English

AP English Language and Composition is an introductory college-level composition course. Students cultivate understanding of writing and rhetorical arguments through reading, analyzing, and writing texts as they explore topics like rhetorical situation, claims and evidence, reasoning and organization, and style.

This course develops the academic reading,writing, and research skills of students new to undergraduate study in the U.S. for whom English is a second language. Course aims to refine grammatical, organizational, rhetorical, and genre-based skills crucial for success.

Introduction to literature and the methods of literary analysis. Close readings of texts. Individual sections vary in the works covered.

Close readings of literary texts, examined from particular thematic perspectives. Individual sections vary in the works covered. Does not fulfill Core Curriculum requirements. Preference given to freshman students.

Careful reading of and intensive writing about literature. Individual sections vary in themes and works covered. Restricted to Arts & Sciences students governed by the New Core Curriculum instituted in Fall 2011.

Practice in writing reports, reviews, arguments, description; emphasis on organization and development.

Designed for students who wish to experiment with composing several kinds of creative writing: short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.

Creative nonfiction has been described as """true stories well told."""" Students will write

In this writing workshop course, we will explore setting, point of view, characterization, plot and other craft elements that make short stories run. We will read influential authors and give feedback to one another to foster our growth as writers.

Instruction in poetry writing, including how to craft imagery, figurative language, sound, line, and rhythm, as well as traditional and contemporary forms. Students read widely and write lyric, narrative and experimental poems that are shared in a supportive workshop setting.

A creative writing workshop course designed for students eager to leap into the complex process of writing a novella or short novel. Students will close-read short novels to analyze elements of craft and workshop sections of their own novel in-progress.

Usually taught by visiting professors. For writers of poetry and short fiction. Reading of models of exemplary technique and application of these to students' own work. Critical feedback from peers and professors.

Memoir is an opportunity to understand life. This writing workshop provides students with practical skills in reading and writing about the events, memories, places that inform their lives.

Do you love detective fiction? Have you always wanted to write your own """whodunit?"""" In this course

The natural world will be a source for the creative non-fiction, poetry, and fiction pieces students will write in this class. Through readings, field trips, writing exercises, and workshops students will learn to sharpen their language and see more deeply.

Can stories change society? In this workshop you will braid your social justice, environmental, healthcare, and migration interests into creative pieces. We will read works by contemporary writers that address existing problems and call for justice, resistance, equality, activism.

Introduces students to the fundamentals of journalism, with an emphasis on digital media. Class will focus on the ins and outs of digital journalism as a practice, with students gaining hands-on experience within a variety of media platforms.

Journalistic principles and practice for students doing individual co-ops via ENG 2999. Distance learning.

In this creative writing workshop you will study contemporary Irish/Northern Irish writers while working on your own creative pieces. Over semester break, you will travel to Belfast for a week of seminars and creative writing workshops at the Seamus Heaney Centre.

Introduces students to key techniques of news gathering and news writing. We will also explore the principles and rules that guide the writing of news pieces, editorials, and features.

In this creative writing course, students will study drama and techniques that lead to developing characters, crafting stories, and writing scenes. In the collaborative scriptwriting workshop, students will work as authors, editors, and critics, ultimately each crafting a one-act play.

We will make, understand, and appreciate the storytelling medium of comics. For artists, writers and enthusiasts of all levels; no drawing experience necessary. Through exercises, readings and collaborative assignments, students learn the language of comics and create their own stories.

Theory and practice of Writing Center Work; writing, editing and tutoring skills. Permission of instructor required.

An analysis of notable works of art, music, literature, video and social media created by people of various international, ethnic and minoritized groups to publicize situations of importance to their communities.

This service-learning course provides students with the background, tools, and experience needed to teach English to non-native speakers. In addition to classes at Villanova, students practice teaching at a Hispanic culture center.

Sports are more than games; they're a crucible for examining human experience. By examining the work of some of the genre's best writers, students will learn to report and write about this arena with deeper understanding and insight.

