Spring 2022 Course Descriptions
1110: Composition I
Many days, times, and online sections available
In this course, students will read, write, and think about a variety of issues and texts. They will develop reading and writing skills that will help with the writing required in their fields of study and other personal and professional contexts. Students will learn to analyze rhetorical situations in terms of audience, contexts, purpose, mediums, and technologies and apply this knowledge to their reading and writing. They will also gain an understanding of how writing and other modes of communication work together for rhetorical purposes. Students will learn to analyze the rhetorical context of any writing task and compose with purpose, audience, and genre in mind. Students will reflect on their own writing processes, learn to workshop drafts with other writers, and practice techniques for writing, revising, and editing. (EPW)
Credit for both this course and ENGL 1110X may not be applied toward a degree program.
Meets New Mexico Lower-Division General Education Common Core Curriculum Area I: Communications.
Prerequisite: ACT English =16-25 or SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing =450-659 or Next Generation ACCUPLACER Writing =>279.
1110Y: Composition I (Stretch II)
Many days, times, and sections available
First and second semester of Composition I stretch sequence. Focuses on analyzing rhetorical situations and responding with appropriate genres and technologies. (EPW)
These are the first and second courses in a two-part sequence. In order to receive transfer credit for ENGL 1110, all courses in this sequence (ENGL 1110X, ENGL 1110Y) must be taken and passed.
Credit for both ENGL 1110X and ENGL 1110 may not be applied toward a degree program.
Students with ACT English <15 or SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing <430 or ACCUPLACER Sentence Skills <109 will begin their English Composition Sequence with ENGL 1110X.
Prerequisite for 1110Y: 1110X.
1120: Composition II
Many days, times, and online sections available
In this course, students will explore argument in multiple genres. Research and writing practices emphasize summary, analysis, evaluation, and integration of secondary sources. Students will analyze rhetorical situations in terms of audience, contexts, purpose, mediums, and technologies and apply this knowledge to their reading, writing, and research. Students will sharpen their understanding of how writing and other modes of communication work together for rhetorical purposes. The emphasis of this course will be on research methods. (EPW)
Meets New Mexico Lower-Division General Education Common Core Curriculum Area I: Communications.
Prerequisite: 1110 or 1110Y or 1110Z or ACT English =26-28 or SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing =660-690.
1410.002: Introduction to Literature
Online
Belinda Wallace, bwallace@unm.edu
The primary objective of this course is to develop a greater understanding of and increased enjoyment from literature. To this end, our class will use Caribbean literature to learn how to read literature. Since this is a class designed for non-English majors, our class will introduce us to the genre of Caribbean literature and then deploy this lit to explore different strategies for reading literature. We will also learn effective practices for writing about literature that are appropriate for an introductory level course.
2110.001: Traditional Grammar
Face to Face, MWF 0900-0950
Carl Johnson, ctylerjohnson@unm.edu
In this course, I hope to convince you that grammar is not something to fear – grammar is your friend. You rely on grammar every day regardless of whether you realize it. As a speaker of English, you have an enormous repository of grammatical information. This course will use that intuitive, unconscious knowledge of grammar to create an explicit, conscious roadmap of grammar so that you can be more confident of your communicative choices.
By the end of the semester, the following Student Learning Outcomes will have invaded your unconscious thoughts, and you will have the ability to:
- Identify sentence constituents and analyze sentence patterns,
- Recognize and understand structural relationships among verb phrases, noun phrases, and adjectival and adverbial phrases and clauses,
- Recognize word forms and explain their functions in phrases and sentences,
- Demonstrate flexibility of composition through phrase modification, nominalization, and other writing strategies that employ knowledge of grammatical forms and functions,
- Distinguish differences of prescriptive and descriptive grammar.
2120.001: Intermediate Composition: Say It Loud: Popular Music and Social Issues
Face to Face, MWF 0800-0850
Amanda Kooser, amandakooser@unm.edu
From The Boss to Beyonce and Dylan to Public Enemy, popular music has spoken out on the social issues of our time. This writing-focused course will engage with those messages and their contexts through a multimodal exploration of music, history, and visual imagery. You will create a personal musical narrative and an analysis of a music video. We will look at topics that range from BLM to war to women’s movements to mental health. The will culminate in you creating a research project that investigates a social issue, popular music’s response to it, and the cultural context surrounding it.
2120.002: Intermediate Composition: Damn the Man: Dystopian Societies in YA, Comics, & Film
Face to Face, TR 0930-1045
Alyssa Covarrubias-Powell, acovarrubias@unm.edu
This course will explore the dystopian genre through non-traditional mediums. The idea of dystopian societies is so often explored through works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver. However, as we continue to develop different mediums such as new genres of literature, video games, and comics our idea of a dystopia must develop with them. We will explore the ever-changing depiction of dystopian societies and their real-world basis through modern works such as The Vanishing Deep, Die, and Mad Max: Fury Road. Together, we’ll try to discover the root of what it means to exist in a dystopia.
