Course Descriptions

ENGL 290 - English Works: Careers for English Majors

ENGL 291 - Seminar

ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Spring 2019, ENGL 292-01: A Monstrous Creation: Frankenstein and Its Intertexts (3). Much like the creature who haunts its pages, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is itself an assemblage of parts. Drawing on numerous literary and philosophical precedents, Shelley’s groundbreaking novel is at once deeply familiar and shockingly new. Placing Frankenstein at its center, this seminar begins with texts that Shelley invokes–including Paradise Lost, Prometheus, Rousseau, and Coleridge, among others–and ends with texts that she inspires. We consider the common mythology, questions, and concerns that all of these texts share, and also the nature of literary allusion, homage, and adaptation. Why does the Genesis story remain so central to the Western literary tradition? Why is Shelley’s creature an especially compelling representation of humankind’s fallen condition? Why does Shelley’s novel continue to resonate with modern audiences, 200 years after its publication? How does the figure of the monster evolve from Milton’s Satan to Dick’s Android? Students cultivate critical thinking and close reading through class discussion, and then deploy these same skills in a series of analytical writing assignments. (HL) Walle.

Fall 2018, ENGL 292A-01: Topics in British Literature: All About Eve (3). Heavy hangs the head of the first woman. From Genesis to the femmes fatales of film noir, the figure of Eve—cunning, seductive, and treacherous—is arguably the most powerful and enduring image of woman in Western literature. Eve’s story and its permutations encapsulate several fundamental dilemmas in the representation of women, from Milton to the present day. Does a woman’s sexuality make her blameworthy? Does her influence make her dangerous? Does her “disobedience” make her criminal? Looking at a variety of media—novels, poetry, graphic novels, and film—this course examines shifting portrayals of Eve and her implications for womanhood and female sexuality. Anchoring our conversation in Genesis and Milton, and then moving to Shelley, Hardy, Carter, and others, we consider what each era’s version of Eve reveals about the perception of women, whether the depiction of Eve changes over time, and how Eve’s legacy of guilt and temptation informs modern discussions of femininity. (HL) Walle.

ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4

Winter 2019, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Urban, Rural, Frontier: Constructions of Space and Place in 19th-Century American Literature (3). What significance does the notion of “place” hold in America’s imagination? How has that conception of place and space consolidated over time? Students of America’s history, for instance, learn how Manifest Destiny was a nineteenth doctrine that justified the United States’ expansion westward, but what goes into realizing such a monumental task? Infrastructural developments such as the transcontinental railroad, of course, realized this vision in a material sense, but even before this, much was done to imagine and reimagine the space of the Americas as available for the taking. While the nation expanded west, its metropolitan spaces also witnessed massive growth as a result of industrialization. The goal of this course is to examine how writers and other artists imagined these changing spaces and landscapes throughout the 19th century. Writers we cover include: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Pauline Hopkins, Sarah Orne Jewett, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Thomas Nelson Page, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and Frank J. Webb. (HL) Millan.

Winter 2019, ENGL 293B-01: Topics in American Literature: The American West (3). The American West is a land of striking landscapes, beautiful places to visit, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, and stories that have had a huge impact on the USA and the world, such as Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, Custer’s Last Stand, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Cowboy and Indian adventures galore. This course studies some of these Western places, stories, art works, and movies. What has made them so appealing? How have they been used? We study works by authors such as John Steinbeck, Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Cormac McCarthy, plus movies with actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Brad Pitt, to see how Western stories have played out and what is happening now in these contested spaces. (HL) Smout.

Winter 2019, ENGL 293C-01: Topics in American Literature: Protest Poetry (3). What kind of work can poetry do in the world? Students in this class study poetry from the Civil Rights Era, poetry about environmental crisis, and other kinds of verse that try to change minds and hearts, including protest poems, prayers and curses, and poetry in performance. For experimental credit, students also put poetry into action, first by collaboratively organizing a benefit event for the Rockbridge Area Relief Association, then by creating activist projects for causes of their own choosing. (EXP) Wheeler.

Winter 2019, ENGL 293D-01: Topics in American Literature: Stanley Kubrick & Stephen King (3). This course explores and juxtaposes the novels and films, epic ambitions, dark visions, and cultural rivalry of two of the most popular, influential, and original narrative artists of 20th- and 21st-century America. We closely study most of Kubrick’s thirteen feature films, and a representative selection of King’s extensive oeuvre, and contextualize these primary texts with relevant biographical, theoretical, and cultural frameworks. Together these primary and secondary works allow us not only to gain a greater appreciation for these artists’ individual achievements and larger lifework but also to scrutinize the limitations of expansive ambition in the age of corporatized mass art. (HL) Adams.

