Spring 2025 EN Course Descriptions
English majors and minors are encouraged to complete the advising template (PDF) before meeting with their academic advisors. Those who choose to register online might consider filling out the document in Word, saving it to a file, and then e-mailing it to their advisors as part of the "permit to register" request.
English Department Course Offerings - Spring 2025
200-Level Courses
Major Writers: Cold War Literature
EN 200.01 – T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard
In this course, we will study the literature of the Cold War period, specifically, the 1950s and 60s, to understand how political developments gave rise to new forms and styles of writing. Likely readings will include Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and science fiction by Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Major Writers: Literature and Climate Change
EN 200.02 – M/W/F 1:00-1:50 PM
Dr. Stephen Park
Nearly everyone knows what climate change is and what the causes are. And yet, societies around the world continue to put carbon into the atmosphere and behave in ways that are, largely, unchanged. Why is that? Fiction writer and historian, Amitav Ghosh, describes our time as an era of “derangement,” one in which people’s understanding of the problem and their actions do not match because they are so invested in deep cultural narratives that doing something different is simply unthinkable. It is our task in “Literature and Climate Change” to explore those narratives.
This course asks the question—how did we get here? We will read a range of 20th- and 21st-century fiction and poetry in order to consider the cultural desires that made carbon the “logical” way forward. The literature in our course will also grapple with the consequences of climate change for different members of society, and, in some cases, these books will help us imagine alternative ways of structuring the world. Texts may include Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. “Literature and Climate Change” counts toward the Environmental Studies Minor.
This is a Community-Engaged Learning course, and students will have the opportunity to volunteer with the non-profit organization, . This work is central to the issues of the course. By learning about and caring for Baltimore’s ecosystem, students will have a richer understanding of how the global issues in our course impact their own surroundings.
Major Writers: Nature and Environmental Poetry
EN 200.03 – T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Katherine Shloznikova
Romantic poets often found their inspiration and consolation in nature: in trees, rivers, clouds, birds, landscapes. Following Rousseau, they endowed nature with love, innocence and benevolence, which allowed them to explore their inner being -- its longing, maladies and melancholy. In this course, we will read ancient poets, European Romantics, American transcendentalists, indigenous and contemporary poetry, in order to explore how nature can be poeticized, manipulated and exploited at the same time. We will study eco-feminist writing and environmental topics in ethics and sustainability.
Major Writers: English Literature: Monsters and the Monstrous
EN 201.01 – T/TH 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery
The flowering of science and technology in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries markedly improved people's lives, but progress (as always) brought with it unintended consequences. The fears that scientific theorizing and experimentation unleashed reveal themselves in the "monster" literature of the period, most notably in works of Mary Shelley, the Brownings, Christina Rossetti, Bram Stoker, and H.G. Wells. This literature aims to evoke horror but also to raise philosophical and moral questions. In "Monsters and the Monstrous, we'll examine the intersections of science, technology, and the monstrous in literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries and analyze shifting conceptions of the natural and the unnatural that still influence us today. In addition to the literary texts, we will also view and discuss four films.
Major Writers: Gender, Cult & Madness
EN 206.01 / PY 207.01 - T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard and Dr. Amy Wolfson
In this team-taught course, we will study the foundational connections between literature and psychology. Featuring literature and films by influential American authors who underwent psychiatric treatment, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen, the course will explore the relation between creativity and mental illness. Throughout history and across cultures, the label of “madness” has often been applied to individuals whose gender identities, emotions, and behaviors fall outside social norms. Through case studies focused on topics including neurasthenia, gaslighting, depression, trauma, addiction, and body image, we will examine how gender constructs and values continue to shape definitions of mental health and illness. In addition to counting toward the second core English requirement, the course will also fulfill a Diversity-Justice course requirement and count toward the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor. Cross-listed as PY 270.01.
