This course introduces students to writing as a conscious and developmental activity. Students learn to read, think, and write in response to a variety of texts, to integrate their ideas with those of others, and to treat writing as a recursive process. Through this work with texts, students are exposed to a range of reading and writing techniques they can employ in other courses. Students work individually and collaboratively, participate in peer review, reflect on their writing development through structured in-class and out-of-class activities, and develop an ePortfolio of their work. Students with a developmental writing placement are required to take SAS 011 (Engaging with Texts Writing Lab) concurrently with WRT 110. Students who want additional professional support while taking WRT 110 may opt into SAS 011.

Who painted the lion? Is Satan a hero? What is a yahoo? How does the story-teller’s perspective (whether social, economic, gendered, cultural, geographic or human) change the story told? From Arthurian Legends, to poems of revolution, and social satire in the early novel, British Literature I introduces students to some of the best-known poems, plays, and novels written between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Through independent reading and class discussion, students learn to move from a text’s literal meaning to its symbolic significance and explore the way literature reflects, comments on, and shapes its cultural moment. Readings include works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift and others. This course satisfies the British Literature I (pre-1800) requirement for the major, and is an elective for the English minor and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. 3.000 Credit hours

Is poetry a form of democracy? Can modern life be the subject of great writing, and can women produce it? Can a culture represent itself if it's lost its language? English 116 familiarizes students with some of the broad trends, genres, and issues of British Literature by focusing on the idea of revolution (both as dramatic change and as the return of ideas) that pervaded the late eighteenth century, could be felt throughout the nineteenth, and erupted again with two world wars and decolonization. At the same time, the course structures opportunities for students to develop close reading and critical thinking skills. Through independent reading and class discussion, students learn to move from a text’s literal meaning to its symbolic significance and explore the way literature reflects, comments on, and shapes its cultural moment. Readings include works by Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill and Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney and others. This course satisfies the British Literature II (post-1800) requirement for the major, and is an elective for the English minor and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. 3.00 credits.

This course focuses on how storytelling has become an effective means of promoting the health of marine ecosystems. Writers have always turned to seascapes to find symbols of human life, gods’ furies, and other imaginative sustenance. In modern times, the fragility of marine life has gained more interest amid mounting scientific evidence of the dire effects of pollution, unsustainable harvesting, and climate change. What kinds of stories teach people to identify fundamental environmental concepts to generate socially just, creative, collaborative, and sustainable solutions to environmental problems? For English majors and minors as well as ISH majors, this class is designed as an elective that provides an introduction to literary studies in the “blue humanities” by sampling works of different genres, cultures, media, and centuries.

This course introduces students to the interplay of literature and social change in the past century through a fuzzy lens: people’s stories about dogs. Evidence of human-dog cohabitation can be found at almost all of the oldest archaeological sites of human settlement. With canine companions, we have explored all corners of the globe, even positioning them to lead our way into outer space. Consequently they are a persistent presence in literary representations, yet literary scholars contend that they only become recognizable as such in the long twentieth century through stories that cast them as aesthetic, scientific, and social actors, sharing in our struggles. Through a broad range of genres including novels, films, poems, and memoirs, course texts will ground discussions of literature’s role in the development and representation of major social issues across the period like racism and xenophobia, hetero/sexism and AIDs, and animal rights and welfare. This course satisfies an elective for the English major, the English minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

What can we learn – and unlearn – from Indigenous voices in film and literature? This course explores examples of literary and film narratives by and about First Nations and other colonized peoples in order to introduce students to the basics of how literary writing relates to moviemaking as not just commercial enterprises but more importantly tools of empowerment. By focusing on the dynamics of “owning” stories – both honoring and possessing them – across media, the course also helps to elaborate the conditions of historic changes in Indigenous people’s lives that are taking place within our lifetimes, such as the Standing Rock protests. One of the wonders of the internet age is that Indigenous peoples all over the world are able to share their own stories as never before. Engaging with their changing understandings of history and representation prepares everyone to become better allies in decolonial struggles for political autonomy.

