled him to represent himself as an anti-hero early in his poetic career, and then to return to that figure again and again in the course of his poetry, through figures like Comus, Satan, and Samson. We know that it must be exhausting always writing for the anti-hero—so why did Milton keep doing it? And why do we keep rooting for his creations?
Eng 427 Shakespeare on Film
Needham MWF 9-9:50
kjneedha@olemiss.edu
Shakespeare’s plays were originally written for performance, but this can get lost when we read them on the page. While films cannot replicate those original performances, they can awaken us to the possibilities and lived power of the Shakespearean text by making it seen, heard, and embodied in performance. This seminar explores adaptations of Shakespeare for film and television from a range of eras, from classic British voices to highly modernized renditions to adaptations from outside the Anglophone world. By reading the plays closely alongside their adaptations, we can observe the choices of each screen adaptation, asking what it reveals about the original play as well as what it says about its own moment and context. We will also consider modern retellings of Shakespearean plays and at least one filmed recording of a stage production, asking how such hybrid forms extend the Shakespearean text and contribute to our cultural narratives of the Bard. Class discussions will involve direct discussion of the play’s text as well as filmic techniques in major scenes (camera angle, lighting, editing, costume, setting, sound, etc.) to ask how the film adaptation constitutes an interpretation of the text. Possible directors include Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor, and Akira Kurosawa. Potential plays include Romeo and Julie, Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. This class will involve close reading of both cinematic techniques and Shakespeare’s language, but it assumes no previous experience with cinema studies or early modern English.
Eng 439 Special Topics in Victorian Literature: How to Read Middlemarch
Kreisel T TH 2:30-3:45
dkk@olemiss.edu
While composing her sixth and most famous novel, George Eliot complained in a letter to her publisher, “I don’t see how I can leave anything out.” It does seem as though in the end she included everything: meditations on science, religion, and epistemology; political commentary on the poor, voting rights, and gender issues; medicine, law, journalism; piano playing, botany, carpets, bankruptcy, scandal, and (sort of) sex. In order to read Middlemarch, one must already have read everything else. In this course, we will set out to do just that: while we might not get to everything, we will certainly read much, all in the interest of contextualizing and enriching our understanding of (according to Virginia Woolf) “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
The course will consist of a fairly leisurely (by Victorian-novel-class standards) close reading of Middlemarch alongside both contemporary Victorian materials and modern criticism. The course will be divided into five separate “contexts”: science and medicine; law and politics; economics; gender; and art. Secondary readings will include letters, journals, and essays of George Eliot; contemporary scientific works by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and others; Victorian art criticism by John Ruskin and others; contemporary periodical articles on political economy, law, and the “woman question”; and modern criticism by, among others, Dorothea Barrett, Gillian Beer, Catherine Gallagher, Neil Hertz, John Kucich, George Levine, Richard Menke, J. Hillis Miller, and Sally Shuttleworth.
Eng 468 Major African American Writers: Malcolm, Martin, Barack
Alexander T TH 1-2:15
pealexan@olemiss.edu
** Cross Listed with AAS 468 **
** Fulfills Capstone Requirement **
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. They are two of the most iconic, charismatic, and anthologized Black male orators of the past six decades. In our current epoch—the third decade of the twenty-first century—Malcolm’s and Martin’s voluminous body of speeches, autobiographical writings, letters, essays, and political visions continue to make headlines, inspire book manuscripts, mass movements, and docuseries, and expand the field of African American literary studies. Now, at a moment in U.S. history marked by the continuing prizewinning literary production of another alluring Black male orator—the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama—the time is ripe to revisit works by and about Malcolm and Martin with a more critical eye.
In this course—which fulfills the capstone requirement for the English major—we will analyze the speechmaking techniques and self-writing practices of Malcolm, Martin, and Barack, as well as the reception of these techniques and practices in literary, scholarly, and pop culture discourses. We will examine many famous and obscure addresses, writings, and scholarly works by and about these African American male orators, paying careful attention to how conventional notions of the American Dream, freedom, justice, criminality, racism, racial uplift, gender politics, nationhood, misogynoir, and Black identities are conceptualized anew in works authored by and about these figures. Readings and screenings will likely include Malcolm’s speeches, “20 Million Black People in a Political, Economic, and Mental Prison,” “Message to the Grassroots,” and “The Ballot or the Bullet,” The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X; Martin’s speeches, “I Have a Dream,” “A Time to Break Silence,” and “I See the Promised Land,” and Ava DuVernay’s film, Selma; and Barack Obama’s speeches, “The Great Need of the Hour” and “A More Perfect Union,” his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, and excerpts from his more recently published memoir A Promised Land.
Eng 494 Special Topics in Environmental Studies: Myths of the American Wilderness
Reed MW 11-12:45
preed@olemiss.edu
** Fulfills Capstone Requirement **
In this class, we will read some of American Literature’s “greatest hits,” asking how they have helped build major mythologies of American and its natural, wild, and green spaces. We will aim to understand the ways early settler colonials thought about the land and how they interacted with native people; we will consider Puritans and their notions of the natural and the supernatural, living in a world filled with wondrous signs and marvelous events. We will also consider Enlightenment and Romantic visions of nature, as agrarian space transformed into wild frontier in the nineteenth century. Reading a combination of well-known and lesser-known texts, we will consider carefully the roots and routes of American ideas of the wild, and how that has impacted us today. This class is a capstone course and requires a longer research paper as part of the final grade.
Eng 515 Non-Fiction Workshop
Sundar T 6-8:30
smsundar@olemiss.edu
This course is designed for students interested in memoir and personal essay. Our concrete goal is to produce one strong example of each, one of which will be revised for inclusion in your portfolio. More broadly, my aim is to help you deepen your understanding of yourselves as writers, and the stories you seek to tell about yourselves and the world.
University Writing Center Services
When planning to write your papers for English classes, don’t forget the benefit of consulting with an experienced writer in the University Writing Center. In a typical 20- to 30-minute writing consultation, you may receive suggestions for development of ideas, audience consideration, organization, style, grammar, and document presentation. Undergraduate students can schedule appointments through our online appointment calendar at www.olemiss.edu/depts/writing_center or call 915-7689.