One of the greatest joys of teaching is sharing and circulating pedagogical and course design tips with my colleagues. These sample courses reflect my teaching and research interests in early modern literature and drama, feminist and gender studies, premodern critical race studies, early modern women writers, and the supernatural and monstrous. I am always thrilled to discuss new ways to show students how relevant, diverse, and exciting it can be to study English literature.
LITERATURE COURSES:
Monsters of the Renaissance (Fall 2023)
What did it mean to be a “monster” during the English Renaissance? This course explores monster figures in English literature and culture from approximately 1500-1666, with a few early stops in the medieval period. Exploring depictions of werewolves, witches, demons, and other fantastic beasts, this course covers everything from the influence of Liber Monstrorum, the medieval “Book of Monsters,” to the fervor of the witch trials, to an early science fiction novel, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. Weaving together the writing of early modern physicians, scientists, demonologists, and witch-hunters with a variety of poetry, plays, and prose, we will approach this diverse archive of texts as cultural artifacts that offer us a window into the monsters of past worlds while considering how the legacies of these constructions continue to impact media and culture today.
Monsters show us how the boundaries between the “self” and the “other” are socially constructed, as they often function as the embodiment of a culture’s greatest fears and/or forbidden desires. Through our course readings, we will discover how monsters personified and mediated anxiety over global travel, race, religious difference, gender performance and presentation, women, sexuality, disability and the body, magic and science, and the borders between the human and non-human. Working chronologically, we will trace how attitudes toward monsters and monster-hunting shifted over time and pay attention to how moral interpretations of monstrosity operated alongside scientific and medical inquiry and taxonomy.
Sex, Scandal, and Society in Literature, 1660-1800 (Fall 2024)
This course will study how writers from the long 18th century (roughly 1660-1800) explored ideas around sex, scandal, and scandalous sex in their fiction. The 18th century, a period that began with the birth of the libertine rake and ended with the rise of “politeness politics” and the “perfect gentleman,” offers a particularly compelling case study for us to investigate the shifting historical legacies of Western cultural values around sex, romance, and all their associated tropes.
While we will begin the course with shorter texts from a variety of genres – and we will read one of the most banned and censored texts of all time, Fanny Hill (1748) – the core four novels of the course are early examples of what we now call romance novels: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). Through our class discussions, we will unpack how all these texts challenged and/or reinforced gendered power dynamics between men and women, creating ideals of masculinity and femininity that persist into our modern day. We will explore how these representations of sex and romance lay bare discourses around sex work, pornography, censorship, heteronormativity, marriage, rape culture, and queerness that may still feel familiar. We will also consider how the cultural and literary legacies of these works continue to exert influence over our contemporary media by ending the semester with a recently published Regency Romance novel, decided by class vote.
British Literature I (Fall 2022)
This class explores British literature from Old English poetry through to the early eighteenth-century novel. Together, we will trace the development of major poetic and prosaic forms such as the epic, the romance, the sonnet, lyric poetry, and the early novel, focusing on themes of love and desire, sexuality, gender relationships, death, religion, nationalism, and politics. The works we will read are the foundations of modern fantasy, science fiction, and romance, from heroes fighting monsters and slaying dragons, to knights galivanting on magical quests, to the discovery of alien worlds and creatures.
This course combines the works of canonical writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton with the contributions of women writers such as Marie de France, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood, among others. Together, we will study the evolution of aesthetic preferences and literary forms over time, but we will also consider these texts as historical artifacts that offer a window into past worlds, reflecting on what they reveal about the gender, racial, sexual, class, and colonial politics of early British literature and culture.
Shakespeare and Power (Spring 2024)
The word “power” appears an astounding 481 times across Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare’s England was a hierarchical society organized along axes of power relations—class status, gender identity, racial identity, and religious identity all determined where you stood in the world. Power was exercised in lots of different ways: the sovereign had power over their people, of course, but so too did fathers have power over their children, men over women, husbands over wives, white men and women over people of color, and Protestant Christians over Jews, Muslims, and other religious minorities. On a cosmic scale, God and fate were believed to determine the lives of humans, the powerful Devil could tempt you toward damnation, or supernatural spells or charms could overtake your free will. Love, perhaps one of the most powerful forces in all of early modern literature, could inspire and foster transformations or coerce people into committing unspeakable acts. Given the overwhelming ways that external forces shaped and controlled early modern lives, it is perhaps not so surprising that Shakespeare’s plays are deeply interested in exploring these different power dynamics.
This course provides a survey of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories. Together, we will read seven plays, paying particular attention to the types of power negotiations that they stage. We will think critically about how the plays engage with early modern debates about gender, women, race, religion, politics, good governance, marriage, and colonialism, considering how Shakespeare’s works simultaneously challenge or disrupt some power dynamics while reinforcing others.
COMPOSITION COURSES:
College Writing I (Fall 2022)
ENGL 1130 is the first part of UW-Platteville’s first-year writing sequence. The purpose of this course is to help you understand the rhetorical situation and how your role as a writer is influenced by audience, purpose, and context. English 1130 offers the rhetorical and formal background necessary for the more focused critical and analytical reading and thinking processes required in English 1230. Through freewriting, brainstorming, grammar activities, essay assignments, and revision, we will practice the many
steps of the writing process while gaining experience in various forms of academic writing. Focusing on familiar topics such as social media, commercial advertising, and film marketing, we will critically analyze the rhetorical situations that we already engage with every day. The goal of this class is to help you develop an awareness of how to effectively communicate in different genres and forms—skills that will help you to be successful in university and in your future professional life.
College Writing II (Spring 2023)
How can writing help create positive change in the world? How do different rhetorical strategies, genres of writing, or mediums of expression lend themselves to activist practice? And, crucially, what do you care about? In ENGL 1230, the second half of the college writing sequence, we will continue to build awareness of rhetoric and genre in order to explore how we can write for change. Together, we will discover the ways in which written and digital communication can affect real change in our world. Studying a variety of successful social awareness and activist campaigns, students will begin the semester by critically analyzing the strategies used by others to reach and persuade diverse audiences. The majority of the semester, however, will be spent developing a research project designed to raise awareness and advocate for an issue that is important to you and your field of study. In the final weeks of the semester, students will work together in groups to adapt these research projects into social awareness campaigns, creating a variety of different digital and material objects such as posters, websites, videos, brochures, and more.
Hannah Korell 