Writing Courses

English Writing Intensive Courses

The English Department offers more courses that satisfy the Intensive Writing 1 and Intensive Writing 2 Proficiencies than any other department on campus. Most students at PC take their Writing 1 course in the English Department, and a substantial number also take their Writing 2 courses here. Our writing courses — taught by both our Ordinary and Adjunct Faculty — are not primarily about grammar and mechanics; they are small-group seminars that use writing as a means of learning about a particular topic. Along the way, students develop skills in rhetoric and argumentation that they will apply to any discipline they choose to study. The courses for Spring 2027 are listed below.*

Writing 1 Courses

ENG 101-001 | MWF 8:30 AM-9:20 AM | 1031 | Michael Burdon
Disentangling Knots: Subversive Argument in Comic, Absurd, and Nonsense Texts
In this course, we will consider subversion as a means of argument and write our own argumentative essays on the nature and function of subversion as a rhetorical strategy. Through various enigmatic and experimental works, we will examine how writers subvert audience expectations, and to what end. We will work together to discover meaning in both fiction and nonfiction designed to undermine meaning, and to determine how subversive texts destabilize the very systems they operate within.

ENG 101-002 | TR 1:00 PM-2:15 PM | 1032 | Emily Pittinos
ENG 101-003 | TR 2:30 PM-3:45 PM | 1033 | Emily Pittinos
What is Place, Really?
Throughout this course, we will ask ourselves: What is place, really? Sure, it’s a space, a landscape, and a climate in every sense of the word. But, is a place also its people? Its moment in time? How does a person’s experience affect their interaction with a place? Is one place the same place to everyone? We will attempt to answer these questions by reading, discussing, and writing in response to texts that look at place through both personal and theoretical lenses. These texts will engage with ideas surrounding the tourism industry, environmentalism, urban planning, gentrification, the housing crisis, and more. The semester’s work will include writing inspired by personal experience and an immersive research project that incorporates our college’s archives and a site visit within Providence.

ENG 101-004 | MWF 8:30 AM-9:20 AM | 1034 | Shawn Flanagan
ENG 101-005 | MWF 11:30 AM-12:20 PM | 1036 | Shawn Flanagan
Kaleidoscope: Reading and Writing about Current Events Across Media Genres
The media content of this course (print and video) will address issues related to social justice and social impacts of technology on our lives. As we discuss the class content and issues it presents which complicate our own understanding, experience, and worldview, we will also explore the rhetorical situation of these materials and how form informs content. Additionally, we will also explore some critical/theoretical lenses that to offer grounds for a richer interpretation of student selected cultural productions. This work will feed into various interactive writing and media projects, which include short essays, presentations, and on-line forums. These initial observational, reflective, and theoretical writings in the first half of the semester will give way to assignments that focus on academic research as a process and culminate in a final research project that includes both a presentation and research paper.

ENG 101-006 | TR 8:30 AM-9:45 AM | 1037 | Jenny Platz
Digital Identity
Every day we encounter digital texts such as social media, YouTube, video games, Netflix shows, and films. Often, interaction with digital texts is unavoidable, as we spend ever-increasing amounts of time on our phones, tablets, or computers. With constant contact with the narratives of digital texts, how are our identities shaped and conflated with the digital media that surrounds us? How do we represent ourselves through digital media? How do others narrate their selves through digital texts? What are the social, cultural, and political implications of creating an online, and therefore public, story of the self? This class seeks to answer these questions through rhetorical examination, and writing about identity and digital media.

ENG 101-007 | TR 7:00 PM-8:15 PM | 1038 | Cole Adams
What Is College For?
How do the stories we tell about college affect the things we believe about ourselves and our world? What is the point of a college education, anyway? In this course students will practice foundational critical writing, reading, and research skills by exploring arguments about and representations of schooling in journalism, media, scholarship, and elsewhere: from crackdowns on student protests and warnings about a jobs crisis in the news, to ivory tower monsters and space cadet academies in pop culture. Across the semester, students will evaluate conflicts over campus politics, mental health, accessibility, the impact of new technologies on education, and more. Assignments will allow students to reflect on their educational goals and the circumstances of schooling on their own campus and contribute to ongoing conversations about studying, working, and living at college today.

