ENGL 350

Spring 2026 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 20-May 6

Writing about Literature, Text, and Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

Writing-intensive, variable-topic course designed to improve English majors' ability to produce clear, well-organized, analytically sound and persuasively argued essays relevant to English studies. Introduces students to research techniques through the examination of critical texts appropriate to the course topic.

Credit is not given for ENGL 300 and ENGL 350. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement; one year of college literature or consent of instructor. For majors only.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Advanced Composition

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ENGL 350 class schedule data for spring 2026
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
70306	Lecture-Discussion	B	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	1024 Lincoln Hall	Morris, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/26-05/06/26 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing About Lit Text Culture Section Info: SP26 ENGL 350 - Writing About Literature, Text, and Culture - Dave Morris - How do our favorite books look when they’re put on screen? For us, did the screen adaptation get it right? What was lost and what was gained? What do these two distinct modes of representation do for our favorite stories and ideas? In this course, we will consider the art of screen adaptation, paying special attention to how film and print allow for different experiences; how adaptation translates texts at formal, historical, and cultural levels; and how differing markets of reception inform our experiences of books. Reading and viewing will draw from writers and filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Jane Austen, Ted Chiang, Roahl Dahl, Arthur Conan Doyle, Amy Heckerling, and Spike Lee. Course work will include short reflections and three written essays that call for visual analysis, adaptation analysis, and research totaling 25-30 pages. Because English 350 is an Advanced Composition course, we’ll write through a process of invention, drafting, instructor and peer feedback, revision, and reflection. Through these low-risk processes, students will strengthen and expand their writing abilities. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s). Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
70307	Lecture-Discussion	F	3:00PM -3:50PM	MWF	131 English Building	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/26-05/06/26 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing About Lit Text Culture Section Info: SP26 ENGL 350 - Writing About Literature, Text, and Culture - Tim Newcomb - Literature and the Modern City - What makes the “modern world” modern? One answer to that question is the machine technologies that between 1865 and 1950 reshaped American life in more ways than we can count. They reshaped the arts as well: William Carlos Williams once remarked that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” This course will ask how American writers and artists of the modern period arrived at such an apparently outrageous assertion, and how they struggled to comprehend and articulate the changes that these technologies were bringing. In this class we’ll examine the era called “the Machine Age” as a phenomenon that transformed people’s understanding of fundamental categories of experience including space, time, speed, gender, race, class, and even human consciousness itself. In doing so we’ll make connections between poetry, fiction, painting, photography, film, product design, advertising, architecture, urban planning, and music. Flashing along on the American railways and subways with early riders from Walt Whitman to Sara Teasdale, we’ll sense the wonder and terror that they felt and tried to express in their arts. We’ll think about how “labor-saving technologies” were revolutionizing people’s attitudes toward leisure time and material possessions, and making shopping a way of life. We’ll feel the ferocity and absurdity of the modern factory floor, as it was captured by poets, photographers, and filmmakers. We’ll see how modernists like Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes, as well as a host of visual artists, drew upon the power of steam-rollers and skyscrapers to create artistic forms that would work for the 20th century. Before we’re through we’ll come to appreciate how passionate artistic responses to emerging machine technologies, the new styles these technologies inspired, and the unpredictable social and political changes they helped bring about, defined modern life. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s). Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
70308	Lecture-Discussion	S	11:00AM -11:50AM	MWF	111 David Kinley Hall	Basu, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/26-05/06/26 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing About Lit Text Culture Section Info: SP26 ENGL 350 - Writing about Literature, Text, and Culture - Manisha Basu - Multi-ethnic Women Writers - This section of “Writing about Literature, Text, and Culture” will focus on multi-ethnic women writers. We will engage with novels, short fiction, poems, essays, graphic narratives, films, and critical works by African, Caribbean, Indian, Belarussian, Iranian, British, Afro-American, and American Indian writers. Our work for the course will involve understanding the temporal and spatial contexts in which the texts we encounter were shaped as well as the ways in which, despite their local specificities, they resonate with one another in their broader concerns. Our work will also involve paying attention to the ways in which almost all the texts we read are involved in some kind of genre-bending exercise, and the assignments you need to produce in response will ask you to ground the texts you are writing about in both local and global paradigms as well as attend to the question of how challenging canonical literary genres speaks to the matter of gender inequities. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s). Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.