English Courses

HUM 203E Literature through Travel Study (1-3)
These thematic courses explore special topics in cultural studies in an on-site setting. Courses include traditional lecture and class discussion as field experiences related to the subject under study. For TS courses offered by departments other than Humanities, students will register for HUM 295 and submit the proper IS form which stipulates that students will plan a series of readings, papers, journals, etc. focused on a specific topic or area of interest and will enlist an instructor to oversee the project. Together, student and instructor will establish a timeline, goals, and requirements for completion. These must comply with the MSMC requirements stated on the form.

HUM 205E Shakespearean and His World (3)
Examines Shakespeare’s drama in the social, political, and historical context of the Renaissance period.

HUM 212E Epic, Community, and Identity (3)
A culture studies-focused literature course that looks at the Homeric texts, Virgil, Beowulf, and Arthuriana, and their cultural progeny. Examines what these texts (including their retellings, especially through film) say about cultural and individual self-concepts and how those self-concepts connect to empire. Instructor will determine focus.

HUM 234E Science & the Victorians (3)
Looks at how literature of the Victorian Period responded to contemporary scientific theories, how it borrowed from and gave emotional substance to scientific concepts, and considers how Victorian scientists conveyed their theories in the language, metaphors, and analogies usually reserved for literature. In exploring the works of writers like Mary Shelley, Tennyson, Dickens, and Hardy, and scientists like Darwin, Koch, Pasteur, Doyle, and others, students will consider how these two seemingly antithetical disciplines are actually closely interrelated cultural practices that reflect the social, political, and economic hopes and fears of the period.

HUM 235E Los Angeles Literature (4)
This course will explore the way myths have ruled L.A. and its literature, including the numerous ways—for instance noir, realism, multiculturalism, postmodernism—that L.A. authors have responded to and deconstructed the so-called “sunshine mythology” of the city’s “disneyfied ” boosters.

HUM 236E Southern Exposure: The Fiction of William Faulkner (3)
Investigates Faulkner’s exposure of the “Southern facade” by focusing on the social and psychological themes of his fiction, including issues of gender, race, and class. Also examines the “fiction” of the author’s own life. Includes selected short stories and novels by Faulkner and biographical works.

HUM 237E The American Dream and its Literary Legacy (3)
Much of American literature results from an attempt to deal with the problematic intersection between the promise of the American dream and the reality of America’s historical legacy, which includes a good deal of individual failure as well as racism, the destruction of Native American cultures, and discrimination. Some recent American writers have tried to redefine the American dream in order to reaffirm its validity while others pursue alternative visions out of the past or into the future. This course examines 19th and 20th Century American literature with an eye towards this problematic dream. Includes authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Kate Chopin, Fitzgerald, Silko, etc.

HUM 239E The Romantic Heritage (3)
Romanticism, as a literary movement in England, began at the dawn of the 19th Century with the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth and quickly found kindred spirits in Keats, Shelly, Byron, and others. The major proponents in America were Walt Whitman and the “Transcendentalists”—Emerson and Thoreau, etc. Students immerse themselves in the poetry and ideas of the English and American “Romantics” and trace the movement through the Victorian period and into “modernist” poets like Cummings and Eliot and even into the later 20th Century.

HUM 240E “Story Painters and Picture Writers:” Poetry and the Visual Arts (3)
Artists such as William Blake, Dante G. Rosetti, E. E. Cummings, and William Faulkner (yes, Faulkner) worked in more than one medium—written text and visual art. In some instances, poets were inspired by objects of art; in other cases, poems become the subject of visual art. This interdisciplinary course uses a variety perspectives and critical approaches to explore the relationships between these media.

HUM 241E Sports in Literature (3)
This course examines sport as subject, symbol, and motif in a variety of texts, including journalism, fiction, and autobiography. By looking at the intersection of text and sport, students examine what sports mean to our society and reveal about our culture.

HUM 242E The Gothic Tradition (3)
The Gothic novel came into its own in the mid-eighteenth century but had its heyday in the nineteenth century. This course offers a variety of approaches to the topic, ranging from vampire literature to female Gothic, to race, gender and imperialism in Victorian Gothic and/or American Gothic, depending on the instructor.

HUM 243E Voices From the Margins: A Search for Identity (3)
Students have the opportunity to explore what gives voice to marginalized groups in such works as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Leslie Marmon Silko’s stories and novels, and plays by David Henry Hwang and August Wilson. Readings will be determined by instructor.

HUM 244E World Literature (3)
Interdisciplinary study of works in world literature representing a variety of periods, themes, and genres. Topics may include: “The Changing Face of Evil;” The International Folk Tale;” “Love in World Literature:” “Exploring World Theatre,” etc. Topic determined by instructor.

HUM 245E Single Author Seminar (3)         

HUM 249E Special Topics in Literature (3)
May be repeated as topics vary.