ENG 101-008 | MW 7:00 PM-8:15 PM | 3302 | Diane Beltran
Information Disorder
We think we know the difference between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and even propaganda — but how do we know? And if we know, what can we as readers and writers do about it? This semester, we’ll look at the characteristics and examples of misinformation across print and digital environments (YouTube, blogs, “social” media). We’ll find that what we think is propaganda isn’t always negative, and perhaps some conspiracy theories might have a gram of truth; we’ll learn that reading and writing rhetorically is one way to resist and even push back against misinformation, and that critical thinking strategies are always needed. We’ll research and respond to claims of information, and work toward creating a digital library of writing that counters the Mis/Dis/Mal (MDM) that circulates in our current mediated environments.

ENG 101-009 | MW 5:30 PM-6:45 PM | 3303 | Milena Radeva
Philanthropy, Altruism, and the Gift
This course aims to develop your writing skills through a variety of writing and reading assignments, draft workshops, and class discussions. We will read a plethora of literary texts and popular essays on the topics of community, altruism, service, and democracy. We will examine the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. We will discuss the very possibility of giving that philosopher Jacques Derrida questions in Given Time. We will ask what it means to give, what motivates donors, how philanthropy affects its beneficiaries, if private giving challenges the practices of democracy. Finally, in this course, you will analyze arguments rhetorically, perfect your grammar, punctuation, paragraph coherence and sentence organization skills, use the resources in the library to write persuasive argumentative essays, and document your sources in the correct MLA citation style.

ENG 175-001 | MW 10:00 AM-11:15 AM | 1047 | Epaphras Osondu
ENG 175-008 | MW 7:00 PM-8:15 PM | 1054 | Epaphras Osondu
Insiders, Outsiders, and Otherness
This course will explore questions related to the notions of being “outside” — racially, politically, sexually, etc. Readings will include a novel about modern India, a novel set in pre-colonial Nigeria, two short plays by Lynn Nottage and Terence McNally, and tons of short stories ranging from Hawthorne and Hemingway to Carver, Chekhov, Osondu, and O’Connor.

ENG 175-002 | TR 2:30 PM-3:45 PM | 1048 | Tuire Valkeakari
ENG 175-003 | TR 4:00 PM-5:15 PM | 1049 | Tuire Valkeakari
Introduction to Literature
Philosopher Plato had little patience with what some ancients and not-so-ancients have called “the lies of the poets.” Why study such “lies,” literary texts, in an academic environment? Let’s find out. We will explore fiction, drama, and poetry, with a particular interest in what these genres are made of and how they work. We will mostly read American authors (e.g. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Julie Otsuka, and Toni Morrison), but one emphatically transnational novelist, Michael Ondaatje, is also included. Students completing this course should be able to read with engagement and discernment, discuss literature critically, and write analytically and with an awareness of scholarly conversations.

ENG 175-004 | TRF 9:30 AM-10:20 AM | 1050 | Elizabeth Weybright
ENG 175-005 | TRF 10:30 AM-11:20 AM | 1051 | Elizabeth Weybright
Music and Literature
In this course, we will discuss literary texts in which music plays a significant role, whether through musical allusion and/or its sustained thematic presence, or through principles of musical composition and gesture that play in the background, informing a text’s structural flow. Together, we will ask: how and to what ends might literature represent musical form or the sensations we feel during a musical encounter? We will consider complex resonances between literary genres and histories of music culture, asking how writers use music to world-build, to characterize, or to situate a text culturally and politically. Authors may include William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or others to be determined. 

ENG 175-006 | TR 11:30 AM-12:45 PM | 1052 | Chun Ye
Introduction to Literature
This class introduces the major genres of literary expression: poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction. The literary texts we read for the class center upon issues of race, gender, sexuality, war, and migration and are written by a diversity of contemporary writers, including Joy Harjo, Ocean Vuong, Julie Otsuka, Ilya Kaminsky, David Henry Hwang, and Mira Jacob. Students completing this course should be able to read with engagement and discernment, discuss literature critically, and write analytically and with an awareness of scholarly conversations.

