Department of English Spring 2021 Undergraduate Course Offerings Select Course Descriptions

Department of English
                         Spring 2021 Undergraduate Course Offerings
                                 Select Course Descriptions
This is a selective list only, meant to help you as you navigate enrollment through
MyUNLV, where the full Spring 2020 schedule appears. Many instructors have also made
more colorful, more visually informative flyers advertising their fall courses (not included
in the descriptions below). Please contact individual professors for more information.

ENG 232: World Literature II
Professor Caitlin Roach Orduna
ENG 232 is a Second-Year Seminar (SYS) course that explores issues relevant to
contemporary global society through the reading of original literature from The
Enlightenment to the present. Students study these issues within their larger contexts,
which include aspects of literature, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and scientific
discovery. The SYS reinforces the University Undergraduate Learning Outcomes (UULOs)
introduced in the First-Year Seminar (FYS).

Twentieth century social realist and modernist, Chinese writer, Lao She, says, “All
literature is shaped by its surroundings, and though devotees of art like to claim that
literature can sway the course of world affairs, the truth is that politics comes first and art
changes accordingly.” This specific course is designed to critically map the threads of
revolution that are woven through world literatures and global popular culture and to
analyze the contexts in which those revolutions were/are born. We will explore the ways
in which writers have confronted social, political, and racial conflict in their work as a
way to examine the way revolutionary identities form.

ENG 261: Introduction to Poetry
Professor Caitlin Roach Orduna
This course will introduce students to the study of poetry as well as the terminology and
tools used in analyzing and discussing a poem. The course will emphasize close readings
of texts, collaborative group work and class discussion. There will be a focus on 21st
century documentary poetry, though not all texts we read will fall under this category.
Our aim will be to seek an understanding of how poetic techniques—from language to
imagery to rhythm to syntax, and more—and historical, social, and cultural context work
in concert with one another in a poem or body of poems to produce a work of art that is
emotionally resonant and pushes us to think.

ENG 298: Writing in the English Major
Professor Stephen Brown
This course introduces English majors to literature-based academic writing, based on
close textual analysis in three genres: drama, fiction, and poetry. Guided instruction will
be provided for converting literary analysis and close textual reading into the thesis-
driven paper, with particular emphasis placed on the following: explication of quotes;
integration of quotes into your own text; proper MLA attribution of quotes and citing of

sources; effective strategies for writing introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs;
conducting research to support a thesis; editing skills; and strategies of literary analysis.
Students will be introduced to the literary features that define effective drama, fiction, and
poetry, and which comprise the focus of literary analysis. Weekly practice in explications
of quotes and discussions based on close textual analysis will be a regular feature of the
course. Course content will be supplemented with inter-active and visual learning
components: videos, power-point presentations, digital slide shows, DVDs etc.

Texts:
W.B.Yeats, Selected Poems
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Earnest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Brown, Writing in the Margins (available free on-line)

Additional Required Materials:
A Reading-Response Journal

Writing:
Reading Response Journal (weekly entries)
Midterm Paper (6-8p)
Term Paper (8-10p)
Reading Response Journal Portfolio (6 entries typed)
In-Class Written Final (2 hrs)

ENG 298: Writing About Literature
Professor Daniel Timothy Erwin
English 298 is the milestone course in the English department. It will help you to become
a better reader and writer and will provide the tools you’ll need to succeed in upper-
division literature courses. We will learn the basic terms and strategies for effective
interpretation of the three major literary genres of poetry, drama, and the novel. The
course is writing-intensive and may include both formal and informal writing projects. It
may strike you that we are reading in a more detailed way than you are used to, and also
more carefully, and that is purposeful. To lend coherence to our experience this term, the
course will include careful attention to the visual aspects of reading. Some of the skills
that you are expected to learn are: the ability to think critically, to communicate
effectively, and to argue persuasively, especially in written exposition; to develop a clear
sense of expressive and structural strategy and technique in British and American
literary traditions; and an increased ability to read a variety of diverse materials with a
greater degree of ease, appreciation, and familiarity. Three quizzes and a final exam,
along with three essays including a final paper.