2120.003: Intermediate Composition: Wildness to Wilderness: The Legacy of Nature in Literature, Film, and Retail
Face to Face, MWF 1100-1150
Carly Heidenfeld, cheidenfeld@unm.edu
We will explore the evolution and importance of nature writing as an interdisciplinary genre with real world implications. You will learn how to analyze nature writing from Thoreau to present day digital magazines and retail markets to understand the genre as a venue for social revolution. You will also create their your pieces of “nature writing” in the form of blogs, journalistic essays, or other creative avenues of writing based on rhetorical situations specific to their own academic and career interests. The skills gained in the course will culminate in a research project that incorporates your own academic/career interests with environmental issues.
2120.004: Intermediate Composition: Cultural Haunting: Ghost across American Writing
Face to Face, MWF 1300-1350
Kennia Lopez, klopez0326@unm.edu
Our topic for the semester is ghost across genre. You will find, however, that the term is fluid and ever-shifting, much like the apparitions themselves. What do we mean when we say we’re visiting our old haunts, for example—or what do we mean when we say the love of our lives has ghosted us? How is specter operating in the text? How is “America” implicated in the haunting? We will be reading, watching, and analyzing texts representing various voices and genres. You will be asked to determine the haunting—who is prey and who—even what—is predator?
2120.005: Intermediate Composition: Making Monsters
Face to Face, TR 1230-1345
Anja Sanchez, anjasanc@unm.edu
Monsters have always been here, but they are no longer hidden figures in the dark— they are everywhere we look from film and literature to video games. Monsters are symbols of what we fear most in society and they are marked by their difference to those around them and their defiance of cultural norms. These differences include gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and disability. We will study monsters from medieval to modernity in film and literature, accompanied by Monster Theory to understand what made them monsters in the first place and how we continue to be scared/fascinated of them.
2120.006: Intermediate Composition: Women Writing Women: Literature & Film Between the Centuries
Face to Face, MWF 1000-1050
Haley Bonner, bonnerh@unm.edu
This course engages with work from American women authors of the 19th and 20th centuries and film directors of the 21st century. Our course will focus on themes identified through the lens of gender. We will explore and discuss the binaries, images, and symbols these authors/directors use to create female narratives, agencies, and mobility. Among other things, this course will help you to advance your knowledge of and practice in expository writing, by asking you to employ rhetorical analysis, to conduct research, and to compose documents that meet the needs of your audience.
2120.007: Intermediate Composition
Face to Face, TR 1100-1215
This course description will be updated as soon as the information is available.
2120.008: Intermediate Composition: Writing Magical Realism
Face to Face, TR 1400-1515
Jennifer Tubbs, jtubbs@unm.edu
From its inception with the works of Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez, magical realism has tackled important cultural and political questions. Today, magical realism has metamorphosed into a genre-bending creature that blends both tradition and innovation. However, the end result remains the same: literature that challenges and explodes the status quo. In this course, we will examine contemporary magical realist texts that comment on such germane topics as immigration, climate change, and the quest for self-identity. Your major writing assignments will include an author profile and a textual analysis. The course will culminate with your own creative work of magical realist fiction.
2120.015: Intermediate Composition: Writing the Body: Disability, Illness, & Alternative Physicality in Genre Fiction
Online
AJ Odasso, ajodasso@unm.edu
In Early Modern works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as in contemporary works like Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall, characters whose bodies and physical senses operate outside the perceived norm have played a critical role in the evolution of various popular prose genres. We will will examine such characterization and narratives through the lenses of early and contemporary Anglophone Horror, Mystery, and SF/F/Spec fiction.
2210.001: Professional & Technical Communication
Many days, times, and online sections available
Professional and Technical Communication will introduce students to the different types of documents and correspondence that they will create in their professional careers. This course emphasizes the importance of audience, document design, and the use of technology in designing, developing, and delivering documents. This course will provide students with experience in professional correspondence and communicating technical information to a non-technical audience. (EPW)
Meets New Mexico Lower-Division General Education Common Core Curriculum Area I: Communications.
Prerequisite: 1120 or ACT English =>29 or SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing =>700.
2240.001: Introduction to Studies in English
Face to Face, T 1230-1345
Diane Thiel, dthiel@unm.edu
English 2240 is a one-credit, eight-week class that brings together students majoring in English. It is a required course and must be taken before embarking on the major coursework. Students are introduced to the subfields of rhetoric and professional writing; creative writing; literary studies; and critical theory and cultural studies. Students will be introduced to the life of the department through class visits with faculty members, attendance at departmental events, and a variety of readings and discussions. Some class sessions will include conversations about employment or opportunities for graduate school. The final task will be to craft a letter of intent documenting an intended course of study and future goals.
2240.002: Introduction to Studies in English
Face to Face, W 1300-1350
Diane Thiel, dthiel@unm.edu
English 2240 is a one-credit, eight-week class that brings together students majoring in English. It is a required course and must be taken before embarking on the major coursework. Students are introduced to the subfields of rhetoric and professional writing; creative writing; literary studies; and critical theory and cultural studies. Students will be introduced to the life of the department through class visits with faculty members, attendance at departmental events, and a variety of readings and discussions. Some class sessions will include conversations about employment or opportunities for graduate school. The final task will be to craft a letter of intent documenting an intended course of study and future goals.
