English: Nature Writing One Semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None
In this course, students will focus heavily on contemporary American poets and the dynamic cultural conversation they strive to initiate, not only with us as readers, but with the poets who came before them. Text: The Penguin Anthology of American Poetry
The course explores nature writing through diverse voices across time and place. Students will read primarily from one genre: the personal essay. Topics that students will explore, as classified by the central text The Norton Book of Nature Writing, potentially include observing and classifying the world, encounters with and among creatures, defining spaces, working (with the land and animals), knowing nature and knowing ourselves, and saving and being saved by nature. Having analyzed conventions of the genre and reflecting on their own experiences with nature, students will write their own personal essays. Writing in those genres will require students to perform activities such as exploration and observation in Southeast Michigan. As this is an English class, students will develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, but the focus will be primarily on reading and the writing process. Text: The Norton Book of Nature Writing English: Nonfiction Writing One Semester (Offered First Semester) Prerequisites: None Journalism can inform, expose, investigate, condemn, or simply delight, but it always has one goal: to discover and share the truth. This course will introduce students to the reporter’s toolbox: gathering information, developing sources, finding an “angle,” and writing for a mass audience. Students will work in teams to report, edit, fact-check, and publish their own work. We will follow developing news stories, study pieces by great reporters of the past, and bring current masters of the craft into the classroom. At the same time, each student will go through the entire process, from conception to publication, of reporting two original pieces—one news story and one feature
English: Short Story One Semester (Offered First Semester) Prerequisites: None
This class will focus exclusively on the short story, investigating a variety of literary issues, some of which are universal and some of which are unique to the genre. Due to the brevity of each text, students will have an opportunity to encounter and analyze a much wider range of authors and writing styles than in a class that reads standard-length novels and plays. A central goal of the course is to help students to discover and define personal preferences. The works for this class have been selected with an eye to serious, adult-themed literature that would serve as preparation for university study. Text: Coursepack
English: Women’s Literature One Semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None
This course explores the history of women’s literature and how it engages with gender assumptions, norms, and expectations, hoping to introduce the major concepts and voices throughout. Feminist and New Historicist critical theories underpin our approach to analyzing texts. The essential questions ask students to develop their own answers to these questions: How have women been historically represented in society and in literature? What stereotypes has literature created, enforced, and/or perpetuated? Who benefits and who suffers when these views become widely accepted and seen as natural? How do the traditional representations, responsibilities, and roles of women affect women’s lives, bodies, and minds? How do they affect women’s abilities to assume non-traditiona l roles in home, at work, and in society? How do writers support, resist, and/or undermine dominant ideas about gender? How do they define and portray both oppression and empowerment? How does women’s literature explore the intersections of gender with other identities (race, class, sexuality, ability, etc.)? How might the definitions of “womanhood” and “femininity” need reconstructing? Text: Coursepack
story—for the class publication, The Ligg . Text: The Associated Press Stylebook English: Poetry One Semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None This course is designed to help foster close
reading and critical thinking through the study of poetry. Students will expand upon their working understanding of poetry beyond the University Liggett School core English curriculum and examine how poets use imagery, structure, diction, implication, and voice in order to explore a representational and thematic study of twentieth-century poetics.
2024-2025 ULS Curriculum Guide
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