Black Women Writers
EN 208.01 - T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
EN 208.02 - T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Sondra Guttman
Did you know that the second woman in America to publish a book of poems was enslaved —and she did it as a teenager? Did you know that the first woman to speak in public in the U.S. was a Black woman? Get to know Phillis Wheatley, Maria W. Stewart, and other writers whose courageous voices have inspired social justice movements and empowered people globally to envision and work towards a better world. The innovative works we’ll read challenge the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, and autobiography and history. Topics include gender and sexuality studies, racial construction and identity, the transatlantic slave trade, African diaspora, and justice movements including Abolition, Civil Rights, Black Feminism, and Black Arts.
The emphasis is on shorter readings (stories, poems, essays, and selections from longer works) with longer works at semester’s end. The work includes weekly blog posts, a midterm and a final exam, two essays, and one collaborative teaching project.
This course fulfills your second-level English/History core requirement and also a Diversity Justice requirement. It also counts towards minors in American Studies, African and African American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Major Writers: Greek Drama
EN 213.01 / CL 213.01 - M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
Dr. Thomas McCreight
Read the most famous myths and stories from Greek Tragedy and Comedy. Content: Cannibalism, incest, intra-family murders (many), a successful sex strike that ends a war. Also: Gore, sex, betrayal, revenge, divine intervention, heroes, monsters. Featured: Great plays like Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Antigone and Euripides' Medea and Bacchae that are still performed today because of their vivid and penetrating insights into human motivation, emotion and action.
Literature Onstage, Yesterday & Today
EN 215.02 – T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Hunter Plummer
The theater can be incredibly communal and even vulnerable for the performer and the audience as they occupy a shared physical space and grapple with ways to (literally) stage a protest or commentary on the writer’s society and culture.
In this course, you will dive into the abrasive, provocative, and experimental world of modern and contemporary theater. You will study plays and musicals as works of literature—not just things to produce onstage—to develop and hone the skills needed to analyze scripts and performances in the same way you would prose and poetry, while also have the opportunity to attend a local professional production.
While this course will be dominated by American and British theater, it will also draw upon the rich traditions of Argentina, Nigeria, and beyond—including works in translation—to expose you to a global vision of the last 150 years of drama. You will explore how theater fits into major artistic and literary movements (modernism, realism, etc.) and forms unique to the stage to cultivate a singular perspective of the ways literature both shapes and reflects the developments and problems of communities.
Possible plays and musicals studied include A Strange Loop (Michael R. Jackson), Fefu and Her Friends (María Irene Fornés), Machinal (Sophie Treadwell), Mother Courage (Bertolt Brecht) Death and the Maiden (Ariel Dorfman), The Camp (Griselda Gambaro), A Dance of the Forests (Wole Soyinka), Gypsy (Sondheim/Styne/Laurents), The Nosebleed (Aya Ogawa), and Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Will Arbery).
Comic Books as Literature, TV & Cinema
EN 220.01 – M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
EN 220.02 - M/W/F 11:00-11:50 AM
Dr. Brett Butler
The impact of comic books, graphic novels, and manga have had on popular cultural is massive. However, it is only in the last couple decades that these mediums have become the topic of proper scholarly debate and criticism. This course exposes students to a variety of comic book and graphic novels and teaches them how discuss them in academically. Whether they are dedicated comic book fans or mildly interested newcomers, students learn to develop a more profound appreciation for visual storytelling.
300-Level Courses
Milton
EN 320.01 ‐ M/W 3:00‐4:15 PM
Dr. Thomas Scheye
In his essay, The Reason of Church Government, Milton describes his ambition this way: “That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome . . . and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine.” In choosing to tell the story of the Fall of Man, Milton is deliberately courting comparison with Moses as the author of Genesis. In plotting his career from the pastoral Lycidas to the epic Paradise Lost, and its sequel Paradise Regained, he is comparing his achievement to that of Virgil. And near the end of his career in Samson Agonistes, he composes a tragedy in the style of Sophocles. Such ambition may suggest something of the challenge that reading Milton inevitably entails, but something of the rewards as well. In Paradise Lost, he promises “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Careful readers will conclude he keeps his promise.