What stories do Americans tell about their origins? How have they used the power of the word to define their communities, justify or contest colonization, resist oppressive regimes, raise their voices, and imagine a new nation? What did it mean to claim the right to write? And how did gender, ethnicity, race, and class—as social constructions and embodied identities—shape the answers to these questions? This course considers questions such as these in exploring the kinds of stories that have circulated on this continent and how narrative shapes what we think we know about ourselves as a nation; we will also come to understand why these stories still matter today.

Who and what is an American? These questions, still unresolved, have driven both creativity and conflict in the United States from the Civil War era to the present. Beginning with Abraham Lincoln’s call in the Gettysburg Address for Americans to complete the “unfinished work” of testing these definitions, then moving forward to the present, this course considers the vibrant and diverse body of texts that constitute literatures of the United States. Our job is not to answer the questions posed in the course title but to understand how people have used narrative to grapple with them, what that can tell us about the practices of reading, writing, and critical thinking in their historical moments, and how these issues matter today.

One has only to think of popular music to appreciate that lyric poetry - especially the love lyric - is arguably the most vibrant literary form in practice today. In this course, we devote time to learning the formal elements of poetry, and to noticing how they can contribute to a poem's beauty and deepen its meanings. We explore ways in which poets and songwriters craft creative responses to personal and historical dimensions of human experience such as love, grief, injustice, and connection with the natural world. This course is an elective for the English major, the English minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

What are the symptoms of a traumatic experience, and what are some of the challenges faced by those who would survive, recover from bear witness to such an experience? How has trauma been represented in literature? Why do so many authors report that the story of trauma must told and cannot be represented? In short, what challenges does traumatic experience present to those who articulate a memory of it, and what do these challenges suggest about the relation between language and experience, and more broadly, about the social, political, religious, historical, and psychological functions of literature?

Writers have always turned to animal life to find moving symbols of human conditions and, more recently informed by animal science research, to gain a broader understanding of how to live with/ around/ as nonhuman beings. Sampling the history of literary animal studies, this course aims to account for why species differences, especially between humans and animals, remain among the most enduring markers of social difference. In telling stories of dogs, for instance, as variously gods, pets, meat, or pests, humans mark irreconcilable cultural differences among themselves as well as set the limits of what (and who) counts as natural object and cultural subject. Through novels, poems, graphic fictions, films, and essays, class assignments and discussions aim to illuminate how animal literatures become both creative and socially engaged practices.This course is an elective for the English major and minor, the Writing minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. 3.000 Credit hours

Two central questions—what is literature? and how do people critique it?—frame this course, guiding our study of some basic theories of the relationships peculiar to a literary work, its author, its audience members, and the worlds in which these entities meet. Reading and writing assignments are designed to meet two interrelated goals: to explore literary ways of knowing by practicing different methods of literary analysis (including romanticism, formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism), and to situate these theoretical developments amid major social developments of the past two centuries (including marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial struggles). By the end of the semester, students should be able to explain how and why no reading or writing can ever be free of theory. 3.000 Credit hours This course is a prerequisite for the Methods in Literary and Cultural Criticism course required for the English major and minor. It also serves as an elective for the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

Narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret and be moved by stories of illness. Through exploring medically-themed literature and crafting creative and academic essays, students will gain a deeper understanding of how narrative influences wellness and disease in today’s culture, study the elements of story, and reflect on their own life experiences in writing. Students interested in the health professions and how narrative influences health in general will use literature and their own writing to learn about a new “tool” in our modern medicine bag. This course satisfies an elective for the English major, the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major, and the English minor.

This course represents a study of the basic theories and practices in linquistics and language usage. The prescriptive- descriptive grammar debate in relations to norms, dialects, and cultural values will be explored. The greater part of the course deals with linguistic description: generative, structural, and transformational systems are considered.

This course explores how and why we cast ourselves into alternate realities, variations on being, and imagined futures. Following Ursula K. Le Guin’s insight that science fiction, however futuristic and fantastical, is about ourselves in the present, we will consider how authors use the genre to grapple with topics such as gender, race, class, and sexuality; settler colonialism; climate change; and artificial intelligence. How does science fiction allow thought-experimentation for critiquing existing social, cultural, natural, human, and techno-scientific realities--and envisioning new ones? How can it help us imagine livable futures for ourselves and our planet? To investigate these questions, we will consider how science fiction engages the imagination through clusters of written and visual texts around three main themes: encounters with “others”; cyborgs and bots: what does it mean to be human?; and the ethics of world-building.

