English Online Courses
The University Without Walls (UWW) at UMass Amherst offers online courses and degree programs. For students taking classes on campus, you will need to request an enrollment appointment on Spire before you can enroll in UWW courses. To learn more about UWW and the online degree programs they offer visit their website at https://www.umass.edu/online/about-uww.
Summer 2023 Online English Course listing
Summer Session 1 (May 30th - July 11th) English Courses:
English 117 Ethnic American literature (ALDU)
Instructor: Timothy Ong
Introduction to newer and older plays, poems, and fiction by writers who embody and represent the ethnic diversity of American identity. A class for anyone interested in stories about the struggle to forge just communities in an imperfect nation. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
English 131 Society and Literature (ALDG)
Instructor: Rowshan Chowdhury
Where did the master narratives, the standard stories we tell ourselves or our culture tells us, come from and how do they operate in erasing our history? What function does literature serve in mediating our relationship to other cultures and societies? How have the ideals of liberty, equality, and human rights taken multiple and contradictory shapes within the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of various eras? The course ENG 131: Society and Literature is designed to explore these questions, looking specifically at the transnational co-formations that shape American society. Through readings of political speeches, short stories, essays, poems, and films based on the entanglements of histories of the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia, we will address literature’s capacity to endorse, naturalize, dramatize, critique, subvert, or reimagine our relationship to the material world. During these six weeks of reading and writing assignments, we will study the ways writers from various origins engaged with societal issues including but not limited to: race, ethnicity, gender, slavery, assimilation, capitalism, fetishization, colonization, and anti-colonial and anti-slavery rebellions.
English 221 Shakespeare (AL)(early British literature or 200 English elective)
Instructor: Dina Al Qassar
Discover the enduring magic of Shakespeare's writing in English 221: Shakespeare. Unlock the secrets of his language and social milieu in this engaging online class. This course is designed for those who love Shakespeare and/or the theater, as well as those who may have been put off by their high school English courses.
English 354 Creative Writing Mixed Genre (300 English elective)(creative writing specialization)
Instructor: Scout Turkel
Title: THE WRITING SELF
"We have come a long way from what we actually felt
If it were writing we would have to explain.”
– Lyn Hejinian, My Life
This course will focus on the practice of writerly and readerly exchange, an exchange both between, and of, our different, communal selves. We will examine the act of crafting a writing-self in both poetry and prose as a sometimes accidental, though always creative practice, one taken up by writers such as (though not limited to) CAConrad, Aimé Césaire, Lyn Hejinian, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Joanne Kyger, and Toni Morrison. Participant writers will read widely, produce and share work in various genres, and respond to the writing of their peers. Together, we will build a collaborative community. In this class, writing will be treated as both a reflection of our inner-selves, and as a tool with the ability to morph and expand one's consciousness. Some guiding questions: where is genre useful to our self-expression, and where does it fail? How does writing across forms change life’s narrative? This course will be held remotely with flexible, asynchronous materials, while providing opportunities for extensive peer and instructor feedback.
English 391AG Writing The Graphic Novel (300+ elective)(creative writing)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha
A nuts-and-bolts look at comic books and graphic novels purely from the writer's side. With 'Making Comics' by Scott McCloud as the basic text, we'll look at panel descriptions that inspire visuals, character-driven dialogue, the seven types of relationship between words and pictures, the writer/artist relationship and more. In addition to various writing exercises, students will develop their own ideas from springboards into completed scripts. This is not a course about artwork, and requires no artistic skill. It is also not a course about superheroes, treating graphic novel as an open medium capable of engaging any type of literary effort from genre to poetry.
Summer Session 2 (July 17th - August 25th) English Courses:
English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture (ALDG)
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad
This course will approach the topic of Gender, Sexualty, Literature, & Culture through a case study in a subsect of women’s fiction known as “Chick Lit.” Students will explore the intersectionalities of gender, sex, and sexuality in and through a collection of texts from a variety of women’s perspectives from across the 20th century and into the 21st. We’ll put pressure on the boundaries of “women’s fiction,” “low/middle brow literature,” “girlhood,” “female friendship,” and “literary canon” all while practicing critical reading, thinking, and writing skills. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)
English 202 Later British literature and culture (British literature after 1700 or 200 elective)
Instructor: Shewtha Chandraskhar
The development of British literature from the Enlightenment of the 18th century through the Romaticism and Realism of the 19th century to the Modernism of the early 20th century; literary response to scientific and industrial changes, political revolution and the technical and social reordering of British society. Open only to English majors, and those studying at the University on international or domestic exchange.
English 339 Film and Literature (300 elective)
Instructor: Thakshala Tissera
Film-works as extensions, continuations, syntheses, and reconstitutions of cultural and artistic traditions. The historical, formal, and aesthetic relationships between literature and the cinema. Emphasis on problems raised in literary aesthetics as a result of film.
