Courses

ENG 102 Introduction to Early Modern Literary Studies

And introduction to early modern literary studies. Special attention will be paid both to the skills needed for all literary analysis, as well as to topics, genres, authors, and themes particularly resonant in English literature from 1500-1800. These topics may include (but are not limited to): the role of queer genders and sexualities across early modern English poetry; the relationship between history and theoretical approaches to literature; intertextuality in early modern poetry; the relationship between literature and coloniality, imperialism, and a burgeoning global perspective; and so on.

ENG 104 Introduction to Medieval English Literature

This course offers an introductory survey of the literature produced in England between 800 and 1485, from Anglo-Saxon poetry through the advent of print. Major texts include pre-Conquest poetry and prose (such as Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), early Middle English romance, post-Conquest lyric and narrative verse (including Chaucer), the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, Arthurian romance, drama, chronicles, and personal letters. Designed for nonmajors and prospective majors, the entry-level course provides a foundation in critical thinking about literary history.

ENG 105 9/11 in Literature and Film

This course examines a wide range of literature, film, and other art that represents the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Students consider the many ways in which ideas of national belonging intersect with practices of racial and other exclusions in the public cultures of mourning and memorialization that frame the idea of “9/11.” Although the focus is on texts that engage with concepts of post-9/11 American culture, students also consider these events and their meanings in global contexts.

ENG 109 Foundations of English Literature

This course introduces students to the major genres, critical approaches, and topics in the field of literary study.

ENG 113 Theory of Narrative

The novelist E. M. Forster distinguished between “the king died and then the queen died,” which is a story, and “the king died, and then the queen died of grief,” which is a plot. How does the causal meaning of “then” explain narrative? Narratology provides a theory of reading that crosses literary criticism, neuroscience, and philosophy of law. This course, in examining causality, agency, event, and temporality, also may pursue recent questions that ask what role narratives play in understanding self, consciousness, and cognition and emotion.

ENG 114 Introduction to African American Literature I: 1600-1910

This introductory course traces the development of a distinct African American literary tradition from the Atlantic Slave Trade to 1910. Students examine music, orations, letters, poems, essays, slave narratives, autobiographies, fiction, and plays by Americans of African descent. The essential questions that shape this course include: What is the role of African American literature in the cultural identity and collective struggle of Black people? What themes, tropes, and forms connect these texts, authors, and movements into a coherent living tradition?

ENG 115 Introduction to African American Literature II: 1910-Present

This introductory course traces the development of a distinct African American literary tradition from 1910 to the present. Students examine music, orations, letters, poems, essays, autobiographies, fiction, and plays by Americans of African descent. The essential questions that shape this course include: What is the role of African American literature in the cultural identity and collective struggle of Black people? What themes, tropes, and forms connect these texts, authors, and movements into a coherent living tradition? This course is a continuation of African American Literature I, which considers literary production before 1910.

ENG 118 The Aesthetics of Seeing: Poetry as Witness

This course explores poetry profoundly influenced by poets’ lived experiences as witnesses. Often the aesthetic of witness is one based in the traumatic: war, abuse, exile, and injustice. But this witnessing can also be the experience of observing kindness, joy, and beauty during times of inhumanity. The course examines how poets use what they have seen, what they have witnessed, to make poems. In effect, poetry preserves memories of the unmemorable. The course studies poems by Carolyn Forche, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others. Classes are discussion-based and include close readings of poems, group exercises, and short papers.

ENG 119 “I, Too, Sing America”: Poetry of this Moment/Movement

In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, American poets who explicitly wrote of the political and social anxieties of their country’s moment, this course analyzes the work of contemporary poets responding to the current social and political moment in the United States. Students closely examine poetry that speaks from small-town America, environmental wreckage, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, the Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline movement as well as poetry that addresses our current political leadership. Readings include Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Layli Long Soldier. Students engage these discussions through the production of critical examinations of the texts and through their own creative writing.

