Department of English
Minor in English
Students on Summer 2024, Fall 2024, or Spring 2025 requirements ENGMIN
Requirements
The minor requires at least 15 credit hours, including the requirements listed below.
- Introductory Course. One (1) course:
- ENG-L 260 Introduction to Advanced Study of Literature
ENG-L 260 Introduction to Advanced Study of Literature
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- Completion of the English composition requirement
- Notes
- R: Completion within the first 9 credit hours of the major
- Description
- Introduces four principles essential to advanced study of literature: attention to language and varieties of figurative language, analysis of generic forms and modes, awareness of historical context and mediation of forms, and facility with traditional and contemporary theories of literature.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Introductory Genre Course. One (1) course:
- ENG-L 203 Introduction to Drama (must be approved for CASE Intensive Writing)
- ENG-L 204 Introduction to Fiction (must be approved for CASE Intensive Writing)
- ENG-L 205 Introduction to Poetry (must be approved for CASE Intensive Writing)
- ENG-L 206 Introduction to Prose (Excluding Fiction) (must be approved for CASE Intensive Writing)
ENG-L 203 Introduction to Drama
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Acquaints students with characteristics of drama as a type of literature through the study of representative significant plays. Readings will include plays from several ages and countries.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
ENG-L 204 Introduction to Fiction
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Representative works of fiction; structural techniques in the novel. Novels and short stories from several ages and countries.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
ENG-L 205 Introduction to Poetry
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Kinds, conventions, and elements of poetry in a selection of poems from several historical periods.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
ENG-L 206 Introduction to Prose (Excluding Fiction)
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Varieties of nonfictional prose, such as autobiography, biography, and the essay. Representative works from several periods and countries.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Literary History Courses. Two (2) courses from the lists below. Courses chosen must be from two (2) different Literary History lists.
- Beginnings through the Eighteenth Century
- ENG-L 305 Chaucer
- ENG-L 306 Middle English Literature
- ENG-L 307 Medieval and Tudor Drama
- ENG-L 308 Elizabethan and Seventeenth-Century Drama
- ENG-L 309 Elizabethan Poetry
- ENG-L 310
- ENG-L 313 Early Plays of Shakespeare
- ENG-L 314 Late Plays of Shakespeare
- ENG-L 317 English Poetry of the Early Seventeenth Century
- ENG-L 318 Milton
- ENG-L 350 Early American Writing and Culture to 1800
- ENG-L 367 Literature of the Bible
- Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- ENG-L 312 Literary History 2: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- ENG-L 320 Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature
- ENG-L 327 Later Eighteenth-Century Literature
- ENG-L 328 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama
- ENG-L 332 Romantic Literature
- ENG-L 335 Victorian Literature
- ENG-L 347 British Fiction to 1800
- ENG-L 348 Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
- ENG-L 351 American Literature 1800-1865
- ENG-L 352 American Literature 1865-1914
- ENG-L 355 American Fiction to 1900
- ENG-L 356 American Poetry to 1900
- Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
- ENG-L 316
- ENG-L 345 Twentieth-Century British Poetry
- ENG-L 346 20th and 21st Century British Fiction
- ENG-L 354 American Literature since 1914
- ENG-L 357 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
- ENG-L 358 American Literature, 1914-1960
- ENG-L 359
- ENG-L 360 American Prose (Excluding Fiction)
- ENG-L 363 American Drama
- ENG-L 365 Modern Drama: Continental
- ENG-L 366 Modern Drama: English, Irish, American, and Post-Colonial
- ENG-L 374
- ENG-L 375 Studies in Jewish Literature
- ENG-L 380
- ENG-L 381 Recent Writing
- ENG-L 396 Studies in African American Literature and Culture
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Chaucer\'s work, with special emphasis on The Canterbury Tales.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Selected works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl, mystery and morality plays, and religious lyrics, read in Middle English.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Drama from its beginnings in Medieval England through contemporaries of the early Shakespeare.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- English drama from Shakespeare’s time to the closing of the theaters in 1642 and beyond.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Major Elizabethan poets, with special attention to Spenser.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Notes
- May not be taken concurrently with ENG-L 220
- Description
- Close reading of at least seven early plays of Shakespeare.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Notes
- May not be taken concurrently with ENG-L 220
- Description
- Close reading of at least seven later plays of Shakespeare.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Major poets in England, 1600–1660.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Poetry and prose of John Milton, with special attention to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines a range of literary and cultural communications from the period of exploration and colonization of the Americas through the Revolutionary era. Special attention paid to the interactions between rhetoric and history, and to religious, scientific, political, racial, and literary discourses.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Hebrew Bible and New Testament with emphasis on questions of reading and interpretation.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- Completion of the English composition requirement
- Notes
- R: Completion within first 21 credit hours of major
- Description
- A broad overview of the development of British and American literature in the era of empire, industry, and revolution. Tells the story of the expansion of English language and literature.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Representative literary works from 1660 to the mid-eighteenth century, studied within their social context.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Representative literary works from the mid-eighteenth century to 1800, studied within their social context.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Development of English Drama from Puritan closing of playhouses into the nineteenth century.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- British literature and culture in the age of Romanticism and the revolutionary era (ca. 1780–1830). Poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction writings from major and minor authors, such as Austen, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Scott, the Shelleys, Wollstonecraft, and the Wordsworths.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Major poetry and prose, 1830–1900, studied against the social and intellectual background of period.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Forms, techniques, and theories of fiction as exemplified by such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Forms, techniques, and theories of fiction as exemplified by such writers as Scott, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Studies a range of texts from the formative period of the republic to the end of the Civil War. Special attention paid to the shifting definitions and constructions of U.S. American national and cultural identity, as affected by issues of race, environment, transatlantic exchanges, scientific discourse, and the emergence of women writers.