Online BA in English Curriculum

In this course, students engage in the writing process, drafting and revising their compositions. Students develop skills in writing clear, correct sentences and coherent, focused compositions.

This course furthers the work of ENGL 101, emphasizing the writing and careful editing of argumentative essays. Students practice techniques to enhance the clarity and persuasiveness of writing for a variety of purposes and audiences. The course includes an introduction to finding and evaluating sources for writing based on research. The major course project is a research paper.

Students develop an appreciation of the literary contributions of minority Americans, primarily of Chinese, African, Puerto Rican, Japanese, Mexican, and Native American heritage.

The course explains the art of storytelling through an analysis of narrative techniques in fiction, drama and film.

A course to develop skills in creative writing, particularly in writing fiction and poetry. Strategies of style, techniques of narrative writing, and forms of poetry are examined.

A study of the English and American traditions of literature by women. The course focuses on literary analysis and appreciation of fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays, and drama by classical and contemporary authors. The roles of women as authors and as characters will be considered within their historical and literary contexts.

Students will study in detail the dramatic and literary values of representative comedies, tragedies, histories and romances.

Broadly speaking, literature refers to many kinds of written, discipline-specific texts, such as artistic or literary writing, scientific articles and books, medical articles and journals, musical compositions and scholarship, etc. Protest literature reflects writing that argues strongly against a perceived injustice or a forced inadequacy; it may criticize, demand change, or express anger. In many respects, a great deal of African American literature is centered on a form of protest, whether directly stated or implied. This course will investigate the relationship between African American music and writing that gives voice to protest.

In this class, we will learn to read and discuss mythology as a unique kind of storytelling. While we will pay special attention to elements often shared in common by myths across the globe (the hero, the underworld, the trickster, etc.), we also will explore what myths can tell us about the unique cultures, histories, and political contexts of the people who produce them. Our readings (and viewings) will include a wide variety of works both ancient and modern, from The Odyssey and The Arabian Nights to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Required work will include participation in weekly online discussions, short analysis papers, and a multimedia presentation.

This class begins four thousand years ago, with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of world literature, and then moves through the ancient and medieval world up to the 17th century. Readings may draw from classic works such as The Odyssey, Greek tragedies and comedies, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, The Journey to the West, Narrow Road to the Interior, The Canterbury Tales, and Don Quixote. The class may also include writers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, as well as selections from the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad-Gita.

Individuality and personal freedom, or alienation and existential despair? This class explores the development of modernity as reflected and developed in the literatures of the world from the 18th century to the present. Readings will be drawn from various global traditions, and may include authors such as Goethe, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Rilke, Lu Xun, Kafka, Akhmatova, Camus, Abe, and Allende

This course examines the evolution of dramatic literature through the shared spectrum of major works of drama and the theatrical spaces upon which such plays were performed. Students will explore important plays from classical antiquity through modern drama, and study how conventions of the genre took shape from one playwright to another. Essential to these readings will be an appreciation of how theatre spaces themselves evolved along with the drama, oftentimes shaping the way that playwrights wrote their plays. Students will be encouraged to view drama not only from the perspective of literature, but also as works of performative art.

Students develop skills in analyzing fiction, poetry, and drama.

A study of major authors and works of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to Shakespeare, this course is required for the English major.

A study of major authors and works of English literature from Neoclassicism to the present, this course is required for the English major

A study of the development of literary criticism in the western intellectual tradition, the course examines the distinction between criticism concerned primarily with form and criticism concerning itself with evaluation.  Pre-req = ENGL 101

Prerequisite: Permission of Instructor Note: Up to six credits in ENGL 499 may be counted toward an English major.