ENG 121 Colloquia in Literature

Colloquia introduce students to the study of literature from a variety of perspectives, with a focus on such objects as author, genre, and literary period. These courses not only delve into their particular subject matter, they also allow a preliminary discussion of critical vocabulary and methods that will carry over into more advanced courses.

ENG 121D The Many Lives of King Arthur

King Arthur is called the “once and future king,” but this malleable, mythic figure in some sense always livesin the present time. Approaching Arthur as an idea as much as a man, students analyze the ways in which the Arthur story has been adapted for different literary, social, and political purposes according to the needs and desires of its changing audience. They explore the features of the Arthurian legend which make it universally compelling, including feudal loyalty and kinship, women and marriage, questing and adventure, magic and monsters, violence and warfare, and consider the fierce debate over Arthur’s historical and mythical origins.

ENG 121F Modern Essays

Speculative, skeptical, learned, and often aformal in its formality, the personal essay meditates on a single perspective or argument and is rich in contradiction and subjective nuance as it mines objective fact. From Michel De Montaigne to Zadie Smith, this course identifies the essential characteristics of the essay across centuries and cultures, focusing on both “classic” and contemporary texts by writers selected from among James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Donald Hall, Cathy Park Hong, Leslie Jamison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barry Lopez, Maggie Nelson, Wesley Morris, Cynthia Ozick, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Henry David Thoreau, Jesmyn Ward, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, and others. Students experiment with writing an essay of their own.

ENG 121G Asian American Women Writers

This course introduces students to some major themes and concerns addressed in the literature of Asian American and Pacific Islander women writers. The course spans the twentieth century into the twenty-first, covering canonical and noncanonical texts, including novels, poetry, short stories, memoirs, and experimental and visual texts by Sui Sin Far, Maxine Hong Kingston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Lisa Linn Kanae, Caroline Sinavaiana, Jessica Hagedorn, Nora Okja Keller, and Miné Okubo. This course combines literary analysis with empire studies, cultural studies, women of color feminisms, and queer theory. Students explore the social, political, economic, and historical realities that shape the literature Asian American and Pacific Islander women produce, particularly the authors’ resistances to U.S. military histories and legal policies. They examine writers’ decolonial practices in spaces of U.S. imperialism and their responses to American immigration policies, war, and adoption practices.

ENG 121H The Brontës

Reading a selection of fiction and poetry by the four Brontë siblings, including their childhood compositions, as well as critical and biographical studies of the authors and their work, students consider the writings of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne in relation to their family dynamics. They examine the ties between literature and history in the Victorian period, and discuss the Brontës’ representations of British imperialism and class relations as well as their varied constructions of gender.

ENG 121J What is Poetry? Why is Poetry? An Introduction

In this course, we will engage the “why?” and “what?” of poetry through introducing students to ways to close read an extensive variety of poems. Students will learn practices and literary terminology for poetic analysis. We will become knowledgeable of various poetic forms, traditions, and periods. We will read poems by John Clare, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jean Toomer, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Alexander, among others.

ENG 121L Modern Short Stories

A study of the short story and novella as characteristic twentieth-century genres, with a brief introduction to works in the nineteenth century. The course focuses on both “classic” and contemporary texts by writers selected from among Anton Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, D. H. Lawrence, David Leavitt, W. S. Maugham, Katherine Mansfield, Susan Minot, Shani Mootoo, Susan Sontag, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Virginia Woolf. Students experiment with writing a short story.

ENG 121P Narrow Rooms: The Art of the Sonnet

This course explores the formal constraints, thematic conventions, historical contexts, and aesthetic and philosophical adaptations and reimaginations of a single poetic form: the sonnet. Beginning with the Italian Renaissance, students follow the form’s movement to Tudor England; its transformation during the sonnet “vogue” of the 1590s; its recuperation by the Romantics; its cooptation during the Harlem Renaissance; its tactical exploitation in feminist and queer poetry; and, its radical, digital, avant-garde, and political remediations by contemporary poets. In addition to writing and thinking critically about sonnet culture(s), students compose their own.