English 391AJ Writing For a Living (300+ elective)(creative writing)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha
Learn strategies and skills for presenting your book, your articles, your ideas, and yourself in a compelling and competitive manner to potential readers and buyers. Focusing on the rapidly changing world of publishing, will explore creative writing concepts that apply equally in creating job applications and business proposals.
Fall 2023 Semester English Course Listing:
Sept 5th - December 8th
English 132 Gender Sexuality, Literary & Culture (ALDG)
Intructor: Sam Davis
In ENG 132, we will explore five fundamental theoretical concepts in the Humanities and apply them to a handful of 20th-21st century literary texts written by authors of color. These fundamental concepts include scholarship on Race, Gender, Disability, Class, and Culture itself. We will read core scholars such as Robert McRuer, Devon Carbado, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Jennifer Morgan, and Kevin Quashie. Each theoretical text will accompany a literary text including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Lena Nsomeka-Gomes’s “When I Was A Little Girl,” Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Sympathetic Little Monster, as well as a film, Paris Is Burning, and one episode from the television series Pose.
The goal of this class is to take complex theoretical concepts and simplify them. In this spirit, the final assignment of the class is to create a digital collection of TikTok videos in which each student takes a theoretical concept and boils it down for a general audience. These videos will be created on a weekly basis wherein each student tackles a particular concept and posts their video on the Moodle. These TikToks then serve as asynchronous weekly material that assists students in their understanding of these difficult concepts. The two skills we work to develop in this class are close reading of dense theoretical texts, and then the ability to explain and describe complex ideas to others, outside of an academic context.
English 254 Introduction to Creative Writing (AL)(200 elective)(creative writing)
Instructor: Ide Thompson
Analysis of problems of form, elements of genre, style and development of themes of stories and poems, written by class members and in class texts. Lecture, discussion, 5 poems, 2 stories, 2 essays. (Gen. Ed. AL)
English 339 Film and Literature (300 elective)
Instructor: Jon Hoel
This course will engage the process of adaptation, the curious dynamic of cinema and literature, a compelling and complex relationship that continues to produce some of the most interesting texts, year after year. We will challenge preexisting ideas of cinema, of adaptation, and of what makes for an interesting film by questioning cinematic narratives and genre conventions and see how far we can push our textual analysis with cinema. We will read film theory, look at some scripts, and watch some video essays on recent developments in movies.
The course will engage all kinds of films including but not limited to:
Diary of a Country Priest – dir. Robert Bresson (1951)
The Ascent – dir. Larisa Shepitko (1977)
Solaris & Stalker – dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (1972 & 1979)
Adaptation – dir. Charlie Kaufmann (2002)
First Reformed – dir. Paul Schrader (2017)
Stars at Noon – dir. Claire Denis (2022)
English 385 Creative Writing Nonfiction (300 elective)(creative writing)
Instructor: Connie Griffin
The popular genre of Creative Nonfiction incorporates literary techniques such as character development and complication, setting and scene, imagery, and symbolic usage. The genre directs a reader’s awareness toward narrative persona and thematic resonance as well as scene and situation. Because it’s such a broad term, identifying subgenres helps in defining it. These include, among others: biography, autobiography, memoir, essays, literary journalism. Experimentations include nonlinear narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness, flashbacks, and episodic vignettes. In addition to becoming informed about creative nonfiction subgenres and literary techniques, we will focus on writing as a process, approach readings (including peers’ writings) as writers, and apply innovative, as well as traditional research methods, to our writing projects. Although students will experiment with the subgenres of creative nonfiction listed above, you are free to choose your own topics, structural devices, and thematic goals. We will engage in a creative community process of discussion, peer review, and revision.
English 391AG Writing the Graphic Novel (300 elective)(creative writing)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha
A nuts-and-bolts look at comic books and graphic novels purely from the writer's side. With 'Making Comics' by Scott McCloud as the basic text, we'll look at panel descriptions that inspire visuals, character-driven dialogue, the seven types of relationship between words and pictures, the writer/artist relationship and more. In addition to various writing exercises, students will develop their own ideas from springboards into completed scripts. This is not a course about artwork, and requires no artistic skill. It is also not a course about superheroes, treating graphic novel as an open medium capable of engaging any type of literary effort from genre to poetry.
English 391AJ Writing for a Living (300 elective)(creative writing)
Instructor Sefan Petrucha
Learn strategies and skills for presenting your book, your articles, your ideas, and yourself in a compelling and competitive manner to potential readers and buyers. Focusing on the rapidly changing world of publishing, will explore creative writing concepts that apply equally in creating job applications and business proposals.