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.
Winter 2024 Semester English Course listings:
December 18th - January 31st
English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad
In this course, we will study a broad range of texts and media to explore connections between feminist-queer engagements with architecture and text. How can both architecture and text be thought of as systems of representation, and how then, do each of them craft a relationship to any embodied subject (a reader/inhabitant)? This question arises from thinking of imagining a book as a lived space in the tradition of feminist and queer utopias, asking us to think about how racial, gendered, and colonial projects are enacted and countered in literary representations of space. How do differently-minoritized subjects write – and read – places that are ‘useless’ (such as a text) as places of subsistence and meaning-making? We will work together to floor-plan the textual fields we encounter, thinking critically about the tools these texts use and how and who can live in them. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)
English 202 Later British Literature (British literature after 1700 or 200 English elective)
Instructor: Caroline Heafey
This course will study British literature from the nineteenth century through the post-war years of the Second World War, examining representations of British imperialism. We will interrogate texts exploring imperial expansion, such as Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee, noting material depictions of the British Empire. We will then turn our attention to the twentieth century, examining themes of espionage and loyalty during the First and Second World Wars. Students will consider the precarity of imperialism as represented in literature and explore how shifts in imperial sovereignty became magnified during the war years. We will then closely examine the role of media in manufacturing pride for the British Empire while it simultaneously declined. Students will read broadcasts from Queen Elizabeth II alongside poems by Una Marson, and will view the 2010 film, The King’s Speech. The central aim of this course is to understand how the language of imperialism seeps into literature both of loyalists and of resistance to empire. Students will investigate larger questions of sovereignty, capital, and power through the texts encountered and in written responses.
English 254: Introduction to Creative Writing (GenEd: AL)(200 English or Creative Writing elective)(Creative Writing Concentration or Specialization)
Title: The Craft Behind Worldbuilding: Fantasy, Sci-Fri & Afrofuturism
Instructor: Rudendo Chidzodzo (on spire as Charleen Chidzodzo)
Have you ever read a story that transported you out of this world? Have you ever imagined living in a completely made-up world? How do we create such worlds? What craft techniques make for great worldbuilding? Whether you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, Black Panther, or Star Wars, in this course, we will explore the art of writing speculative fiction & poetry, we will create works that split open the world as we know it. This course will address two genres: Black speculative literature and sci-fi. We will study the masters of speculative literature and sci-fi before attempting to create our own unique worlds. In order for us to break the rules of reality, we must know them first. We will study short stories, poems, essays, comics, etc. By the end of our course, you will have a completed work of prose or poetry that breaks the boundaries of reality.
This course satisfies the Gen.Ed. AL requirement.
English 339 Film and Literature (300 English elective)
Instructor: Sam Davis
This course will survey the art and political nature of translating a book into a film in American culture. With a particular focus on works written by marginalized authors, we will read novels that were later turned into movies, whether in Hollywood or the Indie scene. We will read the novel Push by Sapphire (1996) and the 2009 filmic adaptation Precious, Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman (2007), later turned into the 2017 film, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s infamous The Great Gatsby (1925). Some questions that we will ask: how are these characters asked to represent themselves similarly or differently across mediums? How does the political moment of the novel or film publication influence this representation? We will read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000), and James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and watch their matching films that followed. Later in the course, we will expand the definition of “literature,” taking sensationalist newspaper articles and literature written about Brandon Tena and watch Boys Don’t Cry (1999). We will take a transitive look across genre and medium in order to unpack the different ways identity is represented in film and literature. For example, many interpret the character Nick in The Great Gatsby as a queer one, yet, almost a century later in 2013, the character and his storyline are stripped of their hints of queerness.
Since this class will be taught asynchronously, all materials will be stored online and easily accessible to students at all times. Because there will be films presented each week, I will hold a remote screening for students to watch the film all together to both encourage community building and to unburden students of potential costs associated with watching the films. Students will read critical social theory and film theory alongside the novels in order to better understand how representation works, both on screen and on the page. Students will write a midterm paper about one novel and film pairing, as well as a final paper comparing two different novels and their filmic adaptations, making an argument about the representations of gender and/or race in the texts.
English 355: Creative Writing Fiction (300 English or Creative Writing elective)(Creative Writing Concentration or Specialization)
Title: Generating Short Stories
Instructor: Lawrence Flynn
How do we generate fiction, using both our imagination and the surrounding world? How do we build stories upward from the sentence? What temporal opportunities are presented by the short story form? What purpose does the short story serve? By examining the process of generating fiction and engaging close readings of classical and contemporary short stories, we will arrive at a greater appreciation for the possibilities and powers of the short story form. Supplemented by craft essays on process, characterization, environment, form, and perspective, we will uncover new techniques to craft stories and practice cultivating writing habits.
Writers of all experiences and backgrounds are welcome. The foundational spirits of our generative workshop will be experimentation, play, and discovery. Buoyed by this energy, we will germinate, draft, and revise two short stories over seven weeks, built from writing routines we will practice together. Regularly, we will also author written responses to our readings, which will draw from a wide range of traditions and voices, including James Baldwin, Italo Calvino, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Ha Jin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peter Ho Davies, Joy Williams, Anthony Doerr, ZZ Packer, Yiyun Li, Jamil Jan Kochai, and others.
Prerequisite: English 254
English 391AG Writing the Graphic Novel (200 English or Creative Writing elective)(Creative Writing Concentration or Specialization)
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 (200 English or Creative Writing elective)(Creative Writing Concentration or Specialization)
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.
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.