2310.002: Introduction to Creative Writing
Face to Face, TR 1230-1345
Andrew Bourelle, abourelle@unm.edu
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.” --Stephen King
In English 2310, students will read a lot and write a lot, as Stephen King suggests, but we will take this practice one step further. Students will read a lot and write a lot together, helping each other through critique, discussion, and support. The class will expose students to the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students will read, analyze, and discuss published examples of each, examining elements of craft in the different genres. Students will write in each of the genres and share their work with classmates, giving and receiving feedback as a way to improve their writing and the writing of their classmates.
2310.003: Introduction to Creative Writing
This course description will be updated as soon as the information is available.
2310.004: Introduction to Creative Writing
This course description will be updated as soon as the information is available.
2310.015: Introduction to Creative Writing
Online
This course description will be updated as soon as the information is available.
2510.001: Analysis of Literature
Face to Face MW, Remote Scheduled F, 1300-1350
Kathryn Wichelns, wichelns@unm.edu
The work of reading literature at the college level is made easier through familiarity with a flexible toolkit of processes and methodologies. This semester, we will use close reading, critical analysis, and argumentative writing as we also examine how select works of fiction, poetry, and drama reflect the history of the constantly-shifting concept of “literature.” In our engagements with Olaudah Equiano, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Eugene O'Neill, Flannery O'Connor, Américo Paredes, Anne Carson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nnedi Okorafor, Ken Liu and others, we will address the influence of sociopolitical forces as well as intellectual and artistic movements on theories of reading and writing. Our introductory foray into literary theory will enable us to recognize different approaches, and begin using them in collaboration with focused research and comparative interpretation. We'll learn to question what counts as "literature" and why, and how as scholars we can use the tools we've gained to read just about anything critically. On midterm and final examinations, students will be expected to demonstrate their ability to present informed arguments about the works we'll read together, supported by specific textual evidence.
2510.002: Analysis of Literature
Face to Face, TR 0930-1045
Sarah Worland, sworland@unm.edu
How might literature and other types of texts contribute to our understanding of the issues and discourses around us? How do we read, write, and think in a “literary” way? In other words, what does a major in literature do? We’ll address questions like these in this course that introduces English majors to literary techniques and conventions in order to deepen our understanding of literary thinking and literary writing. Through discussions, question-forming and question-asking, written assignments, research projects and presentations, and writing workshops, we’ll work together to first identify the key components of literary analysis and then assemble these pieces to compose our own literary analyses of a variety of texts (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc.) from authors like Harryette Mullen, Charles Bernstein, Bernard Malamud, and James Baldwin, among others.
2540.001: Introduction to Chicanx Literature
Face to Face MF, Remoted Scheduled W, 1000-1050
Bernadine Hernández, berna18@unm.edu
This survery course of Chicana/o literature will chart the emergence and aftermath of the literature that historically evolved out of the Civil Rights movement, a time classified as solidifying a Chicana/o cultural consciousness. However, we will be troubling this historical construction with examination of (recovered) texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries that explore and expand upon definitions, literary techniques, and genres of Chicana/o literature. This course will focus on form (experimental and other), literary technique, and genre as a method to think through discursive and material crisis and categorization of Chicanas/os. As we historicize different positionality of Chicanas/os through our earlier texts, we will examine how the texts are critiquing social relations and structures of power. From this historical foundation, we will look at how Chicana/o writers use multifaceted forms, genres, and techniques to express subjectivity and write in the social process of race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will be reading the historical novel, memoir, drama, short stories, and contemporary Chicana/o fiction and be analyzing each respective work for their innovative literary strategies. We will also examine the literature alongside visual culture and critical theory to get a better understanding of the texts. The two films we will be viewing—the Chicano! series and Mosquita Y Mari—bring innovative filmic strategies to our robust literary survey.
2620.001: American Literature II
Online, 2H
Matthew Hofer, mrh@unm.edu
This course surveys the evolution of American literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, with special emphasis on cultural and social issues frequently associated with modernism and modernity. For each of our four modules we will discuss at least one major fictional work, a generous selection of influential poems, and also a culturally significant film.
Our study begins with a week on the Civil War that extends to the beginning of World War I. From there, we will shift our focus to the growth of the modern metropolis from the “roaring” 1920s through the 1940s. In week three, we will investigate racial identity in the American “melting pot” with reference to the Harlem Renaissance as well as the Black Arts Movement. Our fourth and final week will be dedicated to the Cold War era and an indigenous, if not insular, sense of what it meant to be an American when the country was one of two viable global superpowers.
The survey introduces many canonical authors whose reputations — if not individual works — you may already know. However, it aims to do so in conjunction with other important American writers who are perhaps, and perhaps unjustly, lesser known. Our survey will center on prose by Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and J. D. Salinger, poetry by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, and films by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Marian C. Cooper, and Stanley Kubrick.
There are no prerequisites for this course, and no formal knowledge of literary criticism, history, or theory is required in order to be successful in it.
2630.001: British Literature I
Face to Face, TR 1100-1215
Jonathan Davis-Secord, jwds@unm.edu
Monsters, drunken louts, cross-dressing saints, and Satan will feature prominently in this survey of English literature. This course will follow the development of literature in English from its beginning with Beowulf and continue through works by authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, and Phyliss Wheatley. Thematically, the course will explore issues of race and gender, literacy and power, and changing conceptions of writing and literature.
