Fall 2025 ENGL 205 Courses
ENGL 135 Literature & Medicine
Introduction to representations of bodies, health, and medicine in literature. Topics may include bioethics, wellness/illness, disability, death, healthcare, the impact of race and gender and sexuality on human lifespans and experiences, and the relationship between body and mind and soul. Texts will be drawn from a variety of authors, cultures, time periods, and genres.
Attributes: Humanities Elective, Solidarity & Kinship Flag, Medical & Health Humanities.
ENGL 201 Writing About Texts: Gaming
This course investigates how writing works in and around video and tabletop games. We will play and discuss video games spanning decades and genres such as Portal, Depression Quest, and online competitive games as well as collaborative tabletop games such as Dungeons and Dragons, LANCER, and The Quiet Year. Are games art? Can they be considered texts? How do we as players shape the writing in a game? How do we write games? This course will require gameplay both in and out of class.
Attributes: Writing Flag, Humanities Elective
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Dystopias (Wyett)
This course will focus on how dystopian literature comments upon existing social problems or ills by projecting where unchecked abuses might lead us. Our readings will consider how factors such as race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, religion, age, and ability—and their intersections—shape power relations and threats to legal, civic, and human rights. Consequently, this course will also serve as an elective for the Gender and Diversity Studies major and minor and the Solidarity and Kinship Flag. Many of the works we will read feature disturbing depictions of violence and brutality. We will treat these subjects with sensitivity and care in class discussions, but the reading may sometimes be difficult. Ultimately, dystopias offer us roadmaps for resistance, change, and hope.
Attributes: Solidarity & Kinship Flag
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: The Soulmate (Maffetone)
This course will offer an investigation into the concept of the soulmate as represented in literature: what exactly is a soulmate? In what ways (besides romance) might two souls or two lives become intertwined? How is this concept represented in popular culture or popular literatures and what are the implications of those representations? We will consider these questions primarily through a range of literary and popular texts that feature or interact with the idea of the soulmate. This course will investigate the cultural hold of the soulmate narrative and how it supports or subverts anxieties and desires pertaining to love and identity.
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Drama & the Moral Imagination (Herren)
This course offers a survey of drama from ancient Greece through 21st Century America. These plays engage with various social problems and important moral and ethical dilemmas. In this course you will develop skills in close reading, critical thinking, oral discussion, literary/performance analysis, and written reflection.
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: #OwnVoices in YA Lit (Austin)
Our section of Lit & Moral will focus on #OwnVoices in young adult (YA) literature. #OwnVoices is a hashtag movement that seeks to center stories of diverse groups by authors from those groups. #OwnVoices moves beyond representation and diversity by asserting that stories from marginalized or underrepresented groups are best told by authors whose lived experience reflects the characters whose stories they tell. In this course, we will study the online movements for diverse stories and the debate about who gets to tell them. We will focus in particular on #OwnVoices in young adult (YA) fiction, and how #OwnVoices representation is especially critical to coming-of-age stories. We’ll also focus on the limitations of #OwnVoices, particularly for authors who might be harmed by disclosing their marginalized identities, including authors in the LGBTQ+ and disability communities.
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Hip Hop 50 & Beyond (Kamara)
This course will use aspects of hip-hop culture as the literary lens through which to interrogate contemporary and historical societal issues. This will be achieved through the examination of the texts under study, which may include, but are not limited to: critical essays, film, the literary arts (novel excerpts, short stories, and poetry), performance and visual arts, and music. Among the questions our course will consider: How has a culture as new as hip-hop garnered and sustained its worldwide significance? What might the content of hip-hop culture and its discourses signify and teach us about the social world? How does hip-hop culture facilitate our understanding of ethics and morality? What does hip-hop culture mean for the city of Cincinnati and beyond?
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Monsters! (Myers)
This class investigates how monsters are, in the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “embodiment[s] of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.” We’ll examine books, movies, and television shows that engage with the monstrous to determine where humanity ends and where monstrosity begins. Likely texts include Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, What We Do in the Shadows, Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment, Alien, and Shrek.
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Health, Community, Activism (Nix)
The theme for this course is “Health, Community, Activism.” In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a speech, “The Three Evils of Society,” where he stated the phrase, “the disease of racism.” Dr. King was comparing racism to a disease that has caused disruptions in America functioning as a healthy nation politically, socially, economically, spiritually, etc. The comparison of racism to a disease is the core of our explorations this semester. Since 2019, legislative action has taken place across the United States to declare racism a public health crisis. The primary question guiding our studies is: How does activism make us healthier as a community? We will assess health through the categories of social, political, cultural, and physical. We will study activism through engaging with protest literature, historical documents, speeches, visual art, music, fiction, and non-fiction. Ultimately, we will explore how an activist society helps advance the well-being of its citizens and gives agency to the voiceless. This course is a community engaged immersive course that will have site visits to various community agencies and organizations in and around Cincinnati, as well as invited guest speakers.
