300-level English Literature courses
ENGLIT 304 Studies in an Author: Melville and Crane
Instructor: Professor Steven Olsen-Smith (see faculty profile)
Mode: In-person/Online Hybrid
This section of the new course ENGLIT 304 will cover 19th-century American authors Herman Melville and Stephen Crane. Writers of the Romantic and Naturalist literary movements, respectively, Melville and Crane were aligned intellectually by tragic worldviews. Both saw the human condition as essentially isolated, and in their works they often depicted characters who struggled against ungovernable internal and external forces. Philosophical and religious questions surrounding the existence of evil, the indifference of Nature, and the mysteries of death loom large in Moby-Dick and The Red Badge of Courage, as do the tyranny of primal and instinctual impulses over human beings’ efforts to transcend or transform their social and earthly conditions. Whereas our main learning objective will be to achieve a solid comprehension of the writers in relation to their own times, including the censorship they faced and the artistic strategies they deployed to resist it, we’ll devote a portion of our discussions to the relevance of their views in modern artistic, political and cultural contexts. Along with involving traditional interpretive writing and examination, this course requires online activity using digital platforms for literary analysis and discussion. Class meets in person every Thursday, with required platform activity due every Tuesday. Advising Note: The only prerequisite for ENGLIT 304 is ENGL 102, and the course can be applied toward the upper-division American Literature requirement of the English Literature Major using Boise State University’s academic adjustment process. See your advisor or contact the instructor for details.
ENGLIT 306 Studies in Genre: Poetry
Instructor: Professor Jeff Westover (see faculty profile)
Mode: In person, with Canvas and Google online functionalities
This edition of the course focuses on poetry by American authors. It is an upper division literature course and will focus on work by US writers, but other poets writing in English have also been featured by the instructor in the past. You will learn about representative poets and issues of the period after 1945, with special emphasis on the momentous changes in US culture after World War II. We’ll address the development of open form poetics, the impact of the Civil Rights and Feminist movements on poetry, the role of music and popular culture on many poets, and other topics you may identify through presentations and drafts for papers. The appearance of this course brings the spotlight back to recent poetry at Boise State after a five-year lapse. Advising Note: This section of ENGLIT 306 can be applied toward the American Literature requirement of the English Literature Major using Boise State University’s academic adjustment process. See your advisor or contact the instructor for details.
ENGLIT 338 Lit in Translation: German Romantic Literature
Instructor: Professor Steven Olsen-Smith (see faculty profile)
Mode: In-person/Online Hybrid
This section of ENGLIT 338 will focus on German Romantic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries with English translations of poetry, fiction, and drama and their influences on selected authors of the British and American Romantic movements. Central topics include the origins of Romanticism in German Idealist philosophy, its response to the Enlightenment, and its preoccupations with nature and art, the real and ideal, love and death, emotions and the intellect, religious faith, skepticism, tragedy, and resolve in western human experience. Featured authors include figures of the Sturm und Drang movement Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, second-wave German Romantic poets Holderlin and Novalis, and the gothic story-tellers E. T. A. Hoffman and Ludwig Tieck. Our study of German Romantic influence will include excerpts from writings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Edgar Allan Poe. Along with involving traditional interpretive writing and examination, this course requires online activity using digital platforms for literary analysis and discussion. Class meets in person every Thursday, with required platform activity due every Tuesday.
ENGLIT 360 British Romantic Literature
Instructor: Professor Samantha Harvey (see faculty profile)
Mode: In person
“It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day”, wrote the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821, “without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.” This course will explore writers of the British Romantic period in their social, intellectual, artistic, scientific, and historical contexts during this extraordinary moment in time through the reading of poetry, prose, novels, and visual art.
ENGLIT 365 Victorian Literature
Instructor: Professor Ann Campbell (see faculty profile)
Mode: In person
This course will focus on the Victorian novel. Possible reading selections include Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, one of Jane Austen’s novels, Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and a detective or sensation novel.
ENGLIT 387 Modern and Post-Modern American Literature
Instructor: Professor Jeff Westover (see faculty profile)
Mode: In person
This course meets in person and focuses on the unique style and concerns of modern and contemporary American writers. The instructor hopes you will register and enjoy the course. The overall goal is to learn how to read their work on their own terms and in terms of one another. The course will also emphasize cultural contexts of the period, which may include gender, ethnic diversity, and identity; questions about democracy, selfhood, US history, and language; and developments in other arts. You will read all assignments and write interpretive questions about them, contribute actively to class discussions, write essays in defense of a clear thesis (all of which will include a secondary source), compete reading quizzes, and prepare a class presentation on a relevant topic. You may also complete an exam, possibly at midterm. Advising Note: The course is eligible to be cross listed in gender studies. It can satisfy American Literature requirements at the 300-level for those majoring in Literature. It can fulfill American Literature requirements for teaching majors, too.
ENGLIT 393 Literary Criticism and Theory
Instructor: Professor Jeff Westover (see faculty profile)
Mode: In person
ENGLIT 393 Literary Criticism and Theory is a required course for all literature majors at Boise State. The prerequisite for the course is ENGLIT 275. When you successfully complete ENGLIT 393, you are eligible to enroll in such upper division courses such as ENGLIT 424 Advanced Topics in Literature and ENGLIT 498 Senior Capstone in Literary Studies (Finishing Foundations). ENGLIT 393 covers a variety of approaches to literature, inviting participants to learn about the critical concepts associated with the approaches. It requires you to think about the concepts by interpreting literary and cinematic texts in a series of formative and summative writing assignments. During the term, you will read about critical approaches in a brief textbook, one that provides essay prompts. To help you understand important concepts, you will engage in a variety of activities, both in class and as homework. For example, you will maintain self-reflective reading journals to be used as notes for discussion and for formal writing assignments. In addition, you will participate in small-group presentations about critical approaches to literature. Your most intensive and sustained learning will occur when you write, revise, and edit several essays.
ENGLIT 397 Special Topics “BookLab: Book History, Technology, and Literary Studies”
Instructor: Professor Tom Hillard (see faculty profile)
Mode: In person
This course focuses on one of the most enduring technologies in human history: the book. Thus, “BookLab” is a course in book history, tracing evolution of the book as a technology and art form from ancient to contemporary times. In doing this, we’ll consider ways that the book (and printing more broadly conceived) has shaped and been shaped by history, with a particular focus on the materiality and transmission of texts within literary history. “BookLab” is also a “lab,” and accordingly we will regularly get our hands dirty – figuratively and literally! – as we work with book-form materials (ancient to modern, physical to digital) in order to understand the various affordances of those forms and their roles in history and literary studies. In other words, we’ll look at how books are (and have been) made, and how their material and digital forms determine how they communicate and how we interact with them. We’ll explore bookbinding, paper, and different printing technologies; work with centuries-old physical book-objects; and learn about digital technologies that provide access to book and print materials from around the globe. Within literary studies, students will work through some of the problems of textual scholarship and what goes into making an edition of a text – and come to understand how and why knowledge about textual editing and editions matters to readers. In addition to our regular classroom, this class will likely meet periodically in the Boise State Albertsons Library Special Collections and Archives. Advising Note: For English Literature majors, this course can count as a “Literature and Cultural Studies” elective.