Literary publishing in a diverse, compelling field involving both art and commerce. This hands-on class explores the economic, social, and artistic forces that shape contemporary literature. Grapple with what it means to """make culture"""" while honing editorial skills."

Fundamentals of legal writing and analysis.

An exploration of how we engage, understand, explicate, and enjoy texts of all sorts.

Study of the place of women in literature, with emphasis on modern fiction, drama and poetry written in English.

One of the oldest forms of narrative, apocalyptic literature is more popular - and powerful - than ever. Starting with Revelation, this course traces this tradition through fascinating poems, stories, novellas, novels and films to the present day.

The study of global contemporary fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and film that focuses on the environment, climate change, social justice and the future of nature.

Examines major autobiographies by African American and Africans, exploring self, truth, the body politic, and construction of identity. These authors develop crucial dimensions of black intellectual self-representation, whether as individuals or as part of a larger portrait of Black lives.

In this course we will use the tools of literary analysis to discuss all seven Harry Potter novels. Central topics will include how the series evolves; Rowling's use of novelistic form, character and characterizations, and literary models; and the books' representations of gender, class, and other social issues.

The short story can span vast reaches of time and space within a few pages. We examine a range of American short stories, from the fanciful to the frightening, with particular attention to questions of race, gender, and sexuality.

Plot, character, voice, point of view in visual, aural, dramatic, and verbal aspects of serial television. What works similarly or differently in television and prose fiction? In television and film?

The relationship between movies and literature dates back to film's earliest days. Comparing films and texts allows for an explanation of storytelling and the fascinating choices auteurs make. Plot, tone, and symbolism are considered alongside questions of power and representation.

In this course we delve into some of the most famous/influential works of classical Western literature, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Virgil. We discuss issues such as war, glory, political power, the place of the gods, and tragic loss.

Program of approved readings under the supervision of a selected faculty member; examination on readings and a lengthy paper required. Restricted to senior English majors with high cumulative averages. Permission of chair required; ordinarily may not be repeated.

Specific topics vary each semester.

Open only to senior English majors with a GPA of at least 3.5. Permission of consulting teacher and chair required.

Law is consistently criticized for lacking the ABCs of effective legal writing: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. Using current laws, students will learn how to edit legal writing to improve its readability and advocate more effectively for clients.

Communicating and applying skills of English Majors in the workplace.

Co-requisite 1-credit course designed to provide an embedded study-abroad experience to complement a requisite English course.

Internship

Studying the kind of reading that takes place outside of the classroom in book groups and community reads, this course practices reading in community while studying hot new books selected by students in the course.

Full-time employment with a selected firm in the area of publishing, where experience is gained through appropriate training, instruction, and supervision. Approval of English Department Chair required.

Influential British literature from beginnings to 1750, tracing key ideas, power relations, and genres that still impact literature in English, and Anglophone culture, today. Relationships between writing and political change, media history, gender, spirituality, the environment, oppression and liberation.

This course introduces the work of Geoffrey Chaucer through a reading of his lively collection of stories and storytellers, The Canterbury Tales. Through its devout stories, explicit comedies, and probing romances, we will explore medieval society, Chaucer's insights on subjectivity, and influential medieval genres.

The Middle Ages mixed history (historia) and fable (fabula) freely. This course traces the intersections between the fabulous (the fictional and fantastic) and the (real) in medieval narratives about the history, global travel, and the natural world.

Medieval romances - texts about chivalry and love - have shaped everything from racial identity to flirting. This course considers how romances depict sexuality and gender; construct notions of religious otherness; and shape ideas about peoples and political power.

A study of Irish literature from its origins in the world of Celtic mythology, epic and saga through the development of Anglo-Irish literature.

In this course, we will consider how and why secular Renaissance plays adapt plots, characters, and motifs of medieval religious literature, and how they both exploit and challenge medieval moral extremes, including the saint, martyr, virgin, whore, torturer, pagan, and devil.