Attributes: Medical & Health Humanities
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Adulting in a Warming World (Ottum)
Giant wildfires. Rising seas. Species extinction. Although we may disagree on how best to address these challenges, it's no secret that humans today face profound environmental dilemmas. This is especially true for younger people, as trends emerging now (for example, extreme weather) are forecast to intensify in upcoming decades. American culture has long celebrated the nation's youth as a source of hope--children, so the saying goes, are our future. So what does it mean to come of age on a warming, increasingly unstable planet?
Whether you're joining this course a "traditional" college-age student, or as someone outside that 18-23 category, this course will invite you to explore the relationship between environmental change and generational identity. Using recent works of fiction as a guide, we’ll discussion questions such as:
- When it comes to climate change and other big environmental problems, what do older generations owe to younger ones?
- How might the threats posed by climate change shape young people’s sense of identity—both as individuals and as a cohort? How about their goals and values?
- If you are an adult now: how can you demonstrate meaningful solidarity with younger people on climate change?
- Thinking about climate change: how can older people get beyond emotions like guilt and paralysis? How can younger people get beyond emotions like anger and resentment? Should young people reject anger, or might anger be a driving force for action?
- How might generational diversity aid collaboration on climate change and related problems? How might it frustrate collaboration?
Prepare to read a lot in this class. This class also requires regular, substantive verbal participation. For questions, contact the instructor: Lisa Ottum (ottuml@xavier.edu).
Attributes: Peace and Justice Studies
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Guilt, Forgiveness, Atonement (Renzi)
Most of us learn as small children to apologize for the wrongs we’ve done. When we steal a toy from a classmate, we’re told to say “I’m sorry”; when we’re stolen from and hear this “I’m sorry,” we’re taught to respond by “accepting” the apology. But are guilt and forgiveness really this simple? This course will investigate, through a series of literary, historical, and visual texts, questions of guilt, apology, forgiveness, and atonement (or making amends) in a variety of complicated situations that range from the interpersonal to the intercultural, regarding traumas that are both immediate and historical. Throughout, we will consider the following questions:
How do we know when we’re guilty? Are there limits to forgiveness, to atonement? Are we still guilty if we hurt someone while thinking we’re doing the right thing? To what extent do social norms govern right and wrong, and how do we deal with the changing notions of right/wrong—in relation to guilt/forgiveness—within society over time? Do we have the right to forgive someone on behalf of another (be it another person, an ancestor, a group of people who we are taken to represent)? What role do institutions/governments play in forgiveness and atonement? When might forgiveness and/or atonement NOT be just?
ENGL 205 Lit & Moral: Israel &Palestine (Steckl)
Israel and Palestine has been a place of division and unrest since even before the formal establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. A number of writers have been using literature to capture and share their experience living in a state of protracted conflict and to challenge injustices committed by both their own community and the Other. This course will examine works from Israelis, Palestinians, and Israeli-Palestinians and consider how the ongoing conflict is negatively impacting citizens and how reducing alterity might improve living standards for all parties.
Attributes: APEX online no set meet time; peace and justice studies; Jewish studies
ENGL 205/ GERM 205 Lit & Moral: Literatures of Forced Migration and Exile (Trnka)
2015 saw more refugee movements in Europe than at any time since WWII. Situating contemporary debates about im/migration in a broader historical context, this course examines how authors have used a variety of literary forms to challenge and reconfigure national and regional identities throughout the twentieth century. Texts range from the 1930s to the present day and represent experiences of forced migration both within (Jewish German refugees from Nazism in WWII, refugees from the Soviet bloc, Balkan refugees) and to Europe (more recent refugees from a range of Middle Eastern and African countries). Readings include novels, literary essays, plays, crime fiction, feature films and experimental documentary, offering students an opportunity to explore a broad range of choices that shape the moral imagination of forced migration and refuge. All readings and films are in English translation. This is a unique opportunity to read several not-yet published translations with the generous permission of authors and translators!
Attributes: Solidarity and Kinship Flag
LIT/MRL/IMG: What's Real? (Yandell)
In an age of AI-generated content and highly produced TikTok reels, this class explores reality in the world today. Our literary texts pose different answers to “What is authentic?”, finding truth in nature, art, science, and spirituality. We will ask questions that are practical (“How accurate is this author’s life story?” and “How can we identify truth in ads?”) and theoretical (“Why do we use metaphors?” and “To what degree can narratives ever capture reality?”). Our short stories, plays, poetry, and a graphic novel span the Middle Ages to the 21st century and offer supernatural heroes as well as mundane champions.