ENG 131 Tragedy and the Drama of Voice

“Why does tragedy exist?” asks Anne Carson. The answer: “Because you are full of rage. And why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” This course explores how dramatic tragedy expresses such rage and such grief through the medium of the embodied, dramatic voice. By probing the voice’s place in tragedy, emotion, and politics, students seek to better understand tragedy as a genre. Students read two classical tragedies and two Shakespearean tragedies, each alongside an adaptation by modern artists who rethink how tragedy works and whom it serves.

ENG 132 Narratives of Assimilation and Alienation: “Immigrant Fiction” and the Making of Modern American Literature

In a 2013 interview, writer Jhumpa Lahiri rejected the term “immigrant fiction” as both marginalizing and overly general: “Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.” Ceding Lahiri’s point about the pitfalls of “immigrant fiction” as a genre distinction, this introductory course takes a historical approach, tracing a modern literary tradition in relation to the politics and history of U.S. immigration law, from the 1882 passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act through the so-called “Muslim Ban” of 2017. Students examine how writings by and about diverse American immigrants’ experiences of assimilation and alienation variously reflect and respond to this history. In shaping conversations about American identity, post-1882 immigrant narratives also reshaped American literary history, as seen in the emergence of Asian American, Arab American, and Latinx literatures, among other traditions.

ENG 133 Inventing Originality

Originality, varyingly described and likely socially constructed, is linked to creativity and defined as the first appearance of an idea. It is a term relevant to the arts, science, and cultural history and augmented by concepts both tied and in opposition to it: individuality, authority, imitation, genius, creativity, and plagiarism. “Inventing Originality” focuses on romanticism as the historical beginning of the concept. It examines originality expressed by imitation in classical and early modern texts, queries Baudrillard’s simulacrum appearing in twenty-first century experiments in poetry and fiction, Dadaist poetry, and postmodernist efforts to randomize thought, and presents the impact of British imperialism, American immigration policy, and university gender preferences on the scientific discoveries of Ramanujan, Charles Steinmetz, and Rosalind Franklin. Finally, originality is seen in teamwork, especially by those practicing accessibility and inclusion.

ENG 143 Nineteenth-Century American Literature

A critical study of American literary history from the early national period throughthe Gilded Age. Students examine a wide range of texts in relation to key historical phenomena and events. These historical concerns provide a context for understanding the work of literature in constructions of the nation and ofAmerican identity. Special emphasis is placed on writing by African American and Native American authors working within and against dominant literary traditions. Texts, authors, and themes may differ across iterations of the course, but students consider–along with key genres and aesthetic impulses–racial formations in American literature; gender roles, “separate spheres” ideology, and nineteenth-century feminisms; dialectical relations of violence and civic belonging; and constructions of urban, rural, and frontier spaces.

ENG 152 American Writers since 1900

A study of ten to twelve American texts selected from the works of such writers as Dickinson, Twain, Gilman, Chesnutt, James, Adams, Dreiser, Hughes, Frost, Stein, Hemingway, Larsen, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Cullen, Wright, Stevens, Williams, Baldwin, Plath, Albee, Brooks, Walker, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.

ENG 201 Contemporary African and Caribbean Theater

This course explores the dramatic literature and theater history of the African continent and the islands of the Caribbean from the mid-twentieth century to the present. These two areas of the world connected through the African diaspora have brought forth playwrights who were inspired by a mix of traditional African rituals, the Western European theater tradition, colonial histories, and the various social and political upheavals through which many of them have lived. This course presents a critical, historical, and sociological view of these playwrights and the world that created them. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, English, or theater.

ENG 203 Topics in Pre-Modern Literature

This course explores selections from texts (poetry and prose) recorded before the fifteenth century. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: ENG 213 or 214.

ENG 206 Trans/Atlantic Chaucer: Colonizing Identities in the Middle Ages

Reading and interpretation of Chaucer’s major works, including The Canterbury Tales. Students interrogate the many ways Chaucer’s texts challenge assumptions of fixity, including definitions of gender, race, class, territory, and time. All works are read in Middle English.

