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Special Topics (ENGLISH 113) FALL 2025

Catalog course ENGL 113 consists of multiple topics of focus that vary each semester. Current and/or forthcoming descriptions are listed below. To see course details, including dates, times and professors, please use the Registrar’s course schedule.

ENGL 113.01 Seminar in Academic Writing
This course will orient you to the world of expository writing and will provide a solid preparation for the written assignments you will encounter throughout your course work at Hope College. Our work together will emphasize writing as a process and it will focus on exploring, planning and organization of complex ideas, editing and revising of drafts, and developing writing skills through effective means of organization, support and justification of ideas. As such, students will read intellectually intriguing essays, engage in writing workshops that focus on developing a clear and coherent expository style of writing, craft individual and critical responses, construct unified and coherent paragraphs, and contribute to the dialogue about writing that would emerge from our classroom responses. By the end of the semester, you should have generated at least 28 pages of polished prose.

ENGL 113.02, 08 Analyzing Empathy
In this course, we will use the complex and sometimes controversial concept of empathy as a basis for the study of the conventions and possibilities of academic writing. Through a variety of readings — primarily essays and short fiction — we will explore the challenges that face writers endeavoring to define empathy and to determine how it can contribute to contemporary society. We will begin with texts that depict or challenge common methods, such as personal observation and storytelling, that allow us to engage with the feelings and experiences of others. We will then turn toward more specific cases, including works of historical drama and speculative fiction that attempt to give readers access to thoughts and emotions that might be drastically different from their own experiences. Throughout the course, we will think critically about this subject matter and the questions about it that our readings might raise: What are the limits of empathy? When might an empathetic approach create harm instead of helping? To what extent is it the responsibility of writers to create an easy sense of connection for their readers, and to what extent is it the responsibility of readers to engage with perspectives that differ from their own? Is empathy valuable as an abstract feeling, or does it only take on value when it translates into action?

ENGL 113.03 Stephen King: Trash or Talent?

“I think with the best writing you can actually feel the writer’s joy, the writer’s vision, or something like that.”
—Stephen King

Stephen King is a contemporary literary phenomenon: Since the beginning of his career in the 1970s he has averaged at least one new title per year, and his books continue to sell like candy corn at Halloween. Some people dismiss his work as trash, just low-quality pop cult horror stories; even King has jokingly referred to himself as a “salami writer.” But other readers insist that throughout his page-turner fiction King addresses serious, even urgent concerns. What are we afraid of, both as a society and as flesh-and-goosebumped individuals? What are the problems of family life and interpersonal relations? How does American society deal with racial prejudice? What about the scourge of alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse? How has our history made us what we are as a nation? What explains our perennial attraction to the supernatural, even in its more ghoulish manifestations? How has the literature of the past — especially the Gothic tradition, spawned in 1764 and still proliferating — infiltrated the literature of the present?

These are some of the questions we will address in a course that is at its core an introduction to college-level writing: how to form sentences in a variety of modes, how to incorporate appropriate punctuation, how to compose a coherent and interesting academic essay, and how to produce a research project you can be proud of. King’s novels The Shining (1977) and The Green Mile (1996) will be our foundational texts, accompanied by a selection of shorter fiction that demonstrates his relation to other works of the supernatural. And we will also contemplate the transmogrification of his scenarios into film and other media (comic books, cartoons, even opera). 

ENGL 113.05 Adventures in Adolescence
Are you an adolescent or an adult? When should a person receive all the rights and responsibilities of being “grown up”? Do teens get the respect they deserve? If you have an opinion, or would like form one, come explore these questions through writing in this course. A variety of readings and viewings about adolescence will spark conversation and curiosity, but the course learning outcomes relate solely to academic writing. This course offers tools for study, critical reading,and writing insightfully with polish. Each major writing project will be planned, drafted and revised, because revision allows you to take your work to the highest possible level. Do you care enough to figure out what hasn’t been written before, because only you can offer it to the world? Do you want to strengthen your powers of argument and self-expression? Then this course is for you.

ENGL 113.09 Writing in Community
Writing sometimes feels like solitary, lonely work. We sit at our desks, close our doors to the world and grapple with our ideas in quiet. Though it may feel solitary, when we engage in the writing process, we aren’t really working alone: we’re joining bigger, broader conversations, something that Kenneth Burke calls the “Unending Conversation.” In these conversations, we find the scholars and writers whose work we gather, read and analyze; we find our peers and mentors who write alongside us; and we find our intended audiences — those communities we are writing for.

This section of ENGL 113 will help you to see writing as a process — an ongoing “conversation” — and will ask you to practice the many parts of the writing process so that you can develop your own process that will work for you across the next several years of your education. You’ll begin by proposing a “conversation” to join (a semester topic that you’re personally invested in). From there, you’ll get focused experience and ample practice writing across a variety of contexts and genres, for different audiences, so that you can gain confidence and skill as a writer. In community with your professor and peers, this course invites you to become a more deliberate, intentional writer, thinker and listener.