2640.003: British Literature II
Face to Face, MWF 1100-1150
Aeron Haynie, ahaynie@unm.edu
In this course, we will read and discuss highlights of English literature from the late 1700s to the 21st century and we will explore the literary movements of Romanticism, Victorian Realism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism. By the end of this course, you should have a clear understanding of the broad definitions of these terms, and a greater knowledge of British literature. What makes each period’s style recognizable and distinct from another? Why were these texts so popular and what does the literature’s continued popularity tell us about our own time period? And finally, I’m interested in how these readings can be useful beyond our classroom: to your own lives, as a way of sharpening your skills of interpreting complex texts, and in understanding our own culture.
Many of the texts we’re reading raise questions about the nature of romantic love and our shifting expectations of marriage. Although this will provide a nice frame to our discussions, the literature abounds with other compelling issues, such as madness, violence, and social class.
2650.001: World Literature I
Face to Face, MWF 1200-1250
Jessie Bonafede, jkbonafede@unm.edu
Storytelling remains a central element of how we communicate our experiences. Whether in times of triumph, love, tragedy, war, or confronting the unknown, stories allow us to contemplate the outermost boundaries of worldly experience from a variety of cultures and human voices. In this class, we shall chart our course through a survey of poetry, plays, epics, and a variety of other genres beginning with the Ancient World and traveling across the rich cultural and literary traditions of Asia, Africa, and the Arab World, as well as Europe and the Americas from the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. A foundational component of this class is interdisciplinary research, which will include readings, activities, and class discussions involving literature and art, philosophy, religion, cuisine, marriage, government, science, and more. My goal is to provide you with the analytical skills to identify and analyze significant traditions, developments, and points of cultural exchange between the many societies that contribute to our modern world.
Readings will include the Epic of Gilgamesh, selections from Ramayana, Mahabharata, The Aeneid and Beowulf, a selection of medieval romances, religious and courtly lyrics, dramas from Aeschylus, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, and Shakespeare, plus much more. Class assignments will range from weekly readings, class activities, essays, and multi-media projects. Together, we shall develop important analytical and communication skills to discuss and argue for original interpretations of these powerful literary works. Specifically, we shall investigate how literature from ancient to early modern societies reflect and respond to developing traditions, diverse cross-cultural exchanges, and the universal aspects of life and society that continue to define what it means to be human.
2660.001: World Literature II
Face to Face T, Remote Scheduled R, 1400-1515
Sarah Townsend, sltownse@unm.edu
If shady political deals are a sign of our time, they are also a well-traveled phenomenon. English 2660 will explore narratives about “deals with the devil” in world literature from the 17th century to the present. Why do devils, demons, goblins, and trickster figures appear so often in literature as emblems of modern compromise and corruption? What kinds of deals with the devil do characters strike in order to survive, and which kinds of deals destroy them in the end? Our readings will traverse the world: we will encounter fiction, drama, poetry, and nonfiction from Africa, Asia, the Arab world, Europe, and the Americas. Throughout the course we will ask the following questions: Why do the same kinds of stories appear in many different literary traditions across time and space? Do narratives travel from one site to another, or do similar forms and plots emerge independently in societies that find themselves on the brink of modernity?
Class assignments will invite students to think about how literature is produced, funded, sold, circulated, and adapted. We will read about early editions of books, and we will explore digital archives for historical items that will offer us a sense of the time and place in which our literary works were created. We will also try our hand at theatrical set design, publicity, and community reading projects. The course will culminate in a final adaptation project that will invite groups to adapt any course text into a play staged and set in contemporary New Mexico. By adopting roles including director, publicist, set designer, research historian, and business manager, students will consider the artistic, financial, and institutional forces that bring literature into the world.
304.001: Bible as Literature
Online
Kelly Van Andel, kvanande@unm.edu
305.001: Mythology
Face to Face, MWF 1300-1350
Nicholas Schwartz, nschwar@unm.edu
319.001: User-Centered Design & Usability
Online
Julianne Newmark, newmark@unm.edu
In this course, students will come to understand the interrelatedness of creativity, ethics, and design in regard to the usability of “products” of many kinds, be they documents, computer interfaces, or consumer products. In order to understand the impacts of this relationship, students will learn how to understand users and their behaviors. Students will learn practices and theories of audience identification across cultures, ages, and communities, and will develop skills of analysis. Students will learn high- and low-tech methods for testing products’ usability to safely and ethically serve audience needs. Students will create, analyze, and test, and will come to understand the foundational role that user-oriented design plays in the broader realm of technical and professional communication.
See this video for further info!
321.001: Intermediate Creative Writing Fiction
Online
Julie Shigekuni, jshig@unm.edu
This online course will focus on the close reading of and experimentation in the writing of short fiction with an emphasis on voice: How it is created by published authors, and how does it emerge in your work? During the first half of the semester, you will create story fragments, each week isolating and treating an element of story (e.g., character, setting, plot, point of view, theme) that contributes to an engaging narrative. Once you are familiar with the elements of craft, you will choose a story fragment to develop. This story will form the basis for your workshop critique. As well, you will critique stories written by your classmates with an eye toward revision. You will read stories along with notes on craft by well-known authors with the intention of better understanding how stories are made; you will then turn what you know into a fully-developed story. The point of the course is play--to imagine and explore what is possible in your writing.