This course studies the plays and/or poems of Shakespeare. It may be focused on a particular genre of Shakespeare's work, a period in his career, or a topic. The course seeks to develop students' appreciation of Shakespeare's artistry and relevance.

This course studies a popular and influential type of Renaissance drama: the revenge tragedy, a genre preoccupied with spectacular acts of murder and revenge and with the psychological, social, familial, and political circumstances that motivate and justify violent revenge.

The writing of John Milton has fascinated and infuriated English-speaking people for 350 years. We explore why Milton's sometimes radical ideas about conscience, liberty, gender, and marriage remain influential, and how other writers (especially women) have responded to Milton.

Traces the development of British gothic fiction from the late eighteenth century to today, exploring its themes of violence, sexuality, anxiety and social turmoil alongside its historical contexts and major theoretical approaches to understanding this genre.

In this course, students will read and analyze some of the key philosophical texts that established the founding principles of modern science alongside literary texts from different genres that explore science's social meaning and its moral and political implications.

Analyzing realist novels, witty comedies, original tales, and mock epic-poems, we will explore the techniques and styles of authors fascinated by adventure and committed to the power of human reason to discover novel truths about nature, politics, and the rise of a modern commercial economy.

Tracing the expansion in the scope and popularity of the novel as a literary form, we will consider how the major political developments of the Romantic period including the French Revolution and the abolition of the slave trade, shaped its central themes of transgression, violence, and the precariousness of social order.

Discover the Libertine authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, whose witty, scandalous works promoted a freethinking philosophy of sexual pleasure and individual freedom, and provoked critics who blamed them for modern social problems such as prostitution, poverty, and crime.

Influential British and Irish literature since about 1800 (covering the period after ENG 3001), exploring key ideas, power relations, and genres that still shape literature in English today. Topics include political change, gender, artist and audience, and the environment.

Explore literary responses to pivotal developments in medical science and practice from the eighteenth century to the present.Study works that engage with the new ideas about illness, treatment, and disability that arose alongside changing understandings of the human body.

Jane Austen's novels have never been more popular than they are today. To understand why, we will read several, exploring their historical context and reception, as well as influential modern critical interpretations and the most interesting recent movie adaptations.

Investigate how Victorian literature represents doubles - self and other, women and men, past and present, public and private - and study changing constructions of gender, industrialization, and imperial expansion in nineteenth-century Britain.

This class studies how and why women writers used pseudonyms and forged collective authorial identities to grapple with gendered expectations. It considers the knotty politics of authorship, biography, and autobiography in nineteenth-century Britain and the twenty-first century.

This course examines the intriguing relationship between literature and institutions, including governments, schools and prisons. Reading nineteenth-century literature in relation to our contemporary moment, we focus especially on universities, interrogating students' experiences of universities and institutional narratives about universities.

Reading nineteenth-century literature with an eye to who was reading, what they were reading, and how this reading shaped political debates, we'll consider the Victorian Britain's burgeoning print culture, mass movements, colonial publics, and emergent demographic thinking.

Special topic in 19th century Irish literature and culture. For access to the full course description, go to this course number in the Villanova Master Schedule and click on the """syllabus available"""" link."

How do you read a big novel like Ulysses, the master novel that is always atop the greatest novel ever lists? This course will take many different approaches - using films, music, audio recordings, graphic novels, guidebooks, and Joyce's letters.

Films from Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the Irish diaspora tracing developments from early cinema to the contemporary era.

Study of Irish Revival of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century; focus on revivalism, gender, and colonial politics, reading multiple literary genres, beginning with Jane Wilde and William Butler Yeats.

Chronological study of forms of cultural and literary production in Africa. Begins from oral epic traditions up to late 20th century written literatures. Examines postcolonial theory and the issues of language and """authenticity"""" in representations of African societies."

Continuation of study of the various literary practices in Africa, from the late 20th-century writing to 21st-century artists. In addition to postcolonial representation, examines African feminism, Afropolitanism, and Africa and Diaspora intersections in age of globalization.