How is a woman like a criminal or a child? In what ways is she intellectually or developmentally disabled? Social reformer Frances Power Cobbe posed these questions in her 1869 essay “Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors.” The answer, she said, lay in their shared legal status. In this course we will read essays like Cobbe’s in conjunction with case law and legislation on marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, education, and disease in order to examine how legal narratives shaped Victorian women's, and men’s, identities. Together these readings will provide a context and counterpoint to novels of the period that plot the practical consequences of this legislation on men’s and women’s lives and which imaginatively projected alternatives to the "legal fictions" about women. Readings will include legal statutes, trial reports and legal opinions, social commentary and, of course, novels by Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and others. This course satisfies the British Literature II (post-1800) requirement for the English major and is an elective for the English minor, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major, and the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies minor.

What is justice? How is justice represented in literature? How do literary texts connect with and illuminate contemporary questions of justice? Readings may include texts by poets, novelists, and playwrights such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Kafka, Richard Wright, Susan Glaspell, Etheridge Knight, Nawal El Saadawi, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Sherwin Bitsui, and Ada Limón. This course is an elective for the English major and minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

This course focuses on the stories we tell about experiences of illness. Who has the authority to represent illness, and in what ways? How does illness shape one’s sense of self? How do patients make sense of encounters with health professionals? How do factors such as race, gender, sexuality, and social class—or, how do the social, cultural, political, and economic structures we inhabit—affect the experience of affliction and navigation of the health care system? Students will analyze how the experience of illness is represented and how those portrayals are enmeshed within wider social and cultural contexts. Students will gain tools to imagine more empathic care, considering, and perhaps rethinking, just what it means to be a patient—for example, to face one’s mortality, to alter the way one inhabits one’s body and the world, or to struggle for self-determination. Similarly, the class will explore the many forms illness narratives may take and the myriad ways people use narratives of illness, from self-healing to social protest. Through this in-depth study, students will come to recognize the narrative structure of medical representation and how patients participate in the creation of medical knowledge.

This course explores a variety of topics in British literature after 1800, often focusing on a specific theme or genre. A description of the specific topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. Topics may include "Children's Literature" among others. All sections satisfy elective requirements for the English major and minor and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

This course explores a variety of topics in United States literature to 1865, often focusing on a particular theme or genre. A description of the specific topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. Topics may include: The Captivity Narrative; American Origins; The American Renaissance; and The Slave Narrative, among others. Some sections are approved electives for the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies minor.

This course explores a variety of topics in United States literature after 1865, often focusing on a particular theme or genre. The following titles have been offered recently: American Blood, American Dystopias, Whitman to Hip Hop, Women's Detective Fiction, Women of the West. A description of the specific topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. Some sections are approved electives for the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies minor.

The ENG sections of Human Traditions I are offered under a number of themes, including the following: "Wisdom Literatures" and "Conflict & Chaos". Descriptions for each topic can be found at the section level in which they are offered. Depending upon the individual course, they count as either Human Experience (HE) or Power, Knowledge, and Justice (PKJ) Humanities courses towards the requirements for the Nor'easter Core Curriculum.

The ENG sections of Human Traditions II are offered under a number of themes, including the following: Writing in the Modern World; Cultures in Contact; Modern Languages of the World; and The Other. Descriptions for each topic can be found at the section level in which they are offered. Depending upon the individual course, they count as either Human Experience (HE) or Power, Knowledge, and Justice (PKJ) Humanities courses towards the requirements for the Nor'easter Core Curriculum.

This course does not require or assume any prior coursework in English. It offers students the opportunity to study an author, topic, or genre in depth and at an advanced level. Recent course titles offered on the Biddeford campus have included "The Slave Narrative." Recent course titles offered on the Tangier campus have included “The Biography of Tangier” and “Writing Sans Frontières.” A description of the specific topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. This course is an elective for the English major, the English minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. Some sections are approved electives for the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies minor.