322.001: Intermediate Poetry Writing
Face to Face MF, Remote Scheduled W, 1000-1215
Michelle Brooks, mbrooks7@unm.edu
We will study contemporary poetry, as well as write poetry and respond to it in workshop.
323.001: Intermediate Creative Writing Nonfiction
Face to Face, TR 1400-1515
Gregory Martin, gmartin@unm.edu
In this course, we will explore creative nonfiction its many forms and idiosyncrasies, from the memoir to the lyric essay, from literary journalism to the meditation, from the prose poem to the travel essay. We will also write our own creative nonfiction, experimenting each week with low-stakes freewrites, exercises, and improvisations, and later choosing one of these pieces to expand upon, workshop and revise as the semester’s final project. The class will help you to build upon your understanding of prose craft and technique, and we will focus on the development of the "habit" of art, emphasizing process more than product, emphasizing exploration, risk taking, and pushing yourself to write in ways that you could not write before. In the beginning weeks of class, we will focus on generating material, experimenting with different craft techniques, creating the messy “stuff” out of which all good writing comes. Throughout the semester, we will focus on the ways that good writing is collaborative and that responding constructively to another’s work is an equally important skill, and as much an act of the imagination. One primary goal is to encourage you to write what is urgent and essential to who you are—to help you develop your writing persona, the character who is you, telling a story. In order to write well, we must read well, and read as writers, and so this class will combine the discussion of published authors with formal and informal workshopping. Finally, I hope to debunk the myth of the artist. We all can participate in the making of art.
347.001: Viking Mythology
Face to Face, TR 0930-1045
Terry Gunnell, terry@hi.is
This course is taught by renowned Norse Mythology scholar Dr. Terry Gunnell from Iceland and is designed to comprehensively introduce students to Viking Mythology and the evidence for the Old Norse religions that lay behind it. It will cover the archaeological and literary evidence for Norse ideas about the various gods, the creation of the world, the end of the world, its rebirth, and pretty much everything in between. Students should thus expect to read about Odin (Óðinn), Thor (Þórr), Freyr, Freyja, Loki and the jötnar (often called Ice Giants), elves (álfar), dwarves (dvergar), valkyries (valkyrjur) and a host of other characters including Sigurd (Sigurðr) the serpent slayer. As well as learning about the evidence found in runes and placenames, students will also learn about the religious background to these beliefs and the world that gave birth to them, how the beliefs were passed on, and how they eventually gave way to Christianity. They will also look at the influence of these narratives on modern music and media from Tolkien to Warduna. Texts include, but are not limited to, The Elder/Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and Ynglinga Saga, and The Saga of the Volsungs. The final grade is based on four forty-minute on-line tests taken over the course of the term (based on the reading and class material) and a written assignment.
352.001: Early Shakespeare: Race and Identity, Then and Now
Online
Marissa Greenberg, marissag@unm.edu
Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice – you may think that you know these plays, but think again! In this fully online course you will revisit these plays as well as encounter new works, such as the Quentin Tarantino-like revenge plays Titus Andronicus. Using a variety of online resources and active-learning strategies, including open source databases of images and films of Shakespeare’s and discussion groups organized by identity and positionality, you will develop knowledge of Shakespeare’s earlier writings and the contexts of their creation and reception. Special attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s language on page and on stage, in particular through biweekly recitations. Organizing our study of these texts and contexts will thus be, on the one hand, early modern notions of race and intersecting identity positions, such as gender and disability, and on the other hand, your self-identification and affinities with classmates.
353.002: Later Shakespeare: Sensing Shakespeare
Online
Marissa Greenberg, marissag@unm.edu
Why read Shakespeare in 21st-century America? What could the plays of a white, English playwright who has been dead for over 400 years possibly say to us, here and now? In this fully asynchronous online course, you will formulate your own answers to these questions. You will read, analyze, and discuss a selection of Shakespeare’s later plays that reflect on issues – racism, misogyny, settler colonialism, and sexual harassment, to name a few – still relevant to modern-day audiences. Unique course content and activities will promote your understanding of the contexts of Shakespearean theatrical composition, performance, and reception and invite your critical and personal responses to the plays. Special attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s sensorial language, and students who have experienced trauma should be aware that the plays include potentially triggering content.
368.001: T: Autobiography and Gender
Face to Face, TR 1230-1345
Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán, mviz@unm.edu
This course is a critical study of gender and American autobiography; it considers questions of self, subjectivity, and life writing from various perspectives and with attention to race, class, and gender. The course is sub-divided into four-week units and its readings cover a century-and-a-half of American life writing, beginning with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs (aka Linda Brent) to delve into questions of subjectivity and personhood through the slave narrative tradition. We move into the turn of the twentieth century and as-told-to life narratives that cross the boundary between ethnography and autobiography, including Left-Handed: Son of Old Man Hat and Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa. These two narratives together and alongside of Douglass and Jacobs illustrate the critical questions of subjectivity and personhood at the crossroads of gender and genre in American life writing. The second half of the semester looks more critically at twentieth-century ethnic American autobiography, including Elena Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite, the autobiography of a tree, and Fray Angélico Chávez’s La Conquistadora, the autobiography of an ancient statue. The course closes with Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation and Rigoberto González’s Butterfly Boy, both collections of personal essays that explore the fault lines of gender, genre, and sexuality in American life writing. Assignments include four online exams, four analysis essays, and one revision essay. All assignments are reading- and writing-intensive.