ENG 175-007 | TR 4:00 PM-5:15 PM | 1053 | Elizabeth Bridgham
Tellers and Their Tales
“Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.” — Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
     This course, a genre-based introduction to literary interpretation, will focus on a wide variety of literary texts, with a special eye to questions of narrative voice: how tales are told, how storytellers represent themselves (or not) in texts, and what kinds of effects they have on their readers – that is, us.  We will be reading drama, fiction, poetry, a graphic memoir, and watching a film adapted from one of our course plays. Students in this course will engage in reading the works on the syllabus closely and will participate in critical debates concerning the texts’ literary attributes, the ways in which they interact with other works of literature, and the ways in which they influence (and are influenced by) their surrounding cultures.

ENG 175-009 | MWF 2:00 PM-2:50 PM | 1055 | Robert Stretter
“Who Do You Think You Are?”
This section of “Introduction to Literature” focuses on questions of identity: How you do define yourself? How do you present yourself to the world? How does the way others see you affect your self-perception? To help us answer these questions, we will examine literary texts from a variety of genres (poems, plays, short stories, novels) that deal with important issues that influence a person’s sense of self, including age, gender, race, religion, sexuality, national origin, and family. Authors will include Gwendolyn Brooks, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, Nick Hornby, Lorraine Hansberry, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Lauren Wilkinson, Robert Frost, and Pat Okita.
     Along the way, we will learn strategies that will help us derive meaning and pleasure from literary texts. We will study the fundamental techniques of literary analysis and develop the critical vocabulary and skills with which to understand not only what a literary text means, but also how texts create meaning – or meanings, since there is always more than one. The course will show students how to apply this critical vocabulary to close readings of a wide range of literature in English across a variety of historical periods and genres, to develop the skills necessary for analytical writing about literature, to conduct research and cite it properly, and to compose clear and compelling arguments about the interpretation of a text.

ENG 175-010 | TR 4:00 PM-5:15 PM | 1056 | Russell Hillier
ENG 175-013 | TR 5:30 PM-6:45 PM | 3281 | Russell Hillier
Introduction to Literature
Catalog Description: An investigation of the three main literary genres—poetry, fiction, and drama—with an emphasis on writing. Students completing this course should be able to read with engagement and discernment, discuss literature critically, and write analytically and with an awareness of scholarly conversations. Required for English majors.

ENG 175-011 | TR 11:30 AM-12:45 PM | 1057 | Margaret Reid
ENG 175-012 | TR 10:00 AM-11:15 AM | 1058 | Margaret Reid
Introduction to Literature
This section of English 175 will offer you instruction in transferrable writing skills across majors and classes, and a lively set of readings to respond to as you gain confidence in writing and speaking about complex issues.  Our three anchor texts will be F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Toni Morrison, Sula; and Eugene O’Neill, A Long Day’s Journey into Night.  Surrounding our discussion of these texts, we will read quite a bit of poetry and some short fiction as well.

ENG 175-014 | TR 10:00 AM-11:15 AM | 3295 | Stephen Lynch
Introduction to Literature
I am hoping to achieve a balance of breadth and depth by covering 6 authors, each for about 2-3 weeks. We will read short stories by Ray-mond Carver and Flanner O’Connor, poetry by Emily Dickenson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and plays by Shakespeare and August Wilson. Students will write at least one short informal paper each week, plus three longer more formal essays.

ENG 175-015 | TRF 11:30 AM-12:20 PM | 3323 | Cristina Rodriguez
Literature and Epistemology
Epistemology is briefly defined as the study of knowledge. Put simply, epistemology examines how and why we know things, and how we interpret the world around us. This course operates from the premise that Literature offers a unique window into epistemologies or ways of knowing, as works of poetry and fiction present readers with myriad different lenses through which to see the world. How does our vantage point determine our beliefs? How does who we love, who we worship, or our race, gender, or nationality effect our modes of expression and our vision of the universe? How do we categorize and define the world around us, and how can we change our worldview as we gain new knowledge? Questions of knowing and doubting will haunt us throughout the semester. Along the way we will use the tools of literary analysis, especially close reading and argumentation, to interrogate our own views and hopefully develop a more complete epistemology for ourselves, anchored in a broader understanding of Literature and the worlds it gives us.

Writing 2 Courses

ENG 265-001 | MW 11:30 AM-12:45 PM | 3255 | Tuire Valkeakari
20th Century African-American Literature
A reading-intensive introduction to twentieth-century African American fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry, with particular attention to social and cultural contexts. Writers include Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Anna Deavere Smith. Focus on race, class, and gender, and on the authors approaches to the role of literary art in society. Same as AMS/BLS 265.