Modernism exploded onto the literary scene when writers, exhausted by Victorian strictures, explored experimental forms, taboo language, and new ideas about empire, sexuality, race, and technology. We will read 20th-century British novels from 1900 through World War II.

This course explores British fiction written after the second World War until today. What stories do novelists tell about the meaning of """Britishness"""" after the British empire? We investigate themes of nostalgia

Virginia Woolf, novelist, essayist, and diarist, is one of the most influential 20th-Century Writers. Woolf explores the self, modernity, depression, and the joy of an ardent feminist life. We will read Woolf's novels and contemporary debates about form, gender, and sexuality.

Irish plays and performances including Abbey Theatre plays by William Butler Yeats, Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Teresa Deevy, followed by works by Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Marina Carr and new Irish theatre.

Examination of the aesthetics, politics, and practices of the theatre and drama in Africa. Focused on written plays, course explores drama performances on stage, television, and movies. Introduces students to role-playing and small-scale adaptation of texts to American contexts.

India produces some of the most innovative and engrossing literature in the world, while also releasing more films than any other nation. Through both forms, we'll explore debates in contemporary India concerning border tensions, caste, gender, fantasy, and imperial histories.

Focusing on notions of """blackness"""" and emigration

Special topic in 20th-21st century Irish literature and culture. For access to the full course description, go to this course number on the Villanova Master Schedule and click on """syllabus available"""" link."

Readings of Irish poets and prose writers of the last fifty years, starting with Seamus Heaney and Edna O'Brien, and including contemporary works by visiting Irish Heimbold Chairs.

Specific topics vary each semester.

Specific topics vary each semester.

What makes literature """American""""? Who gets to decide? This course examines how literary traditions developed and changed in nineteenth-century America

This course offers a focused examination of a handful of key American writers from early influential voices to major figures publishing to 1945. Significant time will be given to each writer, and a range of genres and themes will be considered.

Black people helped craft the narrative of their lived experiences from their arrival in the New World. Students read the earliest African American literary offerings through the first decade of the twentieth century, including political treatise, autobiography, poetry and novels.

This course asks: how can we read about early American bodies, and how are bodies legible? We will chart how Indigenous, Black, and settler persons used developing forms and genres to navigate identity in texts from sixteenth- through nineteenth- century America.

This course introduces students to a vivid spectrum of Indigenous literatures, exploring how Indigenous peoples have expressed their truths and imagined their futures. We will ask what makes something ?literary?? Why do Indigenous literatures matter, inside and outside our classroom?

This interdisciplinary course looks at the history and literature of the transatlantic slave trade, which fundamentally altered Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the early modern era. It also considers the diasporic Black culture that emerged during and after slavery.

How have Indigenous peoples of the Americas created their own literary traditions? This course introduces students to a wide range of Indigenous literatures produced before 1900, examining how Native writers navigated varying forms that challenge conventional understandings of """literature""""."

We will immerse ourselves in four transformative poets -- Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatly Peters, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson -- while also considering how their lives and work have inspired contemporary culture from prestige television to Taylor Swift.

The nature and evolution of horror writing in America from the eighteenth-century to today.

The genesis of the American novel.

This course survey's groundbreaking U.S. novels from the American Revolution to the Civil War. We'll focus on literary aesthetics as wells as how novels affirm or resist prevailing politics, paying particular attention to racism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Specific topics vary each semester.

Specific topics vary each semester.

A survey of American literature from 1945 to the present, meant to give students familiarity with a wide range of authors and genres who have contributed significantly to American writing in the 20th century and beyond.

This course offers a focused examination of a selection of the most influential American writers writing from 1945 to the present. Significant time will be given to each writer, and a range of genres and themes will be considered.

Contemporary African American literature narrates exciting social, political and aesthetic changes in the US. Students will read a variety of literature, including essays, short stories, poetry, novels and plays, beginning with the Harlem Renaissance to today.