ENGL 113.10 Writing the Self:  Identity, Culture and Voice
In this course we shall examine how identity is communicated through writing. Focusing on the intersections of who we are and how we write, students will not only explore how established writers communicate their identities and cultures, but students will also develop their individual voice while considering how their identity is informed by larger cultural contexts.The course aims to cultivate strategies for personal expression and foster critical discussions on the relationship between identity and culture through writing. Additionally, we will analyze various writing genres to understand how identity influences and is represented in each.

ENGL 113.11, 20 Wit, Wisdom and Wizardry
When you have to make a difficult decision, how do you proceed? Do you carefully analyze the circumstances and rationally weigh your options? Do you cry, “It’s not my fault!” and lash out at the world that forced the decision upon you? Do you close your eyes, grit your teeth, and just accept whatever wild ride you’re on, vaguely hoping for the best? How do various aspects of your identity shape the decisions you make? How do the decisions you make shape the person you become?

In this class, we’ll read three books together, looking at ways that different characters approach the process of decision-making and identity. We’ll discuss different factors that affect their decisions, from family expectations and gender issues to friendships and special talents. We’ll write about ourselves and how we make our own decisions, as well as about these characters and what we can learn from them. Writing for this course will include daily reading responses, several short essays and a research paper.

Special Topics (Anchor Plan and Upper Level Courses) FALL 2025

Several English courses consist of multiple topics of focus that vary each semester. Current and/or forthcoming descriptions are listed below. This is not a complete list of available English classes for the semester. For a complete list of upcoming classes or to see course details, including dates, times and professors, please see the Registrar’s course schedule.

ENGL 110.01 Apocalyptic Anxieties
This course covers literary texts that reflect fears about the end of the world. We will place fiction, poetry and drama about monsters, natural disasters and other catastrophes into conversation with descriptions of the real-life wars, technological developments, medical challenges, political conflicts and religious anxieties that inspired these visions of the apocalypse. After exploring the British Romantic period as a starting-point for modern apocalyptic literature, we will turn to modern and contemporary American literature, focusing on both the challenges that our texts depict and the strategies for hope and resilience that they reflect. Readings may include works by Mary Shelley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thornton Wilder, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang and Joy Harjo. Analysis of these texts will center on the ways in which the study of literature can enable us to process some of the most difficult elements of human experience.

ENGL 130.01 African Novels, Music and Film
Based on the apartheid system of racial discrimination and economic and cultural oppression of blacks in South Africa, the course explores the history of apartheid, its implementation, political and cultural implications, and indigenous struggles and resistance to it. Using two novels by Alex La Guma — In the Fog of the Season’s End and A Walk in the Night — Paul Simon’s Graceland: The African Concert of 1987, and Sarafina! of 1992, the course uses literature, songs and film to trace the process of resistance to apartheid and the path to political emancipation. It also draws from two documentaries – The June 16, 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa and Amandla! to depict the indignities of a system that dehumanizes millions of Africans in their own country. Carol Muller’s 2004 essay “Music and Migrancy” and Louise Meintjes’ paper “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning” also provide additional context for literary engagement of the theme of oppression.

ENGL 230.01 The Great American Novel
This course contemplates the novel as it has emerged in the United States. Selecting texts for a semester course looms as an impossible challenge: who can possibly sift out the “best” or “most significant” or even “representative” texts from the enormous heap of narratives the nation has produced since the Revolution and possibly even before? As a compromise, we look first at two mighty forebears, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, partly because they consciously exemplify the tension between realism and fantasy in the tradition of prose fiction. We look next at classic works from what might be called the great age of the American novel, from the 1920s until World War II. From there we progress to an important theme laid out in American fiction, the attention to race. We begin with short selections of representative publications, then make our way to classics of the theme: Hemingway’s memorable war novel, A Farewell to Arms; Sinclair Lewis’s satire of the American middle class, Babbitt; Jean Toomer’s novel-in-stories Cane, a jewel from the Harlem Renaissance; John Steinbeck’s novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath; Faulkner’s short novel The Bear, included in Go Down, Moses, a tortured retrospective on slavery in the American South; then what is still the most powerful African American sob of protest, Richard Wright’s ironically titled Native Son. John Updike’s Rabbit, Run hit American readers hard as a beachhead in the liberated culture of the 1960s; Stephen King’s Misery actually faces head on a recurrent question regarding the genre itself, the great divide between highbrow/lowbrow or “literary” versus “popular” fiction. In addition, we will look at parallel genres, the comic book and the graphic novel — and we will hear from practitioners of the genre who are at work right among us!