Winter 2019, ENGL 293E-01: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to Graphic Novels (3). This course briefly explores early works in the graphic novel form before shifting to a central focus on 21st-century publications from a range of presses outside of U.S. mainstream comics. Students also read a range of literary theory on the formal qualities of graphic novels and then apply those theories to the analysis of selected works. (HL) Gavaler.

Winter 2019, ENGL 293F-01: Topics in American Literature: 19th-Century American Gothic Literature (3). Ghosts? Curses? Institutions in varying states of decay? What comes to mind when you think of the word “gothic”? What makes a literary work “gothic,” and what differentiates European and American gothics? Why was an appeal to gothic themes an important element during the nineteenth century in the United States? And how did this literature interface with other leading intellectual and artistic movements of the century? Starting from these questions, this course centers recurring themes in nineteenth-century American Gothic literature—such as the fraught divide between rationality/the irrational; puritan anxieties and guilt; fear linked to the unknown, which was often manifested in unexplored territories and frontiers; and serious looks at the unsettling depths of the human experience that challenged ideas about civilized society. Many of these themes were either direct or indirect responses to what was happening at the time: frontier clashes with, and genocide of, Indigenous peoples, slavery, and industrialization. Writers we may cover include: Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (HL) Millan.

Spring 2019, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature & Culture: Films of Alfred Hitchcock (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Not open to students who have taken a similar course as ENGL 272 or 372. This course presents an intensive survey of the films of Alfred Hitchcock: it covers all of his major and many of his less well-known films. It supplements that central work by introducing students to several approaches to film analysis that are particularly appropriate for studying Hitchcock. These include biographical interpretation (Spoto’s dark thesis), auteur and genre-based interpretation (Truffaut), psychological analyses (Zizek & Freud), and dominant form theory (hands-on study of novel to film adaptations). (HL) Adams.

Fall 2018, ENGL 293B-01:  Topics in American Literature:  The Literature of the Beat Generation (3).  A study of a particular movement, focusing on the ways in which cultural and historical context have influenced the composition of and response to literature in the United States.  This course examines the writings of such authors as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, who wrote starting in the mid-1940s, continuing through later decades, and becoming loosely known as the Beat Generation.  What cultural, literary, historical, and religious influences from the U.S. and other parts of the world have shaped their work?  What challenges did their boldly different writings face, and how did their reception change over time?  What are their themes?  Their notions of style?  What have they contributed to American (and world) life and letters?  The goal of this course is to lay a strong foundation from which such questions can be richly addressed and answered.  (HL) Ball.

Fall 2018, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to Literary Editing (3). An apprenticeship in editing for one or more students with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee’s nationally prominent literary magazine. This is a course for anyone interested in editing literary journals, writing for the literary community (blogs, news releases, two book reviews, features, business correspondence) and how both print and on-line journals operate. Often a stepping stone to a publication career, the course involves an introduction to the creation, design and maintenance of WordPress web sites, as well as a survey of current magazines. The course also offers opportunities for each student to practice generating and editing his/her own texts and those of his/her peers. Each student oversees one facet of the journal (Poem of the Week, blog, submissions management, contests, social media), and each makes a presentation to the class on the nature and practices of two other current literary journals. Students work in pairs toward an understanding of the role journals play in contemporary literature and engage in peer editing. (HL) Staff.

ENGL 294 - Topics in World Literature in English

ENGL 295 - Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4

Spring 2019, ENGL 295-01: Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Neo-Slave Narratives (3). Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. How does an engagement with the genre of neo-slave narratives help to develop our thought about the institution of slavery across the Americas? Most importantly, how does this body of work force us to reexamine our cultural inheritance? This course addresses these questions via the thoughtful examination of a range of theoretical, fictional, and cinematic texts. This course involves a five-day residency at the Berry Hill Plantation in South Boston, Virginia. While exploring the plantation and surrounding communities, we visit slave cemeteries and some of the most well-preserved slave quarters in the nation. (HL) Wilson.

Spring 2019, ENGL 295-02: Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Adapting the 19th Century (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. This course considers what it takes to adapt facets of the 19th century for 21st-century audiences. We read literary works ranging from “Rip Van Winkle” to “The Tell-Tale Heart” to Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as well as neo slave narratives, film, and artefact curation that either adapt these works or otherwise engage the difficult questions that emerge out of adapting the 19th century (slavery, empire, etc.). Students think about what makes something literature, what goes into adaptation, and what alternative versions of a given text can show us about their source material. The course includes visits to Monticello and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Students eventually work towards adapting/curating an aspect of W&L’s 19th-century history for modern audiences. (HL) Millan.

ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Fall 2018, ENGL 299A-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Utopia, Science Fiction, and the Idea of America(s) (3). What value does the utopian/dystopian text hold in the development of alternative thought? This course, grounded in science fiction and the African American and Latin American contexts, addresses this question via the thoughtful examination of a range of theoretical, fictional, and cinematic texts. Works studied throughout the term come from, among others, Carlos Fuentes, Thomas More, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Frederick Jameson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frances Bodomo, Alfonso Cuarón, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany. (HL) Wilson.

ENGL 305 - Writing Outside the Lines

ENGL 306 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 307 - Fresh/Local/Wild: The Poetics of Food

ENGL 308 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

FDR: HA
Credits: 3 in fall and winter, 4 in spring

  Gavaler.

ENGL 309 - Advanced Creative Writing: Memoir

ENGL 311 - History of the English Language

ENGL 312 - Gender, Love, and Marriage in the Middle Ages

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

  Kao.

ENGL 313 - Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

ENGL 316 - The Tudors

ENGL 319 - Shakespeare and Company

ENGL 320 - Shakespearean Genres

ENGL 326 - 17th-Century Poetry

ENGL 330 - Milton

ENGL 334 - The Age of Unreason: Studies in 18th-Century Literature

ENGL 335 - 18th-Century Novels

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

ENGL 336 - Ghost in the Machine

ENGL 341 - The Romantic Imagination

ENGL 345 - Studies in the 19th-Century British Novel

ENGL 348 - Victorian Poetry: Victorian Pairs

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

  Adams.

ENGL 349 - Middlemarch and Devoted Readers

ENGL 350 - Postcolonial Literature

ENGL 351 - World Fiction in English

ENGL 352 - Modern Irish Literature

ENGL 353 - 20th-Century British and Irish Poetry

ENGL 354 - Contemporary British and American Drama

ENGL 355 - Studies in British Fiction Since 1900

ENGL 358 - Literature of Gender and Sexuality Before 1900

ENGL 359 - Literature by Women of Color

ENGL 360 - Cowboys and Indians

ENGL 361 - Native American Literatures

ENGL 362 - American Romanticism

ENGL 363 - American Poetry from 1900 to 1945

ENGL 364 - American Poetry at Mid-Century

ENGL 365 - Studies in Contemporary Poetry

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

ENGL 366 - African-American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Fall 2018, ENGL 366-01: African-American Literature: Make a Body Riot: Laughter, Resistance, and African American Literature (3). How does what makes us laugh position us, either as audience or collaborator? What does the intersection of comedy and performance have to show us about identity formation in relation to race, class, and gender? How might laughter—as a release, as a physical expression, as an indicator of one’s interior life, or even as a mode of protest—help us better understand many aesthetic, thematic, acoustic, and political aspects of African-American literature? In pursuing answers to these questions, we center recurring themes and genres in the development of African-American literature throughout the 20th century—such as the role of Black literature in society; the intersections of race, class, and gender; the afterlives of slavery; the historical novel; the role of humor in community formation; and the significance of sound, among others. To guide our discussions, we locate each text within its historical-cultural context and make use of critical sources. Authors we might cover include Charles W. Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Fran Ross, George C. Wolfe, Toni Morrison, and Paul Beatty. (HL) Millan. Staff.

ENGL 367 - 19th-Century American Novel

ENGL 368 - The Modern American Novel

ENGL 369 - Late 20th-Century North American Fiction

ENGL 370 - Contemporary North American Fiction

ENGL 373 - Hitchcock

ENGL 374 - King and Kubrick

ENGL 375 - Literary Theory

ENGL 382 - Hotel Orient

ENGL 384 - Ireland in Literature, History, and Film

ENGL 385 - Preparatory Reading for Study Abroad

ENGL 386 - Supervised Study in Great Britain

ENGL 387 - Visions and Beliefs of the West of Ireland

ENGL 388 - Exploring the West of Ireland

ENGL 391 - Topics in Creative Writing

FDR: HA
Three credits in 200-level English and instructor consent. Previous workshop experience recommended. Students who have successfully completed ENGL 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, or 207 should inform the department’s administrative assistant, who will grant them permission to enroll; otherwise a writing sample will be required. An advance workshop in creative writing. Genres and topics will vary, but all versions involve intensive reading and writing. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