ENG 208 Asian American Graphic Narrative

This course traces the evolution of Asian American graphic narrative. Students consider the narrative in a visual format, discussing how works created by Asian Americans combat decades of stereotypes propagated in comic books, especially as evil-genius Fu Manchu figures. Students read graphic novels, graphic memoir, and selected issues of several comics series. Topics include race, identity, family history, military history, gender performance, and sexuality. Students discuss writing practice, style, genre, research, and multimodal composition. They also workshop their writing and discuss effective revision critiques.

ENG 213 Shakespeare

A study of the major plays, with some emphasis on the biography of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan milieu. ENG 213 is offered in the fall. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Not open to students who have received credit for ENG 215.

ENG 214 Shakespeare and Early Modern Racialization

This course examines the historical, ideological, and discursive construction of race in early modern England. Through the lens of Shakespearean drama, we will also trace, interrogate, and consider the ways that our contemporary world has inherited and perpetuated such constructions. At stake in examining this relationship between our moment and Shakespeare’s moment, then, is the possibility that understanding the early formations of violent, racist ideologies and systems of thought (including anti-Blackness, antisemitism, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism), as well as ruptures in and resistances to such logics, may help us do the work of dismantling them in our own time and furthering the cause of anti-racist scholarship, pedagogy, and being. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 222 Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature

In this course, we will explore intersections of race, gender, and science in 17th century English literature and culture across various critical frameworks. Drawing from a range of texts, our discussions will focus on entanglements of the sciences and arts in the 17th century as well as how these formations relate to constructions of social identities and embodiment in early modern England. Readings and assignments will ask you to consider relationships between English Renaissance poetry with histories of science and the humanities. Utilizing close reading, archival research, and visual analysis, our community in this course will collectively investigate how race, gender, and science intersect in 17th century literature and culture (and beyond!). Our readings for the course will include work by William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish as well as criticism and theory from fields such as critical race studies, feminist and queer theories, and affect studies. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 223 Survey of Literatures of the Caribbean

This course examines the literatures of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Some texts are drawn from Anglophone authors such as Lamming, Anthony, Walcott, Brodber, Danticat, Lovelace, Brathwaite, NourBese (Philip), Hopkinson, and Dionne Brand; others, from Francophone and Hispanophone writers, including Guillen, Carpentier, Condé, Chamoiseau, Depestre, Ferré, Santos-Febres, and Morejón. The course places each work in its historical, political, and anthropological contexts, and introduces students to to a number of critical theories and methodologies with which to analyze the works, including poststructural, Marxist, Pan-African, postcolonial, and feminist. Recommended background: AFR 100 or one 100-level English course.

ENG 231 Women Writers of the 1950s

Was the ’50s woman a radical? By brazenly exploring taboo identities of family, race, class, religion, sexuality and gender in their work, how did women writers of the post-war era reject and/or ironically embrace the confines of social conservatism to advance their art? This discussion-based course reads expansively from women writers around the country during the post-war period, examining both individualized and shared characteristics of their disparate voices. Did women writers of the 1950s create a foundation for social justice movements to come, such as Women’s Lib, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter? Can or should we consider them to be a school as codified as, say, the Beat Poets? Readings may include Brooks, Childress, Hansberry, Jackson, McCullers, O’Connor, Paley, Plath, Porter. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 233 New York City: Land of Poets

What poet does New York City make? Why has New York City been “the” place for poets to be, live, and converge? This course explores poems and poets emerging from the experience of either being a native New Yorker or influenced or inspired by this metropolis. Students examine poets including those from the New York School, a group of poets of the 1950s and 1960s allied with and interested in visual art and artists, urban wit, and casual address including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery. Students also examine Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Hettie Jones, Allen Ginsberg, and Federico Garcia Lorca, the lauded Spanish poet who lived in New York City for nine months, among others. The course includes a creative work.