ENG 298: Writing about Literature
Professor John Hay
This course is designed to serve as an introduction to the English major. The primary goal
of the course is to get you familiar with the common characteristics of scholarly and
critical writing. This involves matters of citation, but it also extends to the structural and
rhetorical aspects of essays. In order to cover "writing about literature," we will also need
to address "talking about literature" and even (or especially) "reading literature."
Therefore, this course will also serve as an introduction to the four major literary genres:
poetry, drama, prose fiction, and nonfiction prose. You will learn key terms pertaining to
each of these genres. We will be reading a variety of short, contemporary (i.e. published in
the last five years) texts in each genre.

ENG 402A/602A: Advanced Creative Writing – Up Close and Personal: Literary Nonfiction
Professor Jose Roach Orduna
Does life imitate art or does art imitate life? What does “Based on a true story,” mean? In
this workshop course we will increase our skills as writers, editors, and literary
community members by exploring what it takes to transform the stuff of life into literary
nonfiction. The course will center on the production and workshopping of three pieces of
literary nonfiction. Students will participate in workshops that will help generate new
and inventive writing, and participate in the sharing of work with an intelligent group of
critically engaged peers. The goal of this class is to develop the skills to tell our own
truths in ways that engage and move readers.

Class time will be divided into workshops, reading discussions, short lectures, and the
occasional in-class writing exercise. In workshop, expect to explore and discuss writing
technique, form, style, content, perspective, imagination, emotion, and more. By the end of
the course you will have read a wide range of nonfiction; reviewed and critiqued one
another’s work; employed various techniques, structures, and mechanics of literary
nonfiction; and produced a body of creative work.

ENG 409A/609A: Visual Rhetoric
Professor Melissa Carrion
This course explores how visual texts—ranging from print and online documents to
photographs, artwork, and even physical spaces and bodies—function as persuasive tools
for communicating information, ideas, and values. Students will be introduced to a
variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying this process, and will
draw from these to both analyze existing visual texts and create their own. We will
explore the role of visual rhetoric in everything from politics to science to popular culture,
and we will pay particular attention to how we can design both effective and ethical
visual texts. Course assignments will include quizzes on assigned readings, brief
reflection essays, the development of an infographic, and a rhetorical analysis of a visual
object. Students are encouraged to connect course material and assignments to their own
personal or academic interests, and all assigned course readings are available for free to
students through UNLV’s library and/or as PDFs/links on the course Canvas site. This is

an online, hybrid course; each week will include one synchronous meeting (i.e., students
will log on and participate during the set time) and one structured asynchronous meeting
(i.e., students can complete this component according to their own pace and schedule).

ENG 411B/611B: Principles of Modern Grammar (Web-Based)
Professor Ed Nagelhout
This course will introduce students to the patterns of English grammar and their
influence on sentence structure, punctuation, and style. The course focuses on analytical
methods for understanding more fully the structure of the English language and explore
the relationship between grammar and writing, reading, and thinking. By the end of the
semester, students in English 411B will be able to:
    1. Describe fully English words, phrases, and clauses
    2. Distinguish between the form and function of words, phrases, and clauses
    3. Analyze a sentence for grammatical elements
    4. Recognize how phrases and clauses function in a variety of sentences
    5. Understand rhetorical choices for sentence structure and punctuation
Through a variety of activities, students of English 411B will achieve the five course
outcomes by exploring the complexity of English language, discussing the grammatical
structure of English in a sophisticated manner, and learning to reach consensus on
grammar-related problems in different rhetorical situations.