This course will examine a range of texts covered by the umbrella term "nature films" -- a term that from the beginning of moving pictures has signaled a motley mix of aesthetic experimentation, entrepreneurship, activism, and education -- by reading them through some emergent theories of their critical and popular impact. From camera-trap codgers to Hollywood stars, all sorts of people make and watch nature films for all sorts of reasons. They can be fictional and documentary, photorealistic and animated, and their focus might include nonhuman and human animals, plants, mushrooms, elements, even whole ecosystems. Through film screenings, readings, researched and response writing, as well as discussions, we will examine several key concepts that define nature films: anthropomorphism; wildlife; conservation; and contested histories, including the disputed origins of the form in trophy hunting and photography and its afterlives (or deaths) in web-based media. 3.000 Credit hours This course satisfies the interdisciplinary literacy requirement for the English major, and can serve as an elective for the English minor as well as the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

This course explores writing about health and illness, by authors who define, experience, and inhabit womanhood in a variety of ways. Because their experiences are bound up with the social and cultural contexts in which they live, we will consider how writing intersects with issues of gender identity, social class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as with the changing status of women in the health professions. Given that this is a literature course, our central concern will be representation—that is, while we are urgently interested in the topics themselves, we will pay special attention to authors’ and artists’ representational choices and will learn to discern, analyze, and assess those choices. Students will enrich their understanding of women's writing and gendered health issues as well as gain experience working with primary sources and stretching critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

In this course, we read several of Shakespeare’s plays and explore them from two distinct perspectives: one traditional, the other global. In the traditional approach, we focus on the literary and performance elements of the texts. In the global approach, we examine how cultural contexts and perspectives—Western and non-Western—shape how the plays are interpreted and performed. Our coursework includes weekly discussion assignments; viewing films of two performances of each play; group work that leads to brief, informal presentations or rehearsed scenes; and a self-directed final project that offers students the opportunity to direct a performance of a selected scene from one of Shakespeare’s plays. The final project includes research into aspects of how the play has been interpreted, adapted, and performed in both Western and non-Western contexts.

This course does not require or assume any prior coursework in English. It offers students the opportunity to study an author, topic, or genre in depth and at an advanced level. Recent course titles offered on the Biddeford campus have included "The Slave Narrative." A description of the specific topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. This course is an elective for the English major, the English minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. Some sections are approved electives for the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies minor.

This course explores a variety of topics related to literature and health. Each section focuses on a particular theme or genre. Recently offered titles include “Madness in Literature” and “Patient Narratives.” A description of the specific topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period.

We read a broad selection of texts by poets, novelists, and playwrights from across the world, with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This course satisfies the Global Literacy requirement for the major and can serve as an elective for the English minor as well as the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. The course meets a Deeper Dive (DD)--Power, Knowledge, and Justice (PKJ) open--requirement for the Nor'easter Core Curriculum.

We read a broad selection of texts by poets, novelists, and playwrights from across the world, with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This course satisfies the Global Literacy requirement for the major and can serve as an elective for the English minor as well as the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. The course meets a Deeper Dive (DD)--Power, Knowledge, and Justice (PKJ) open--requirement for the Nor'easter Core Curriculum.

Topics in British Literature offers students an in-depth study of an author, topic or genre as it figures within the broad category of British literature. Topics may include "Prize Fiction" among others. All sections satisfy elective requirements for the English major and minor and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. "Prize Fiction" satisfies the Diversity and Global Literature elective.

Al-halqa tradition in Morocco has been deeply affected by the rapid changes taking place ever since the colonial enterprise. However, its re-invention in some contemporary Moroccan theatre practices exemplifies that territories are no longer bounded entities with the overflow of old ways into new ones. The course explores how theatre and storytelling in Morocco converge to re-invent new theatrical forms out of old ones. The very transposition of al-halqa's techniques and circular morphology into a stage building articulates the spirit of exchange that conditions Moroccan theatre today. The journey from Tayeb Saddiki's Sidi Abder-rahman Al-Majdoub in 1968 to Naima Zitan's Dialy in 2012 reveals an ever-lasting obsession with al-halqa as a deeply rooted performance behavior in Morocco. To trace some of these wide-ranging developments, our class brings to light 'other' voices and bodies of inquiry into theatre studies. Moroccan theatre, then, becomes characterized by a general tendency toward mediating different performing traditions that belong to the Orient and the Occident. To reach this end, students will be given the appropriate tools to comprehend Moroccan performances in relation to social change and can perform their own stories in the form of al-halqa.