ENGL 392 - Topics in Literature in English before 1700

Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring

Spring 2019, ENGL 392-01: Topic: English Literature beforen 1700: Othello and Ourselves: Race, Religion, and Reconciliation in Shakespeare (4). Race, religion, sexualized violence: Othello is a play that poses timely and difficult questions for our own age. This course examines one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies in detail, studying its sources, historical context, textual history, performance history, and film adaptations. Subsequently, special attention is given to the play’s literary and cultural legacy to see ways the play has been both cited and revised to comment on our modern situation. We consider one of Shakespeare’s late plays, The Winter’s Tale, as one of the early “revisions” of Shakespeare’s Othello and see the play at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton. Students taking the course for 300-level credit complete a digital-humanities project on the textual variants between the two earliest editions of the play. (HL) Pickett.

ENGL 393 - Topics in Literature in English from 1700-1900

Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring

Spring 2019, ENGL 393-01: Topic: Literature in ENglish, 1700-1900: A Monstrous Creation: Frankenstein and Its Intertexts (3). Much like the creature who haunts its pages, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is itself an assemblage of parts. Drawing on numerous literary and philosophical precedents, Shelley’s groundbreaking novel is at once deeply familiar and shockingly new. Placing Frankenstein at its center, this seminar begins with texts that Shelley invokes-including Paradise Lost, Prometheus, Rousseau, and Coleridge, among others-and ends with texts that she inspires. We consider the common mythology, questions, and concerns that all of these texts share, and also the nature of literary allusion, homage, and adaptation. Why does the Genesis story remain so central to the Western literary tradition? Why is Shelley’s creature an especially compelling representation of humankind’s fallen condition? Why does Shelley’s novel continue to resonate with modern audiences, 200 years after its publication? How does the figure of the monster evolve from Milton’s Satan to Dick’s Android? Students cultivate critical thinking and close reading through class discussion, and then deploy these same skills in a series of analytical writing assignments. (HL) Walle.

ENGL 394 - Topics in Literature in English since 1900

Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring

Winter 2019, ENGL 394A-01: Topics in Literature in English since 1900: James Baldwin and His Interlocutors (3). This seminar explores the life and writing of James Baldwin. Through an examination of both his fiction and nonfiction, the seminar charts his interrogation and development of ideas surrounding, among other topics, race, courage, love, nation, revolution, and belonging. We also trace his impact on our national consciousness by reading authors whose own bodies of work intersect with his. This list includes, but is not limited to, Norman Mailer, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, and Barry Jenkins. (HL) Wilson.

Winter 2019, ENGL 394B-01: Topics in Literature in English since 1900: Environmental Persuasion (3). Students without the course prerequisites may gain entry with instructor consent. This course is open to all majors and class years and fulfills the humanities requirement for the major or minor in environmental studies. How do we resolve major environmental problems? How do we balance the science, economics, public policy, political, ethical, cultural, and other dimensions to create real solutions? Why is this so hard? This course studies strategies of persuasion used by participants in environmental debates to teach students how to enter and win these debates. We study some of the great environmental writers in many genres, look at key historical documents and multimedia works (documentaries, ads, movies, websites), and do some activities involving local leaders and issues. Students write short analytical papers and work on a big project that studies an important environmental debate historically, analyzing who won and why. How do we persuade others to join us in making the changes we want to make? (HL) Smout.

ENGL 395 - Topics in Literature in English in Counter Traditions

ENGL 403 - Directed Individual Study

ENGL 413 - Senior Research and Writing

Credits: 3

Winter 2019, ENGL 413-01: Senior Research and Writing: Memoir (3). We live in the age of status updates and social media notifications. The selves we project in these platforms and in our daily conversations are often one-sided, a picture either of accomplishment and confidence, or of frustration. More complex representations of the self, of identity, and of individuality, appear in literary genres such as memoir, the personal essay, and fiction. This capstone considers concepts of memory, identity, experience, agency and audience as they inform readings of the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, memoirs by Mary Karr, Deborah Miranda, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marina Keegan, and personal essays by Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and selected Shenandoah writers. As we consider the narrative choices employed in these literary texts, as well as life narratives’ engagement with theories of identity, we develop expertise through research on a chosen autobiography. Then, in the final third of the course, we craft personal narratives of our own, tracing first memories, childhood scenes, and coming-of-age thresholds. These pieces reflect careful thinking about theories of selfhood, as well as specific writing tools, studied throughout the term. (HL) Gertz.