African American short fiction has taken on a number of forms throughout the 20th and 21st century. Students will read works by writers diverse as Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Edwidge Danticat.

How can we feel connected even when alone? This course explores how the activities of reading and writing produce the strange and sustaining feeling of being alone together. We'll examine examples of this paradoxical condition in recent fiction and poetry.

The exquisite poetry of 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century African American writers, like Wheatley, Dunbar, Johnson, Hughes, Brooks, Sanchez, Giovanni, Angelou, Dove, Rankine and Mullen introduces students to a range of experience and the power of language.

F. Scott Fitzgerald called the years between the wars the """Jazz Age."""" Folks uptown recognized that a Renaissance was happening in Harlem. Students will study major works by African Americans written during the 1920s and 1930s."

From American slavery to Afrofuturism, writers of the African American novel have explored the lived experience of black people in America and and throughout the African Diaspora.

This course studies crime and detective fiction as an intellectually rich phenomenon preoccupied by gender and sexuality. It examines how crime narratives from the nineteenth century to the present critique socioeconomic realities and address fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge.

Major plays of the period.

"""The play's the thing"""" to capture the conscience of not only a king but a nation. Students will read plays written by African Americans including Lorraine Hansberry

Focused study of contemporary American poetry emphasizing gender, ethnicity, aesthetic principles or genre.

This course examines the fierce, vibrant strain of writing by immigrants who have pushed beyond boundaries of genre and nation to tell their stories. It focuses on fiction and creative nonfiction published in the U.S. after 1900.

Canonical texts that treat questions of race and ethnicity. Focus on the critical role of language and literature in constructing and deconstructing racial categories.

This course examines a fascinating range of contemporary US literary texts to explore the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with race, class and other categories of identity to form our experiences of selfhood, community, national belonging, and power.

Examines American literature in the context of U.S. empire, including histories and effects of settler colonialism, overseas expansion, and war. Focuses on authors of color from 1945 to the present.

Examines literature, film, art, and other cultural productions by Asian Americans and explores Asian American histories from the early 20th century to the present.

What does it mean to be """undocumented?"""" In this course

How does writing bring together distant lovers, friends, family? We'll read letters, the digital forms (social media, instant messaging) that have replaced them, and their representation in novels, poems, and essays to explore how intimacy forms across distance.

Through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and genre-bending texts and performances by Latina/o/x/writers, this course will ask: How has Latinx cultural production inscribed and sometimes joyously subverted language, border and immigration politics from the 1960's to the present?

To be alive today is to feel distracted. This course offers us the chance to slow down. We read just one short poem per class meeting and learn how to give it our full attention, in writing and in conversation.

This course taught in English introduces students to contemporary world literature and cinema in translation. The study of these texts as translations equips students with an understanding of how translation allows movement among diverse languages and cultures, including our own.

Specific topics vary each semester.

Specific topics vary each semester.

Explores representations of the culture and history of the Caribbean in the literary and performance traditions of creative artists from the region. Examines postcolonial discourse and folklore aesthetics across genres and in cultural forms such as carnival and Carbbean music.

Do you love to write? Dream of visiting with authors to discuss their work and the publishing world? This course combines creative writing workshops with literary analysis and the chance to hob-nob with prestigious authors during the Villanova Literary Festival.

This course surveys major contemporary novels depicting American disasters and their aftermath. We'll consider the varieties of apocalypse that are imagined -- including economic collapse, pandemic, """zombie apocalypse

How do borders impact our lives, and how might they be imagined differently? This course examines how """the border? shapes Latinx literatures

This community-based course for Villanova students and incarcerated men will use literature to explore the causes and experience of addiction in addition to the routes taken toward recovery.

We will explore the vibrant field of Latinx literature, including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by Puerto Rico, Chicano (Mexican American), Dominican American, Cuban American, and Central and South American descent writers and artists. Knowledge of Spanish is not required.

Capstone experience combining immersion in primary and secondary materials with an intensive writing experience. Limit of 15 students.