Topics in African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance
EN 375.01 – M/W/F 1:00-1:50 PM
Dr. Trevon Pegram
The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most praised and criticized Black cultural and literary movements of the 20th century. From its inception at the close of WWI until its eventual demise during the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance was a vital cultural moment when, as Langston Hughes proclaims, “the Negro was in vogue.” This class will grapple with what it meant for Black artists to be “in vogue” and the broader complexities (and contradictions) of the Harlem Renaissance. To understand the breadth of this period, we will discuss novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, films, and songs. In doing so, the course will introduce students to central and marginal figures of the Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Oscar Micheaux, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Rudolph Fisher, and Duke Ellington. This course will provide students with a broad overview of the Harlem Renaissance and an understanding of why it remains a mythic moment of artistic production.
Literature of the U.S. - Mexico Border
EN 390.01 ‐ M/W/F 1:00-11:50 AM
Dr. Stephen Park
This course will explore the literature and culture of the borderland, from the violent creation of the US-Mexico border in 1848 to the present day. Throughout the semester, we will read a historical range of texts, almost exclusively written by Chicanx authors. We will consider how this body of literature has been shaped by the lived reality of the US/Mexico border, by the tension between English and Spanish, and by the lasting effects of internal colonialism. By examining more closely the poetry, fiction, and life writing produced in the borderlands, it becomes clear that this seemingly peripheral region is central to the United States and to the longer story of American Literature.
We will begin with a study of Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work, Borderlands/La Frontera in order to give us a theoretical lens through which to view the borderlands. We’ll then read early works of Chicanx Literature, such as María Ruíz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez, as well as works by contemporary authors, such as Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Cormac McCarthy. This course will also consider how the US/Mexico border has been represented in film, television, and music.
This course counts toward the Minor in Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS). Past and current participants in Loyola’s immersion program with the Kino Border Initiative are especially encouraged to enroll.
400-Level Courses
Seminar in African American Literature
EN 481.01 ‐ T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Gary Slack, Jr.
In African American literature, the manifesto is tied to ideas of being and personhood, making clear its aesthetic and political commitments. From David Walker’s Appeal (1829) to Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) to the Combahee River Collective statement (1977), manifestoes survey the present while creating the future. This seminar explores manifesto writing in the context of African American literature, as well as in the works of art they influence. We will also engage with works that are not manifestoes in the traditional sense but still do the work of manifesting new standards and possibilities.
Seminar in Modern Lit: RE: JOYCE!
EN 483.01 - T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Nicholas Miller
Seminar in Multiethnic American Literature: Asian/Pacific U.S. Lit
EN 488.01 – M/W 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Sondra Guttman
We’ll read poems carved into barrack walls by immigrants in detainment, a satire of contemporary cop shows, a memoir interwoven with the Ballad of Mulan, and more. You’ll learn how writers of different backgrounds represent similar experiences, including family relationships, love, trauma, war, immigration, migration, discrimination, and internalized racism.
Past students reflected:
- “The literature helped me understand a key piece of American culture which is so often overlooked. I hope to be able to use the history learned in this course to better understand experiences in my own life, especially with media portrayal of Asian Americans.”
- “I learned that we grew up in a world where stereotypes are far more normalized than we ever thought. It is vital to have an open mind in life. Not everything you hear is true and I am really glad that I took this class.”
Throughout the semester we’ll discover works from the Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, Philippine, and Vietnamese American traditions. Requirements include blog posts, collaborative discussion leadership, one close reading essay, a midterm exam, and choice of final research essay or exam. This course fulfills the Diversity Justice course requirement for graduation and can be counted towards minors including Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Asian Studies, and Peace Studies.
EN 099 English Internships
Students may take one internship course for degree credit. The course counts as an elective, not as a course fulfilling requirements for an English major or minor. Students taking an internship course are responsible for locating the internship and must work at least ten hours per week. For-credit internships include biweekly meetings with Dr. Cole and other fellow interns, and students undertake a series of reflective and goal-setting activities that can be highly beneficial aspects of the career discernment process. Internships may be done locally in the Baltimore-Washington region or remotely, but written or electronic permission of the instructor is required and all arrangements for a spring semester internship must be made prior to the end of the drop/add period. Interested students should contact Dr. Forni (kforni@loyola.edu) , the departmental internship supervisor, before registration.