368.002: T: New Wave Science Fiction
Online, 2H
Matthew Hofer, mrh@unm.edu
***This 2H course in New Wave SciFi is scheduled for the SECOND eight weeks of Fall 2021*
The dates for this interdisciplinary analysis of the fantasy and reality of space travel — 1955 to 1980 — effectively span the period from the planning of the satellite Sputnik I to the first successful flight of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia. Grounded in literature, film, music, history, and philosophy, the course is based on widespread notions of science “fiction” (which is, of course, not limited to prose) becoming thinkable possibility, even “fact.” Beginning after the so-called Golden Age of science fiction and stopping before the rise of Cyberpunk, it adopts the New Wave focus on the person holding the “gizmo” rather than the oddness of the “gizmo” itself. In terms of critical thinking, its overarching objective is to address in critical, historical, and conceptual contexts the extension of modernist aesthetic innovation into a multi-generic proto-postmodernism that asks meaningful questions about forms of human discovery. Our key themes turn on ideas of normativity and difference, including representation, reality, freedom, authority, and, especially, the self & the other.
There are no prerequisites for this course, and no formal knowledge of literary criticism, history, or theory is required in order to be successful in it.
378.001: T: D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico: Lawrence’s Writing of Place and Our Role as Public Humanities Content Creators
Face to Face MW, Remote Scheduled F, 1100-1150
Julianne Newmark, newmark@unm.edu
This course combines literary studies explorations of British Modernist writer D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico-era writing with opportunities for students to create public-facing content that celebrates, documents, and contemporarizes his New Mexico home, the Kiowa Ranch near Taos, which is owned by UNM. Students will learn critical textual analysis techniques to apply to Lawrence’s NM-era works (including the novel The Plumed Serpent, the collected essays Mornings in Mexico, the novella St. Mawr, and the short story "The Woman Who Rode Away," plus letters of the period) and will learn the nuances that applications from Indigenous Studies, psychoanalytic theory, Dis/ability Studies, and Science and Technology Studies make possible when exploring Lawrence’s writing. Students will also have the opportunity to create documents and social media content related to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch and in support of the International D. H. Lawrence Conference, which will be held in Taos in July 2022 and with which the course’s students will have an opportunity to participate
388.001: T: US & Latin American Film
Face to Face WF, Remote Scheduled M, 0900-0950
Jesús Costantino, jcostantino@unm.edu
Over the past decade, new sources of funding have created a new global market for Latin American cinema, while at the same time, Hollywood films from the US have grown increasingly global in their content and production. Through regular film viewings, course readings, and frequent discussions, students will confront these recent transformations in the US and Latin American film industries. Because this course is also interested in the current conditions of filmmaking, students will also be asked to consider the continued relevance of feature-length filmmaking in the digital era, in which binge-watching, fan edits, amateur criticism, and streaming platforms have come to dominate the contemporary cinematic landscape.
413.001: Scientific, Environmental, and Medical Writing
Face to Face T, Remote Scheduled R, 1400-1515
Michelle Hall Kells, mkells@unm.edu
This course will examine writing across academic, public, and professional spheres to promote the circulation of knowledge toward environmental justice, public health, and community wellbeing. It is a key tenet of this course (an Aristotelian “first principle”) that climate change, natural resource depletion, and biodiversity loss condition (and will continue to condition) the health, wellbeing, and survival of all life on this planet now and into the future.
We will apply the theoretical frame of Rhetorical Studies to Technical/Professional Writing as a field of practice to apply, analyze, evaluate, and engage diverse discourses, genres, and media across a broad spectrum of document users (and stakeholders) within Science, Medical, and Environmental Studies. As technical communicators (producers and users) of science, medical, and environmental discourses, we need to recognize that we are always in Nature and always in Language.
Course assignments will challenge you as writers and information designers to engage the difficult rhetorical work of generating and circulating scientific, medical, and environmental (academic) arguments across diverse public spheres. We will examine a diverse range of genres related to science, medical, and environmental writing including academic research reports, white papers, personal academic essays, citizen scholarship, literary journalism, and participatory journalism.
Students will select a research topic (an environmental, medical, or public health issue locally and globally impacting your communities of belonging). Our course will constitute project-centered learning communities focused on examining and generating writing products for academic, public, and professional audiences. Capstone Project will include Multi-Modal writing samples (using field research and Appreciative Inquiry methods) toward the production of an online portfolio of public health, environmental justice, and scientific research for the digital publication of a final project website or blog.
417.001: Editing
Online
Cristyn Elder, celder@unm.edu
This course teaches students how to approach editing as a career or as writers who want to improve their own writing. Along with practicing advanced copyediting skills, you will learn how to perform comprehensive editing that results in documents that are complete, accurate, comprehensible, usable, and reader focused. Assignments include regular homework, scheduled quizzes, and two editing projects, as well as reflection on your progress toward the student learning outcomes.
