English Classes
Below is a listing of classes that may be offered during your studies at Butler. For the most updated information, please review our Course Catalog.
EN 382: Studies in Poetry
Specific courses on important groups of poets, historical periods of poetry, or bodies of national poetry. Current offerings include modern American Poetry, modern British Poetry, and contemporary international Poetry.
EN 390: Research Seminar on Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn
Possibly the most read, analyzed, and controversial novel in American history, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn continues to influence the way readers think about literature, language, politics, race, and education. In addition to exploring Twain’s life and the implications of his masterpiece, this seminar will help students develop and practice methods of scholarly research, in both written and oral forms.
EN 310: Intermediate Writing Workshop
Students will have the opportunity to work on their own writing in a workshop setting, which includes the participation and critique of all other students in the course. Students will read extensively in the specified genre and attend Butler’s Visiting Writers’ Series events.
EN 393: Visiting Writers Series
Home to one of the best writers series in the country, the Butler English department offers students the opportunity to meet, dine with, and talk to visiting authors. Students will study both the texts and the living human beings behind the texts. Past writers who have visited Butler include John Green, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, Junot Diaz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nick Hornby, David Sedaris, Allen Ginsberg, Nick Flynn, Mark Strand, Edwidge Danticat, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., among many others.
EN 321: Comparative Literature: Caribbean Crosscurrents
If you want to discuss post-colonialism, magical realism, migration, translation, and other thought-provoking literary concepts, this class is for you. From texts as diverse as Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, a tale about a ruthless dictator, and Arenas’s The Doorman, a story of a doorman who telepathically communicates with his tenants’ pets, this course is an enlightening exploration of globalization.
EN 493: Writing On Drugs
In this senior seminar, students will read the works of Jacques Derrida, Irvine Welsh, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, and many other writers who investigate the ideologically charged relationship between drugs, self, and community. Part science, part philosophy, and part literature course, Writing On Drugs will challenge students to consider how drug use shapes reality and narrative.
EN 381: Studies in Major Authors (Victorian Literature)
How does Darwin’s On the Origins of the Species influence Victorian literature? What do stories like Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde articulate about the racial, sexual, political, religious, or scientific anxieties of the West in the late 1800s? And why do novels like Middlemarch and Black Beauty insist that humans ought to empathize with each other and the world around them? This course explores one of the most radical and intellectually stimulating time periods in western literature.
EN 218, 219, 310, 410: Creative Writing
Need a break from reading four hundred-paged Penguin classics and writing essays on Spenserian stanzas? Consider creative writing! From fieldtrips to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to group discussions on submitted work, these courses are designed to foster writing and creativity. Topics include poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting.
EN 215 (TCC 215): Theory, Culture, and Criticism
This course is an introduction to cultural studies: a critical, theoretical, interpretive, and interdisciplinary way to understand our world and our place in it. Cultural studies is a disciplinary practice that attempts to unravel our assumptions about how we interact with our culture by interrogating the personal and political implications of what we experience as everyday life.
EN 303: Studies in Professional Writing
This course introduces students to professional, persuasive and creative modes of writing in public and professional fields such as business, medicine, and environmental studies. In the process of reading, discussing and practicing these different types of writing, students will become acquainted with key environmental problems, policy initiatives nationally and locally, and with local environmental organizations. Competent writers, no matter their major, are welcome.
EN 393: Special Topics in Film
Bring popcorn. This course will offer an intensive analysis of some of the most innovative, daring, and experimental films produced across the globe during the past half-century. Films include Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Merilles’s City of God, and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, among many others.
EN 245: Inquiries in American Literary and Cultural History
This course will be organized around a theme in early American literature, and thereby seek to increase students’ understanding of major works, authors, and literary movements of that period.
EN 455S-01: Writing in the Schools
Attention volunteers and future educators! This service-learning course emphasizes the teaching of writing alongside the mentoring of elementary, middle, and high school students. Students enrolled in this course will gain tremendous teaching experience in the public school setting.
EN 390: Literature of the Holocaust
In addition to teaching students the methods of scholarly research, this course investigates the Holocaust and its impact on Americans from World War II to the present. Students will also be introduced to the works of Jewish American writers.
EN 386: Studies in Rhetoric (Literature and Medicine)
On a daily basis, doctors deal with life and death—the very same themes explored in many great works of literature. Students in this course will ask questions and seek answers to the intricate (and surprisingly intimate) relationship between art and science.
EN 381: Studies in Major Authors
Specific courses focusing on extensive study of one or two major writers, their lives, their art, and their development. Examples of authors include Chaucer, Milton, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.