Summer 2020
ENGL 230: Exploring Literature
Online [CRN 31537]
Instructor: Victoria Wynn
General education humanities introductory course. Instruction in the critical reading of literature. This course will explore best-selling, young adult fiction beginning in the 1930s to present day. Genres include fantasy, magical realism, humor, and graphic novels. Prerequisite (or co-requisite): ENGL 102.
Online [CRN 30929]
Instructor: Michael Cole
General education humanities introductory course. This course introduces students to various forms of literature, including fiction, poetry, short stories, plays, graphic novels, films, and music. The emphasis in this course is on close-reading techniques and character and style analysis. Prerequisite (or co-requisite): ENGL 102.
ENGL 330: The Nature of Fiction
MW Online [CRN 30930]
Instructor: Dr Carrie Dickison
General education humanities and fine arts advanced further study course. Acquaints the student with narrative fiction in a variety of forms: the short story, short novel and novel. Covers works of fiction drawn from different cultures and historical periods; focuses on the characteristics of fiction, giving some attention to historical development and to theories of fiction. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 102.
ENGL 377: Graphic Novels
MW Online [CRN 31808]
Instructor: Dr Darren DeFrain
General education humanities and fine arts advanced further study course. Graphic novels are literary works that typically combine sequential images with alphabetic text to create a unique genre with equally unique interpretative, critical, and creative demands. This class will provide a history of graphic narratives while also providing the tools and opportunity for reading these works critically, culturally, and linguistically. While comics will also be covered, students need not have any prior knowledge of comics or graphic novels to do well in this class. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 102.
ENGL 580: Special Topics: The Young Adult In Literature
MW Online [CRN 31540]
Instructor: Dr Rebeccah Bechtold
This special topics course, “(In)dependent States: The Young Adult in Literature,” explores representations of childhood as depicted in popular young adult novels published in the United States. The course opens with two early American texts, Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, as an introduction to how shifting definitions of childhood contributed to the development of YA literature as a genre. From there, we will turn our attention to more contemporary representations of childhood, focusing on four coming-of-age stories: Lois Lowry’s post-apocalyptic Gathering Blue (2000), Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s free verse novel The Poet X (2018).