We encounter digital texts and codes every time we use a smart phone, turn on an app, read an e-book, or interact online. This course examines the innovative combinations of text and code that underpin emerging textual practices such as electronic literatures, digital games, mobile communication, geospatial mapping, interactive and locative media, augmented reality, and interactive museum design. Drawing on key concepts of text and code in related fields, students will analyze shifting expressive textual practices and develop the literacies necessary to read and understand them. Practicing and reflecting on such new media literacies, the course explores their social, cultural, creative, technological, and legal significance. To encourage multiple perspectives on these pivotal concepts of text and code and their import, the course includes guest lectures by scholars and practitioners in these fields.

This course explores the evolution of an influential literary form (the short story, drama, poetry, autobiographical literature, or the novel). Reading a series of variations on this literary form, likely bridging cultural or historical contexts or themes, the course develops critical perspectives and artistic insights into this genre of writing. Criticism and theory appropriate to the genre will be discussed as a way to understand the form, its social functions, and its cultural and political significance. The course can be taken up to two times, for a total of 6 semester credit hours, as long as the topics are different.

Students will use the capstone as an opportunity to design a project that integrates the knowledge they have gained throughout their English program with experience in the professional track. Students will work with faculty to develop, manage, and execute a project that will culminate in the creation of an academic research paper, analysis of text using digital methods, construction of an argument across media, demonstration of theoretical and/or aesthetic language use in digital form, portfolio of previously written coursework that is revised with reflective introduction, or creative work in text or digital form . Students will work with course instructor and/or faculty mentor on project design, creation and reflection . Students will present their project in a venue appropriate to their specific work.