418.001: Proposal and Grant Writing
Face to Face, MWF 1000-1050
Charles Paine, cpaine@unm.edu
In this course, you will learn how to write persuasive grant proposals. Drawing off the principles of rhetorical analysis, you will learn how to develop a clear statement of need, offer achievable objectives, design logical step-by-step plans, create specific and accurate budgets, and present your organization powerfully. We will explore how to locate appropriate funding opportunities and how to evaluate requests for proposals. We will also discuss methods of writing persuasively that are both ethical and effective, and study how to use document design to create a professional proposal package.
Because proposal writing is not a solitary task, but rather a process of working with others to identify needs, locate opportunities, and develop persuasive solutions, it is helpful to understand how the process works in the real world. To accomplish this need for real world experience, the major project for the course will be to write a real proposal by working with a local organization in a service learning experience.
420.001: T: Blue Mesa Review II
Face to Face MF, Remote Scheduled W, 1400-1450
Lisa Chavez, ldchavez@unm.edu
Hey writers, if you want to learn more about literary publishing and how literary magazines work, this is the class for you! This class introduces you to the production of UNM’s national literary magazine, Blue Mesa Review. Your primary responsibility in this course is to assess submissions for possible publication in BMR. In addition, you’ll keep an informal journal about your reading, attend discussion meetings, and write a few short papers. This class requires you to be self-motivating; in some respects, it is very much like an independent study. And if you’re interested in being part of BMR’s editorial board in the future, you should take this class!
421.001: Advanced Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
Face to Face, TR 0930-1045
Daniel Mueller, dmueller@unm.edu
In this upper division creative writing workshop, students will draft the stories and novel excerpts we'll examine in class with the intention of helping manuscripts-in-process find their larger audience through revision and, ultimately, publication. Augmenting our critical, constructive analysis of student-generated fiction will be short fiction exercises and assigned readings of narrative craft essays and contemporary short fiction, all designed to enlarge the student's understanding of how fiction imparts meaning. By the end of the course students will have completed a final, polished portfolio of original fiction.
422.001: Advanced Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
Face to Face MF, Remote Scheduled W, 1100-1150
Michelle Brooks, mbrooks7@unm.edu
We will partipate in poetry workshops, discuss contemporary poetry, and discuss publishing.
440.001: T: Nature Writing Across Cultures
Face to Face, T 1600-1830
Michelle Hall Kells, mkells@unm.edu
“The obligation to endure gives us the right to know” (13). Rachel Carson Silent Spring
This course will explore environmental issues across time, culture, and space through the critical lens of rhetoric. As a verb, “to environ” means to contain or to encapsulate. Rhetorically, we can say that we “contain” our environments and our environments “contain” us. This course will give particular attention how language (writing) constitutes environments as well as constitutes us within our environments. We will examine diverse textual representations of the environment across diverse cultural view points and ethical systems (including Indigenous, Chicana and Chicano, Africana perspectives). We will examine the rhetorical constructions of nature/wilderness as well as built/urban contexts as frameworks for social engagement and action.
The purpose of this class is to create a community of environmental thinkers and to cultivate opportunities for considering our roles as writers, citizens, and scholars (of place). Participation in field exercises and multi-modal (digital) learning environments will be integral to this course. Our reading list will include environmental texts by writers within and beyond the Southwest region.
The rich literary and rhetorical legacy of twentieth and twenty-first century environmental writing will be examined through diverse textual artifacts (and genres) including public rhetoric, film, poetry, speeches, essays, letters, creative nonfiction as well legal treatises and policies. These different genres tell the stories of collective struggle, achievement, and citizenship that shape current trends in education, law, socio-economic status, government, private organizational policies, and political participation related to the environment and its use.
441.001: English Grammars
Face to Face T, Remote Scheduled R, 1400-1515
Bethany Davila, bdavila@unm.edu
Studying grammar doesn’t have to be boring! This course helps students approach the study of grammar from different perspectives, all while attending to language politics, language attitudes, and language use. Projects include considering grammar in use as well as the rules that govern our use, examining our own and others’ grammar in academic writing using corpus linguistics, and studying a local issue related to language attitudes and the politics of language.
444.001: Practicum: Tutoring Writing
Face to Face R, Remote Scheduled T, 1100-1215
Rachael Reynolds, reynoldsr@unm.edu
Discuss and analyze theories in the field of composition and pedagogy. Learn to develop a broad theoretical basis for helping others develop their writing skills, purpose, and voice, while also including practice in the field. Apply theory to real-life situations: students will be paired with online English students and will serve as tutors for these students.
448.001: T: Advanced Old English
Face to Face, TR 1230-1345
Jonathan Davis-Secord, jwds@unm.edu
Beowulf is the most celebrated and studied Old English poem, yet it remains ambiguous and contested. Modern scholars continue to scrutinize difficult points in the text and wrestle over approaches to the poem. This course will be devoted to a close reading of Beowulf in the original Old English and publications on the poem. We will explore the roles of women in the text, the meanings of the monsters, the patterns of gift-giving, the linguistic intricacies of the text, and many other topics. Students will prepare translations of the poem, read secondary literature, and write a critical research paper for the semester. Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of Old English.