This course offers students the opportunity to complete a guided, independent project in an area of interest within literature or writing, broadly conceived. Students interested in an independent study should consult with an advisor and speak with a relevant member of the department about the possibility of such work. Students interested in pursuing an independent study should plan ahead, as the course must be proposed and approved by the university in the semester before the work begins. This course satisfies an elective for the English major, the English minor, and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major. Depending on the topic, it may satisfy a requirement for the Writing minor.

Functioning variously as physical setting, character, as well as psychological environment, the sea provides a common focus for writers around the world from ancient times through the present. A wide range of historical and regional literatures will inform our investigations of the ways in which early maritime works influence contemporary representations of the sea. By comparing life writing, fiction, and poetry, the course will explore not only how authors represent the history of life by, on, and in the sea but also how such representations play an active role in shaping present and future marine ecologies. Readings may include texts by Rachael Carson, Daniel Defoe, Julie Dash, Linda Greenlaw, Amitav Ghosh, Herman Melville, Yukio Mishima, Derek Walcott, Lydia Millet, Virginia Woolf, and Linda Hogan. 3.000 Credit hours This course satisfies the interdisciplinary literacy requirement for the English major, and can serve as an elective for the English minor as well as the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

From Frankenstein to Dracula, this course delves into the underside of Victorian decorum. Known for strict rules and tighter corsets, nineteenth-century Britain also produced some of the best-known monsters. What can we learn from a culture’s monsters about its perception of threat? And what can we learn from the novel -- which American author Henry James considered a “loose and baggy monster” itself -- about how to contain them, or not? Readings include critical essays and a selection of novels, for example, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King Solomon’s Mines, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula and other lurkers. This course satisfies the British Literature II: (after 1800) requirement for the major and can serve as an elective for the English minor as well as the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

The rise of hypertext and the social web, the ability to digitize images and texts in archives, and the accessibility of low-cost computing power, have yielded a range of developments in humanities research and in the production of texts. This advanced English seminar, a working tour of the digital humanities, explores these developments from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Students will learn about the Text Encoding Inititative, the role of computing and 'big data' in humanities research, the enduring importance of close reading, and tools for curating interactive digital exhibits. This course meets an Advanced Studies Core requirement.

Examples of possible topics include slave and captivity narratives, Native American fiction, American women writers, the American Renaissance, literatures of the frontier, fin-de-siecle America, the Depression novel, literatures of immigration, women?s detective fiction, and modern poetry. A description of the topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. 3.00 Credit hours

Restricted to graduating majors, the capstone study is undertaken independently to explore a topic in more depth with an English faculty whose work touches on the area of the student's interest. Students will be expected to produce a high-quality paper at the end of the course, one that illustrates their mastery of skills acquired throughout their education at UNE and their ability to contribute original ideas to scholarly and intellectual debates.

An internship is a high impact learning experience where knowledge and theory from students’ program of study are integrated with shadowing, volunteering, or paid employment with a private company, not-for-profit organization or government agency toward the intentional development of transferable knowledge, skills and abilities and practical application of professional competencies. Prior to registering for the class, students must work with the Internship Coordinator and course instructor to identify, apply for, and secure an internship. In addition to the hands-on experiential learning that occurs at the internship site, students attend class to discuss the experience, reflect on their learning, and explore ways the internship extends course-based learning. Through guidance, support and regular feedback from the mentor and the course instructor, students learn and practice their internship position and achieve their learning objectives.

For students who have completed ENG 491, this second internship is a high impact learning experience where knowledge and theory from students’ program of study are integrated with shadowing, volunteering, or paid employment with a private company, not-for-profit organization or government agency toward the intentional development of transferable knowledge, skills and abilities and practical application of professional competencies. Prior to registering for the class, students must work with the Internship Coordinator and course instructor to identify, apply for, and secure an internship. In addition to the hands-on experiential learning that occurs at the internship site, students attend class to discuss the experience, reflect on their learning, and explore ways the internship extends course-based learning. Through guidance, support and regular feedback from the mentor and the course instructor, students learn and practice their internship position and achieve their learning objectives.