Fall 2018, ENGL 413-01: Senior Research and Writing: From Jane Eyre to Jane Steele: Adaptation, Homage, and Literary Fan Culture (3). From the 18th-century fascination with Shakespeare to the 21st-century obsession with Austen, adaptation and homage is a major part of literary culture. Sometimes, these adaptations become literary classics themselves: Jean Rhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea imagines the life and history of Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic; similarly, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours updates Mrs. Dalloway for the 1990s. Other times, however, these adaptations are pure fun: Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective fiction has been recently rewritten as The Lady Sherlock series; Austen’s work has been peppered with zombies and sea monsters; and the famously independent heroine of Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been reimagined as the homicidal protagonist of Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele. This course puts several instances of adaptation—both highbrow and lowbrow—in conversation with the critical theory on adaptation, homage, and fan culture. This reading prepares students to embark on an individual guided research project in the second half of the term. (HL) Walle.

ENGL 431 - Master Class in Creative Writing

Experiential Learning (EXP): Yes
Credits: 1

Winter 2019: ENGL 431: Master Class in Creative Writing: Poetry (1). Prerequisites: Three credits in any creative writing workshop plus instructor consent. Please submit a 5-7 page poetry sample, along with information about creative writing and literature courses you have taken, to Professor Lesley Wheeler (wheelerlm@wlu.edu) by Monday, October 22 for consideration; you will be notified before registration begins about whether you have been admitted to the course. An advanced workshop taught by Glasgow Writer-in-Residence Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The course includes the study of poetry, workshops, individual conferencing, and a final group reading. (EXP) Nezhukumatathil.

ENGL 453 - Internship in Literary Editing with Shenandoah

ENGL 493 - Honors Thesis

ENV 110 - Introduction to Environmental Studies

ENV 111 - Environmental Service Learning

ENV 180 - FS: First-Year Seminar

ENV 201 - Environmental Science

ENV 202 - Society and Natural Resources

ENV 203 - Environmental Humanities

ENV 207 - Nature and Place

ENV 212 - Land Use and Aquatic Ecosystems in the Chesapeake Watershed

ENV 250 - Ecology of Place

ENV 288 - Key Thinkers on the Environment

ENV 295 - Special Topics in Environmental Studies

ENV 365 - Advanced Topics in Environmental Ethics

ENV 390 - Special Topics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Issues

ENV 395 - Special Topics in Environmental Ethics

Credits: 3

Fall 2018, ENV 395A-01: Environmental Values and Environmental Policy (3). What values shape environmental decisions? In economic terms, we seek to allocate resources so as to maximize social utility. However, our policy decisions regarding the environment also pursue certain ecological goals, such as the preservation of biodiversity and the maintenance of healthy and functioning ecosystems. In addition, environmental policy is constrained by ethical concerns such as the pursuit of environmental justice and our responsibilities to future generations. This course addresses such questions as: To what degree are these three kinds of policy goals in tension with one another? How can we clarify our thinking about these policy goals so as to harmonize them where possible and reasonably negotiate the tradeoffs when they come into conflict? Cooper.

ENV 396 - Pre-Capstone Research Seminar

ENV 397 - Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies

ENV 401 - Directed Individual Studies

ENV 402 - Directed Individual Studies

Credits: 2

ENV 403 - Directed Individual Studies

Credits: 3

Winter 2019, ENV 403-01: Directed Individual Study: Compositble Disintegration (3). Determination of disintegration of various compostable materials in different composting processes. The research objective is to understand if single-use compostable materials break down in the way and the timeframe that they claim, and in what processes this disintegration works the best. Hodge.

Winter 2019, ENV 403-02: Directed Individual Study: Waste to Energy (3). Examination of alternative technologies for converting waste into energy, with a critical analysis of relevant literature. Kahn.

  Staff.

ENV 493 - Honors Thesis in Environmental Studies

FILM 109 - Film Performance Laboratory

FILM 121 - Script Analysis for Stage and Screen

FILM 195 - Topics in Film Studies

FILM 196 - Topics in Film and Literature

FILM 220 - Screenwriting

FILM 233 - Introduction to Film

FILM 236 - Science Fiction & Fantasy: From Page to Screen and Beyond

FILM 250 - Preparing for Ethnographic Study of Modern Day Slavery in Ghana

FILM 251 - Ethnographic Study of Modern-Day Slavery in Ghana: Creating Short Documentary Film

FILM 255 - Seven-Minute Shakespeare

FILM 285 - Music in the Films of Stanley Kubrick

FILM 413 - Research and Writing Film Capstone

FREN 111 - Elementary French I

FREN 112 - Elementary French II

FREN 161 - Intermediate French I