ENG 279-001 | MW 1:00 PM-2:15 PM | 3300 | John Scanlan
Literature of Baseball
Baseball has always been the writer’s sport, and American writers have generated a vast and varied literature on baseball. To pay respect to this compelling body of work, I’ve interpreted the word literature broadly: for our purposes, it will encompass fiction, poetry, autobiography, journalism, biography, children’s literature, and history, as well as film. Many themes will recur: social class, race, gambling, urban life, statistics, technology, women, children, and the business of baseball. We’ll place special emphasis on the many ballparks and baseball diamonds where the game has been played, especially in cities. We’ll also spend much time on the Negro leagues. While the players and teams of professional baseball will be important topics in our course, we will also spend much time discussing how 2 Department of English Spring 2027 Course Offerings writers have presented everyday people reacting to the game. Fathers and sons playing catch. A father and daughter sharing a love of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mothers and sisters playing baseball during wartime. Baseball in internment camps and in prisons. High school, college, and club baseball teams, office softball teams, and “over 50” baseball leagues. Children playing baseball in neighborhood fields. Families journeying to Cooperstown, New York, to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, to see the plaques of their heroes and to watch the aging members of the Hall parade down Main Street during Induction Weekend. These and many other topics will constitute the subject matter of our course. In short, our course will introduce us to baseball and its meanings in the broadest possible sense.

ENG 301-001 | TR 2:30 PM-3:45 PM | 1063 | Raphael Shargel
The Art of the Argumentative Essay
In this class, you will read and write essays designed to convince readers to accept a controversial perspective. We’ll study a variety of argumentative essays from the past and the immediate present. In seminar, we’ll discuss the most effective methods of persuasion and consider how to adopt them into your own writing.

ENG 301-002 | TR 4:00 PM-5:15 PM | 1064 | Raphael Shargel
Writing About the Movies
What is the purpose and the function of a film review? How should it serve its readers? What shouldn’t it do? Can a negative commentary encourage readers to watch the movie anyway? Can a positive one make them nevertheless opt to avoid it? This semester, we’ll watch movies and study film reviews by influential critics. You will work on your own reviewing skills and, through reading and writing, develop your appreciation for movies, criticism, and persuasive argumentation.

ENG 301-003 | MW 8:30 AM-9:45 AM | 1065 | John Scanlan
ENG 301-004 | MW 10:00 AM-11:15 AM | 1066 | John Scanlan
Biography
Our course will have two principal concerns: the study of biography and the practice of writing. Biography is one of the most exacting yet malleable kinds of non-fictional writing, and because of that, we will explore many different ways an author can choose to write about another person. The culmination of the term will be the submission of an imagined chapter of a full biography of an important person of your choice. To see how other professional writers and scholars have handled the challenges of biography, we’ll read three important and recent biographies over the term. We’ll be studying three fascinating lives and analyzing the rhetoric of three seasoned biographers and professional writers. We’ll also supplement our reading with obituaries and short readings relating to the art of biography.

ENG 301-005 | MW 5:30 PM-6:45 PM | 1067 | Shawn Flanagan
ENG 301-006 | MW 7:00 PM-8:15 PM | 1068 | Shawn Flanagan
Writing Writing the Event: From Reportage to Report
What do a college student, a scientist, and anthropologist have in common? How about a journalist, a social worker, a manager, a marketer? Chances are they have all created reports. To that point, this class will focus on the genre of the report, some of its variations and remixes. Along the way, we will complete a number of short assignments geared to develop our rhetorical reading skills and composition practices informed by an awareness of rhetorical situation and other textual elements. Additionally, these activities (readings, writings, and discussions) will culminate in a well-researched event report on a topic of the student’s choosing and presentation of it in another medium.

ENG 360-001 | TR 8:30 AM-9:45 AM | 3322 | Alexander Moffett
Modern Irish Literature
This course is a survey of Irish literature from 1880 to the present. Emphasis is placed on the Literary Revival (1880 – 1940). Authors include Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O’Casey, Lady Gregory, O’Faolain, O’Connor, O’Flaherty, Beckett, Bowen, Heaney, and Friel. Topics include the appeal of the past, literature and politics, the formation of a new Ireland, and the problem of violence.

* Schedule and instructors subject to change.