ENGL 198 A-Z - (LT) Special Studies in Literature

Semester Hours: 3

Current Special Topics:

ENGL 198B - (LT) Sex & Justice in American Lit

This five-week course will examine the question of justice and its intersections with sex and sexuality studies through the lens of American literature. Taking a historical approach, we will read novels and short stories from the 1850s through 2017 to explore how questions of sex and sexuality affect, and are affected by, changing cultural understandings of justice, fairness, and perceptions of right and wrong.

ENGL 198C - Medieval Romance

Medieval romance narratives are characterized by adventure and often rely on the courtly love tradition to shape the quests. Romance was medieval culture’s most popular non-religious literary genre. It has its origins of the courtly romance in twelfth-century France, through the later Middle Ages, and concludes in the Renaissance. In this course, we shall explore why the romance genre emerged when it did, the nature of its relationship to contemporary social, political, and religious ideas, and the reasons for its enduring popularity. Course texts include Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances; Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston; The Lais of Marie de France; Sir Gawain and Green Knight; The Siege of Jerusalem; and Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur.

ENGL 198S - The Hate U Give: Learning from YA Lit (January Course Offering) 

How does society use stereotypes to justify vilification of, and violence against, identified subaltern groups? The course will use historical backgrounds for a close reading of Young Adult literary texts from the perspective of the oppressed groups. Readings would include: The Hate U Give, Looking Like the Enemy, There There, The House on Mango Street, and What Happened to Lani Garver?

ENGL 198T - This Is The End: Literature & the Apocalypse

Judgment day, zombie apocalypse, nuclear and cyber war, global pandemic, alien invasion, environmental collapse, meteor collision, machine uprising: all of these represent the various ways in which humanity has, over the course of history, imagined “the end” of its existence. Whether by our own agency, by the hand of some unseen, uncontrollable force, or some combination of the two, we have always contemplated the end of things, often in a religious or spiritual context but, just as often, as a routine part of our collective desire to be entertained by such shocking and horrific events. That desire is manifest in many film offerings, such as 2012, World War Z, 28 Days Later, The War of the Worlds, The Day After Tomorrow, and of course, the Matrix, Terminator, and Planet of the Apes trilogies. There is even the so-called apocalyptic comedy: This Is the End, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The World’s End, Warm Bodies, and Zombieland. Television, as well, has taken up various apocalyptic themes and narratives, from the reality show Doomsday Preppers to The Walking Dead to The Leftovers to The Last Ship. What exactly compels us to watch such apocalyptic fare? Why are we drawn to narratives depicting the end of humanity and the world as we know it? And why do we find such narratives to be “entertaining” in any sense? This semester, we will seek to answer some of these questions and perhaps generate a few of our own by reading and discussing literary works that speak to our enduring preoccupation with the apocalypse and its aftermath, including H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Nevil Chute’s On the Beach, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. In addition, we will read a variety of poetry, as well as apocalyptic and prophetic literature from the Bible.

ENGL 198X - (LT) Climate Fiction

Our climate house is on fire, and as we approach the point when the house has burnt to the ground we keep emitting more and more greenhouse gas, throwing more fuel on the flames.  Indeed, the more our leaders talk about this, the worse things get.  As Greta Thunberg has put it:  “Build Back Better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah … .They’ve now had 30 years of blah, blah, blah and where has that led us?” 

In this course, we’ll consider the relationship of fiction to this history of blah blah blah. As such fiction gets categorized as its own subgenre, “cli-fi,” to what extent does it amount to its own kind of normalizing discourse, its own kind of blah blah blah? How has fiction sought ways to speak beyond that blah blah blah, to represent the extremity of that existential crisis that is our present? What are the difficulties inherent in that attempt?  To what extent, for example, has cli-fi represented not only the spectacular consequences of the climate crisis but also its less visible roots in capitalism and colonialism? We’ll pursue these and related questions partly by looking at texts that push the boundaries of  might be categorized as “climate fiction” in the first place. Some of the texts we’ll look at may include Jenny Offill’s Weather. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ilija Trojanow’s The Lamentation’s of Zeno, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and (a film) Benh Zeitlin’s “Bests of the Southern Wild.” (This is a tentative list)

Prerequisite(s)/Course Notes:
WSC 001  or WSC 002 . The topics of the “special studies” courses change every semester. Please consult the English Department Course Description Booklet for topics offered in a particular semester. (Formerly Readings in Literature or Special Studies.)

View Course Offering(s):

Fall 2025

January 2026

Spring 2026