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Surveys American literature through the development of realism, regionalism, naturalism, and the beginnings of modernism. Considers literature\'s relation to social and cultural phenomena of this era, such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, racial tensions, labor strife, changing gender roles, and the spread of mass media and consumer culture.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Surveys a range of literary fiction in nineteenth-century America, examining a variety of forms including the novel, sketch, short story, as well as modes (Gothic, romance, sentimental, adventure). Attention will be paid to the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which canonical and lesser-known authors wrote.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Includes the work of Bradstreet, Taylor, the fireside poets, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Crane.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Modern poets, particularly Yeats, Eliot, Auden; some later poets may be included.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores 20th- and 21st-century British fiction and its techniques and experiments.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Provides an understanding of the pivotal literary innovations and cultural changes during this period. Literary movements such as naturalism, realism, and modernism may be the subject of focus, as might changes in race and gender relations, labor politics, immigration policies, regionalism, and the increasing shift from agricultural to urban economics.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the general trends and important contributions found in the work of major and minor American poets.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Surveys literary expressions centered mainly in the first half of the twentieth century. Attention may be given to such literary movements as modernism and the Beats, as well as literature written by women and various ethnic populations.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines—but is not limited to—such nonfiction genres as the personal or political essay, science writing, journalism exposé, history, biography, film criticism, memoir, travel and speech writing. The instructor may focus on a particular genre or period.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Main currents in American drama to the present.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Special attention to Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and the theater of the absurd.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Shaw, Synge, O’Neill, and other significant dramatists, such as Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Athol Fugard, and Wole Soyinka.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Jewish authors, such as I. B. Singer and Elie Wiesel; groups of authors, such as Holocaust writers and writers about the immigrant experience; or genres and themes. Topic will vary from semester to semester.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Selected writers of contemporary significance. May include groups and movements (such as black writers, poets of projective verse, new regionalists, parajournalists and other experimenters in pop literature, folk writers, and distinctly ethnic writers); several recent novelists, poets, or critics; or any combination of groups.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated once for credit by special arrangement with the Department of English.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Study of a coherent phenomenon of African American literature and culture (such as Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, African American women’s autobiographies, black popular culture and literary expression, recent black fiction or poetry, or a cluster of major authors).
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourseSpring 2025CASE AHcourseFall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Summer 2025CASE DUScourseSpring 2025CASE DUScourseFall 2024CASE DUScourse
- Electives. One (1) course:
- Additional course from the Literary History lists
- Any ENG-G 300–399
- Any ENG-G 400–499
- Any ENG-L 300–399
- Any ENG-L 400–499
- Any ENG-R 300–399
- Any ENG-R 400–499
- Any ENG-W 300–399
- Any ENG-W 400–499
- Minor GPA, Hours, and Minimum Grade Requirements.
- Minor GPA. A GPA of at least 2.000 for all courses taken in the minor—including those where a grade lower than C- is earned—is required.
- Minor Minimum Grade. Except for the GPA requirement, a grade of C- or higher is required for a course to count toward a requirement in the minor.
- Minor Upper Division Credit Hours. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed at the 300–499 level.
- Minor Residency. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed in courses taken through the Indiana University Bloomington campus or an IU-administered or IU co-sponsored Overseas Study program.
ENG-L 305 Chaucer
ENG-L 306 Middle English Literature
ENG-L 307 Medieval and Tudor Drama
ENG-L 308 Elizabethan and Seventeenth-Century Drama
ENG-L 309 Elizabethan Poetry
ENG-L 313 Early Plays of Shakespeare
ENG-L 314 Late Plays of Shakespeare
ENG-L 317 English Poetry of the Early Seventeenth Century
ENG-L 318 Milton
ENG-L 350 Early American Writing and Culture to 1800
ENG-L 367 Literature of the Bible
ENG-L 312 Literary History 2: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
ENG-L 320 Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature
ENG-L 327 Later Eighteenth-Century Literature
ENG-L 328 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama
ENG-L 332 Romantic Literature
ENG-L 335 Victorian Literature
ENG-L 347 British Fiction to 1800
ENG-L 348 Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
ENG-L 351 American Literature 1800-1865
ENG-L 352 American Literature 1865-1914
ENG-L 355 American Fiction to 1900
ENG-L 356 American Poetry to 1900
ENG-L 345 Twentieth-Century British Poetry
ENG-L 346 20th and 21st Century British Fiction
ENG-L 354 American Literature since 1914
ENG-L 357 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
ENG-L 358 American Literature, 1914-1960
ENG-L 360 American Prose (Excluding Fiction)
ENG-L 363 American Drama
ENG-L 365 Modern Drama: Continental
ENG-L 366 Modern Drama: English, Irish, American, and Post-Colonial
ENG-L 375 Studies in Jewish Literature
ENG-L 381 Recent Writing
ENG-L 396 Studies in African American Literature and Culture
Minor Area Courses
-
Unless otherwise noted below, the following courses are considered in the academic program and will count toward academic program requirements as appropriate:
- Any course contained on the course lists for the academic program requirements at the time the course is taken—as well as any other courses that are deemed functionally equivalent—except for those listed only under Addenda Requirements
- Any course directed to a non-Addenda requirement through an approved exception
This program of study cannot be combined with the following:
- Bachelor of Arts in African American and African Diaspora Studies and English (AAADENGBA)
- Bachelor of Arts in English (ENGBA)
- Bachelor of Arts in English and African American and African Diaspora Studies (ENGAAADBA)
Exceptions to and substitutions for minor requirements may be made with the approval of the unit's Director of Undergraduate Studies, subject to final approval by the College of Arts and Sciences.