ENGL 230.02 Broadway Literature
Broadway shows are central to popular theater in the United States; both plays and musicals have the potential to reach wide audiences through New York’s Broadway theaters. While Broadway serves as the pinnacle of mainstream theater, it is also the site of many ambitious endeavors to challenge the norms of popular performance. This course will focus on these intersections of popular and experimental art through analysis of theatrical works that have brought new ideas and new approaches to performance to the Broadway stage. We will read late 20th/21st-century musicals and non-musical plays that address ideas like race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, relationships, family, labor and art. In addition to reading scripts, we will watch several recordings of performances and will explore the reactions of critics and fans.

ENGL 230.03 Survey of British Literature, Romantics to Contemporary
In the 1790s, writers known as the Romantics upended British literary tradition, revolutionizing poetry to express their fascination with humanity’s relationship to nature and the divine. Soon after, authors like Jane Austen and Mary Shelley supercharged the novel into a gripping storytelling medium. This course will span over two centuries of great literature, tracing how Britain’s empire-building produced an increasingly complex British identity. We’ll read poetry, travel narratives, fiction and drama from England, Scotland and former colonies like India, Ireland and South Africa. In the Victorian age, we’ll see how literary realism enabled new ways to tell (or obscure) the truth about scientific discoveries, class tensions and global injustices. In the Modernist era, we’ll see brilliant writers wrestle with world war and women’s fight for rights. We’ll close with postcolonial literature, examining the questions of “who belongs” and “who speaks for England” that Britain continues to struggle with today.

ENGL 230.04 Ancient Global Literatures
This course presents a critical perspective of the Ancient literatures in the non-Western traditions within a diverse range of selections. It seeks to examine the world’s great literature by exploring the historical, philosophical, social as well as the literary and cultural foundations of its development. This course draws from selected works such as The Bhagavad Gita and The Ramayana of Valmiki in India, The Arabian Nights of the Middle East, the Epic of Sundiata in West Africa, the Epic of Gilgamesh in the Middle East, and oral tradition in Nigeria as depicted in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard. Ancient Global Literature is a multi-genre course and draws from the epic and lyric poetry, drama and prose narrative, and focuses on the oral narratives, of Ancient Africa and the Middle East.

ENGL 240.01 EDITING AND PUBLISHING
This course will focus on developing the professional skills of a working editor within the publication process, whether the media is books, periodicals or websites. Students will be introduced to basic editing practices, from copy-editing with its focus on correcting and improving grammatical and stylistic choices, to the more complex skills of editing for substance, organization and clarity of purpose. Part of the course will explore the business aspects of freelance editing, including best practices for working directly with authors, and students will also occasionally interact with professionals from the West Michigan publishing industry, who will share their experiences and insights on what it takes to become a successful working editor.

ENGL 240.02 Intro to Writing in Healthcare Professions
This course is an introduction to writing effectively in a wide variety of healthcare professions. The course is designed for future healthcare practitioners, not what are generally called “healthcare writers” (although it will be beneficial to them as well). Its primary objective is to help future practitioners succeed in professional schooling and during their early years of practice. The course will have students work through basic professional and medically-related writing tasks, both large and small, and produce writing that is clear, organized, correct and effectively communicates its point. An additional course objective is to give students necessary skills for analyzing and composing messages in basic genres such as letters, instructions, resumes and reports. The course includes a brief review of fundamental grammar, punctuation and stylistic conventions in Standard Edited English.

ENGL 310.01 Chaucer and Shakespeare
Chaucer and Shakespeare will focus on major works by Chaucer, including his longest completed poem, the Troilus, and several of the Canterbury Tales. We will begin by reading The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, which Chaucer translated, and finish with a few plays by Shakespeare which show Chaucer's influence, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Troilus and Cressida. We will consider how these works address major questions about human fulfillment, faith, freedom, desire, love, gender and relationships and bring to bear some modern theoretical perspectives, such as feminism, queer theory and mimetic theory. Translations of Chaucer’s works will be available, but we will also discuss Middle English enough to be able to work with his original text.

ENGL 335.01 Black Science Fiction
If you had a superpower, what would it be, and how would you use it?

Central to Black science fiction is the interrogation of power, the fight for freedom and alternative worlds where Black existence is reimagined. It poses this central question: If Black folks had power, how would they wield it? Black science fiction interrogates power not as a tool for control, conquest or dominance but as a force for justice and collective transformation. 

In this course, we will examine Black science fiction as a genre that: Explores power struggles, addressing themes of oppression, resistance and agency, disrupts mainstream science fiction and reinvents its tropes, reimagines the future, while engaging with different futures (including Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Pan-AfricanFuturism) and endless possibilities of new worlds shaped by resilience and hope in the face of adversity and trauma.