ENG 425A-1001: Narrative Studies in Fantasy
Professor Amy Green
Narrative Studies in Fantasy: Our course will explore a diverse selection of stories in the
fantasy
genre, including those which intersect with other genres, like science fiction or the
western. Our novels provide a diverse background from which to consider the complex
and compelling issues found in fantasy literature. We will also consider over the course of
the entire semester how Final Fantasy XIV, an online, massively multiplayer online role-
playing game (MMORPG), utilizes the video game form to shape its complex story.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Complete Edition available for
gaming consoles or PC.
Viewing of Season One of The Mandalorian
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

You are welcome to contact me at greena@unlv.nevada.edu with any questions.

ENG 425A: Themes of Literature
Professor David Morris
Authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe. According to the Human Rights
Foundation, 53% of the world’s population currently live under some kind of authoritarian
rule. In this class we will look at how prose writers and other artists have depicted
authoritarian societies. Questions discussed in this class will include: How do
authoritarian regimes use language to control people? What role does technology play in
the rise of totalitarian societies? What role do torture and the police play in the
maintenance of totalitarian regimes? What is the relationship between fascism and
aesthetics? Is American consumer capitalism a form of totalitarianism as some critics
have suggested? Readings will include Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Hannah
Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Allan Moore’s V For Vendetta, Masha
Gessen's The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, George
Orwell’s 1984, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, P.K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle,
and Marguerite Feitlowitz's A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture.

ENG 426B: Mythology
Professor Amy Green
Our class will focus on the diversity and breadth of world mythology, with an emphasis
on understanding both how sacred texts functioned in their own time, and how they
might be interpreted by modern readers. We will also consider the intersection of history,
culture, and politics with sacred texts. Finally, we will also focus our attention on
numerous modern iterations of mythology.

Students in this class will play Final Fantasy XV as part of the required course materials
and an integral component of our study of mythology, especially modern iterations of
myth. Students will be required to obtain their own copies of Final Fantasy XV. Please be
sure to get The Royal Edition for consoles. The PC version is the same as The Royal
Edition and is called the Windows Edition.
You are welcome to contact me at greena@unlv.nevada.edu with any questions.

ENG 434A: Shakespeare’s Tragedies
“The Birth of ‘Shakespearean’ Tragedy”
Professor Scott Hollifield
This fully remote section of ENG 434A will enhance students’ experience of William
Shakespeare through intensive study of the genre in which he cultivated his
transcendent reputation. Investigating the fluid relationship between the playwright and
the industry in which he flourished, the course will recontextualize an abstract literary
celebrity (“not of an age but for all time!”) into a working poet. To illuminate such oft-
discussed plays as Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, we will also
explore Shakespeare’s chronicle play The Tragedy of Richard II and works by Thomas
Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, each of which laid the groundwork for the thing we call
“Shakespearean Tragedy”. To engage these late-16th century dramatic texts and refine
essential strategies of critical reading, thinking, and writing, core coursework will include

virtual reading response journals, weekly virtual conversations, cooperative discussion
threads, focus-scene dissections, and a final reflection project.

Please note that while this course will rely upon a number of online and electronic
resources, it requires all students to read and cite from physical copies of the specific print
editions listed on the syllabus.

ENG 440A: Medieval Literature
Professor Philip Rusche
The theme of this class is Medieval Romance, a genre invented in the twelfth century by
combining earlier heroic literature focusing on the brave deeds of the warrior class and the
new emphasis on love as the ideal virtue of the gentile class. We will first read the greatest
of the romances, those written by Chrétien de Troyes and set in the idealized world of
King Arthur’s court, and then we will explore various permutations of the genre: the short
Breton lais by Marie de France; later Arthurian romances; and parodies of romance and
courtliness known as fabliaux. We will also read the non-fiction correspondence of
Abelard and Heloise for an example of how actual men and women related to each other
in this period. Many of the works will be what most modern people think of as
“quintessential” medieval literature and will show that many of the notions of love,
heroism, and intelligence are the same that we value today, while others will highlight the
vast differences between medieval and modern tastes.

ENG 449A: Survey of British Literature I
Professor Philip Rusche
In this course we will read the major literary texts from the Old and Middle English
periods, the Renaissance, the Restoration, and the eighteenth century. We will discuss the
changes in literary tastes and genres alongside the changing political and historical
contexts of the first 1000 years of British literature.

