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300-level English Literature courses

ENGLIT 302 Literary Adaptations

The course addresses the differences between literature and film in order to understand what adaptation entails. You will learn about the role of telling and showing in presenting stories in writing and on screen, and you will explore the effects of adapting short stories and novels for the cinema.

ENGLIT 305 Crime, Conflict and Consquences in Literature

Study and analysis of literary treatments of crime.

ENGLIT 345 Shakesepeare

This course introduces students to Shakespeare’s plays in various modes
(Comedy, Tragedy, History). In addition to exploring the historical contexts concerning the original production, performance, and reception of Shakespeare’s plays through readings, lecture, and discussion, we will also endeavor, together, to test the validity of Shakespeare’s friend and critic Ben Jonson, who claimed that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” Students in this course will be expected to engage with Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of ways including written analysis, performance, and imaginative engagement with music, film, and other media.  An optional service-learning project—Shake It Up After School—is integrated into this course. Through it students have the opportunity to teach Shakespeare in performance to Boise elementary school students by coaching 4th-6th to produce an abbreviated Shakespeare play.  Spring 2026 play selections: Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Tempest.

ENGLIT 360 Romanticism

Study and analysis of nineteenth-century British literature.

ENGLIT 377 American Renaissance

ENGLIT 377 covers the major writers of the American Romantic period, which extends from the 1830s to the 1860s, with intellectual roots in the earlier Romantic movements of Germany and England. Known as the “American Renaissance,” the period saw unprecedented advances in philosophical depth, rhetorical innovation, poetic and narrative skill, and social criticism in American literature. Writers covered in this course profoundly influenced the course of American letters and inaugurated forms, ideas, and approaches that continue to influence modern literary culture. Our main focus will be on the artistic, religious, and philosophical conditions that gave rise to this legacy, involving a burst of artistic activity that produced (within five years of each other) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In addition to those masterworks, the course will begin with the Transcendentalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, and it will end with the poetry of Emily Dickinson. This section of ENGLIT 377 requires online activity using digital platforms for literary analysis and discussion. Class meets in person every Thursday, with required platform activity due every Tuesday. Required texts: (1) any edition (in or out of print) of The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865; (2) any edition of Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville.

ENGLIT 384 Literature of the American West

From the original cowboy romance of 1902 to a Native reckoning with gun violence in America, this course studies the shifting meanings of “the West” in American imaginations. Most readings are novels, with poetry and nonfiction prose making cameo appearances on the syllabus (Robinson Jeffers, Lawson Inada, Joy Harjo, Wallace Stegner). Student projects include papers, a class presentation, and a research-based podcast episode.

ENGLIT 393 Literary Criticism and Theory

ENGLIT 393 Literary Criticism and Theory 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 texts in a series of formative and summative writing assignments. During the term,  you will read about critical approaches in How to Interpret Literature, a textbook by Robert Dale Parker. To help you understand important concepts, you will engage in a variety of activities, both in class and as homework.

ENGLIT 397: BookLab (Book History, Technology, and Literary Studies)

This course focuses on one of the most enduring technologies in human history: the book. “BookLab” is thus a course in book history, tracing the evolution of the book as a technology from ancient to contemporary times. 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. But “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, how their material and digital forms determine both how they communicate and how we interact with them – and ultimately consider why all this matters within the field of literary studies. (In addition to our regular classroom, this class will meet periodically in the Boise State Albertsons Library Special Collections and Archives, and in the Albertsons Library MakerLab.) Advising Note: For English Literature majors, this course can count as an “Intermediate Elective” under the current degree requirements, or a “Literature and Cultural Studies” elective in the older (pre-2024) catalog.

Return to Spring 2026 Course Offerings