449.001: Middle English Language
Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Anita Obermeier, aobermei@unm.edu
This course provides an introduction to those principal dialects of Middle English, demonstrated by selected readings, in the context of the development of the language from Old English to Early Modern English (c. 1150-1500). We will be looking at the language both diachronically (the historical development) and synchronically (the differentiation of dialect features at a given time). The primary goal of the course is to familiarize students with the range of texts available in different dialects during the period. At the end of the course, students should, for example, be able to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original North-West Midlands dialect with a full appreciation of the contribution of the language to the artistry of the poem, and to recognize its difference from the London dialect of Chaucer. Assignments will include take-home exercises, a midterm, a final, and a group translation project.
457.001: Victorian Studies
Online
Gail Houston, ghouston@unm.edu
This course is an undergraduate senior level survey of British literature and culture of the Victorian period (1832-1901). We will read poetry, fiction, and drama, analyzing how writers responded to the dramatic social changes of their time. Guided by the preoccupations of Victorian writers, the course will focus on these themes:
- the Condition of England question (including issues of industrialization, capitalism, and class society more generally)
- the Woman Question
- the Crisis of Faith (faith and science)
- and Empire
466.001: African American Novel
Face to Face, MW 1400-1515
Finnie Coleman, coleman@unm.edu
What are we to make of Harold Bloom’s claim that Toni Morrison’s imagination “whatever her social purposes, transcends ideology and polemics, and enters again into the literary space occupied only by fantasy and romance of authentic aesthetic dignity?” It is important that we do not dismiss Bloom’s assessment out of hand (and then not because he is merely explaining why he personally “rereads” Morrison). Bloom’s claims tell us much about hegemonic masculinity and the omnipresence of Charles Mills’ “Racial Contract” in contemporary literary theory. This course is bound up in examining elements of Afrofuturism and Critical Race Theory in Morrison’s fiction as her characters navigate the pantheon of “contracts” that have governed life and living in the Americas since the age of conquest. We will begin with a primer in historical context, political philosophy, and ethnic identity development before taking deep dives into The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981). This course would be incomplete absent a reading of Beloved (1987). Morrison’s literary masterpieces will help us to better understand African American religious traditions, the legacy of Reconstruction, the promulgation of Jim Crow laws, segregation, Black nationalism, lynching, the struggle for civil rights, and the enigmas of hegemonic masculinity in the United States. We will use her iconic Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) to make sense of the “Public Image of Blackness” in the profoundly complex racial milieu in post-Obama America – the troubling mythologies undergirding a Post-Post Racial America where we must interrogate the impetus for and impact of Black Lives Matter, the “Me Too” movement, and the startling disarray of contemporary American politics.
473.001: Postmodernism
Face to Face T, Remote Scheduled R, 1100-1215
Scarlett Higgins, shiggins@unm.edu
This course will present an overview of the basic concepts and texts of postmodernism (as it's now understood from our present vantage point of post-postmodernism). It will also explore two intertwining ideas within postmodernism. The first of these is that of the unraveling of traditional sense of "identity" as a solid, unchanging entity. How, we may ask, can postmodernism’s critiques of identity be a source of strength for the liberation struggles of oppressed groups? (Can they?)
The second of these is the trope of the postmodern mystery and/or detective figure, often called the "metaphysical detective." The detective story has been a persistent feature of literature since the nineteenth century, as well as film and television during the twentieth, and into the twenty-first. Our continuing fascination with mysteries, and particularly with those who attempt to solve those mysteries, has provided an apt vehicle for a variety of creative explorations of the very conundrum concerning identity with which postmodernism (and its critics) has struggled. In this, the prototypical question of the detective story, “Who dunnit,” or “what is the identity of the criminal,” is transformed into the question, “who am I,” or, “am I that criminal that I have been searching for?”
474.001: Contemporary SW Literature: The Border
Face to Face MF, Remote Scheduled W, 1300-1350
Bernadine Hernández, berna18@unm.edu
In this course we will utilize a historical framework to investigate the production of the US-Mexico border and the culture that surrounds this arbitrary construct. We will start our investigation in the nineteenth-century and move to our global age to examine how the process of racialization and technologies such as gender and sexuality inform the constantly shifting ideologies of the border. Starting in the nineteenth century, we will look at political and legal documents of US Expansion and Manifest Destiny in the wake of empire to not only examine the production of the border, but also examine how the logics of settler colonialism and the construction of blackness are a haunting presence in the invention of “Mexican America.” We will be focusing on “invention” and “construction” as a historical process and will look at letters, travel narratives, and visuals to think through the logics of shifting borders within US Empire and how the many wars going on within this historical time period further shaped its existence. In conjunction with the historical specificity, we will be looking at borderland theories that consider how border histories reflect different subjectivities and positionalities, beginning with the canonical Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera (1987). Some questions we will be asking are: How do the legacies of racial, gender, sexual, and class differentiation inform or (re) produce the geopolitical space of the border within U.S. Empire and Imperialism? How do the fiction, short stories, letters, films, art, and theories undermine and challenge conventional histories of citizenship, US history, and shifting borders? In constructing a historical and structural framework of the border, we will move to contemporary discussions of how the border becomes an abject and fungible space in our current global age. Focusing on gender, sexuality, and the border, we will look at films by Lourdes Portillo Senorita Extraviada, Funari and De La Torres Maquiapolis, Alex Rivera Sleep Dealer, Dan DeVivo Crossing Arizona, Tin Dirdamal De Nadie.