ENG 449A: British Literature I
Professor Katherine Walker
This section of ENG-449A will focus on the topic of “Monsters, Marvels, and Magic.” These
three ideas will allow us to investigate how, spanning the medieval period up to the
eighteenth century, literature responded to contentious debates regarding monstrosity
(including what bodies, races, and identities are labeled as non-human), wonders or
marvels in nature, and occult powers. The narrative of English literature includes some
surprising turns of the imagination, but this literature was speaking to readers and
audiences who believed in the possibility of talking animals, demons, or divine
intervention in the cosmos. We will take up the question of how the rich tradition of
English literature helped craft a magical worldview. Our exploration will include a diverse
range of genres and authors. One of our goals will be to rediscover not only the historical
circumstances surrounding English literature, but also, at a more foundational level, how
this compelling, diverse tradition can provoke delight, consternation, or contemplation
when considering the monstrous, the marvelous, and the magical.

ENG 451A: American Literature I
Professor Jessica Teague
This course surveys American literature from its Indigenous origins and colonial period
to the Civil War in order to interrogate the role literature has played in the creation of
America. Authors may include: Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
Abigail Adams, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick
Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson among others. Over the course of the
semester, we will track chains of intellectual and artistic influence across generations in
order to inquire about the general characteristics of “American” literature. We will also
discuss which texts from America’s past might be most relevant to our contemporary
social, intellectual, and cultural moment. Course lectures will be provided
asynchronously; there will be an optional synchronous discussion once a week on
Thursdays during the scheduled time—attendance encouraged, but not required. Required
Texts: The Norton Anthology of American Literature (9th ed.), vols. A & B (ISBN 978-
0393264548)

ENG 451B: American Literature II, 1865-present (online)
Professor Emily Setina
This course surveys American literature from the Civil War to the present and introduces
students to major authors and literary movements in their historical contexts, from
realism and naturalism to modernism and multiculturalism. Authors will include Walt
Whitman, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Nella Larsen,
Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Louise
Erdrich, and Tracy K. Smith.

ENG 452B: American Literature, 1800-1865: "The Transcendentalists"
Professor John Hay
This course will explore the many facets of one of America's most significant intellectual
movements: New England Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists were a coterie of
poets, critics, and essayists centered in Concord, Massachusetts, and active in the decades
leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Some have suggested that they were the hippies of the
1840s. Our course will address questions about American authors’ roles on both a national
and international stage and about the relationships between literary activity,
environmental stewardship, and religious practice. We will focus especially on Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s mind-altering philosophy, Margaret Fuller’s pioneering feminism, and
Henry David Thoreau’s self-experimentation at Walden Pond. We will also examine the
Transcendentalists' interests in communal living, educational reform,
scientific innovation, and the abolition of slavery. Students will develop an understanding
and an appreciation of both the philosophical scaffolding and aesthetic novelty of
American Transcendentalism.

ENG 460: The American Short Story
Professor Maile Chapman
This course is a survey of the American short story from the form’s origins in the
eighteenth century to the present, looking particularly at how these works can be
understood and appreciated in relation to their historical, cultural, and literary contexts.
Our goals are to learn to read critically, to enlarge our familiarity with the ways the
human experience has been represented in American short fiction, to better understand
the evolution of aesthetic trends in American literature, and to understand how fiction
can allow us new perspectives on and insight into the experiences of others.

Required Texts:
The Anthology of American Short Stories. James Nagel (ed). Wadsworth Publishing
Supplemental readings will be distributed as needed.
E-mail: maile.chapman@unlv.edu

ENG 460A Heroic Epic: Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller.
Professor John Bowers
This class surveys the English tradition of the “heroic epic” from the perspective of J. R.
R. Tolkien by studying works that he edited, translated, and taught at Oxford. These will
include Beowulf, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Starting with his
legendary Silmarillion, we will spend much of the term studying Tolkien’s 20th-century
epics in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Term grade is based on six quizzes (60%), a term paper with revision required (20%), and a
final examination, (20%).

The course will be taught online using Canvas and WebEx

ENG 470B: British Novel II
Professor Kelly J. Mays
When, in 1867, Margaret Oliphant declared, “a woman,” every woman, “has one duty of
invaluable importance to her country and her race,” “the duty of being pure,” she articulated
what served, for many Victorians, as a central article of faith — one reinforced by, even as it
defined, that “sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanliness” ostensibly distinguishing “English
novels” from their foreign counterparts. Yet Oliphant felt the need to assert the “vital
consequence” of sexual and textual propriety, national and racial purity, and their
interdependence precisely because she saw these as threatened by the “new impulses” at work in
contemporary fiction. In this course, we’ll use Oliphant’s concerns as one lens through which to
examine, discuss, and debate six Victorian novels that together capture much about the range
and development over time of the novel as a genre and of those notions of gender, class, nation,
and race it alternately secured and threatened.

Reading
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Bram Stoker, Dracula

ENG 491B: Environmental Literature
Professor Stephen Brown
This course focuses on American Nature Writing. Course readings will be supplemented
with digital slide presentations based on the instructor’s life-long travels and studies of
the environments covered in course readings: Yosemite, The Tetons, Desert Canyon-
lands, Alaska, and Coastal Wetlands, related to the readings of John Muir (Select
Writings) , Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire), and Margaret Murie (Wapiti Summer). In
the context of our exploration of American Literary Nature Writing, we will examine
problems with local, regional, national, and global relevance: climate change, species
extinction, habitat loss, industrial tourism, and the pollution of the air, water, and soil.
We will engage current issues from Fracking (extraction of natural gas) to global
warming, from the impacts of Big Oil, Big Timber, Big Mining, Big Fishing, Big
Recreation, and Big Development to the ethics and tactics of eco-activism, as practiced
by a range of environmental groups: from The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and
Nature Conservancy to Green Peace, Sea Shepherds, and Earth First. Throughout the
course, multi-media presentations will be used to enhance and enliven instruction:
digital slide shows, power point presentations, films/videos, dramatic readings, current
event handouts, and guest speakers as opportunity allows.

ENG 494A: Native American Literature
Professor Steven Sexton
Louis Owens says that stories make the world knowable and inhabitable. An important
way in how we understand the world and imagine who we are as individuals, as
communities, and as a people is through the stories we tell. Through their fiction, poetry,
and nonfiction, we will examine how Indigenous people express self-imagination, the act
of imagining oneself, through their literatures. Given the pervasiveness of Euromerican
culture, society, and politics—a reality of settler colonialism—we should also consider how
settler colonialism has influenced how Indigenous writers imagine themselves and how
they resist it. We will look at how Indigenous people confront issues brought by settler
colonialism that include identity, history, and politics.

ENG 496B/696B: Narratives of Hispanic & Indigenous America
Professor Vincent Perez
Early Latinx Literature: Narratives of Hispanic & Indigenous American
This course draws on the fields of Hemispheric American Studies and U.S. Hispanic
literary recovery studies to present a comparative survey of early Latino/a
literature. Beginning with writings about the Spanish Conquest of the Americas and the
Spanish colonial era, this early period extends beyond the era commonly associated with
Latinx & Latino/a literature, which is often conceived as a post-WWII phenomenon. The
course moves from the colonial period through 19th-century writings and concludes with
a number of works from the first half of the 20th century.

Within the field of Hemispheric Studies, Latino/a literature is understood both as an
ethnic minority literature and as an expansive network of literary, cultural, and socio-
historical filiations that extend across the Western hemisphere from the period of
Spanish colonialism to the present. A comparative hemispheric perspective offers new

possibilities for analyzing Latinx & Latino/a literature, possibilities not readily available
when “Latino/a” is defined narrowly as a synonym for a culturally or historically isolated
U.S. ethnic minority.