ENG 235 Climate Fiction

This course examines representations of climate change in contemporary literature, comics, and film. Working with materials from a variety of world regions and cultural traditions, students consider the emerging genre of “climate fiction” in relation to a larger and longer history of environmental fiction. They grapple with the form, function, and limits of climate fiction as a discourse. Is cli-fi a kind of science fiction? A new mode of realism? A new form of activism of pedagogy? A genre of Anthropocene fiction? Or something else entirely? Prerequisite(s): ENVR 205 or one 100-level English course.

ENG 238 Jane Austen: Then and Now

Students read Austen’s six major works, investigate their relation to nineteenth-century history and culture, and consider the Austen revival in film adaptations and fictional continuations of her novels. The course highlights the various and conflicting ways in which critics represent Austen, and the cultural needs her stories now seem to fulfill. Readings include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 239 Shakespeare’s Queens

When Shakespeare began writing plays, England was ruled by a queen. Elizabeth I understood that her power was inextricable from her gender, and she developed intricate iconography and ideology to support her queenly rule-iconography and ideology which also made it into some of the greatest art of the age. This course considers the question of queenship in Shakespeare’s poetry and plays. Centralizing concerns of gender-including those of sovereign rule, race, queerness, desire, religion, agency, performativity, and intersectionality-students work to understand forms of “queenship” in playful as well as serious ways. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 240 Literary Imagination and Neuroscience

Freudian approaches to the mind, which influence literary ideas, have been supplanted by cognitive neuroscience. Can today’s neurobiology explain literary imagination, and would eighteenth-century aestheticians understand such explanation? This course inquires how philosophers and scientists once defined imagination and next investigates what interdisciplinary overlap exists between contemporary studies and its past. Historically it frames imagination, and the Lockean language about the mind that accompanies it queries whether romantic writers advanced radically different ideas than these earlier efforts, and finally studies how today’s “Principles of Neural Science” understand consciousness and unconsciousness. Does the neurobiological picture of imagination, seen through the cross-neural nature of cerebral processes, cognitive historicism, neurobiological imaging techniques, and emotion processes as fluvial and dynamic stand at great distance from what was once thought?

ENG 241 Fiction in the United States

Critical readings of a diverse selection of novels and shorter fictions, ranging from works by earlier writers such as Hawthorne, Howells, James, Wharton, Jewett, and Chesnutt, to more recent writing from James Baldwin, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Sherman Alexie, and David Foster Wallace, among others. In addition to major directions in the history of American fiction, more recent developments concerning postmodernism, multi-ethnic literature, and emergent forms–graphic novels and electronic texts–are considered. Class discussions and writing assignments also address critical terms and methods.

ENG 242 Screenwriting

This course presents the fundamentals of screenwriting: concept, plot, structure, character development, conflict, dialogue, visual storytelling and format. Lectures, writing exercises, and analyses of films such as The Social Network, Chinatown, and Rushmore provide the student with the tools to create a short screenplay. Prerequisite(s): THEA 240.

ENG 243 Global Romanticism

Some scholars of Romanticism contend that it cannot be defined. Others have insisted on maintaining national divides between the movement to preserve purist genealogies.Still others have argued that it can be viewed as a reaction against the way of life in capitalist societies. This course reexamines the origins and breadth of Romanticism, beginning first with the traditionally studied German Novelle and British poetry and then shifting to other national and transnational works that have not previously been associated with Romanticism as a movement, such as romantic racialized paintings of Native Americans, Frederick Douglass’ “The Heroic Slave,” and the Haitian rebellion. The course breaks down Romanticism past definitional monolith and asks how capitalism, nationalism, revolution, and transatlanticism revise past scholarly approaches to the movement and further contextualize it within the global world. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 244 Sentimentality in U.S. Literature

This course examines the place of sentimentality in U.S. literature and culture. Reading works of fiction, poetry, and performance, students ask how and why certain kinds of feeling-suffering in particular-have become central to the articulating and contesting U.S. national identity. They pay particular attention to how sentimental literature, in its various guises, seeks to enable identification across boundaries of race, gender, class, and ability. What kinds of politics do spectacles of emotion enable? What kinds of politics do they foreclose? Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 246 Staging Sovereignty: Theatricality and Early Modern Politics

This course explores the tensions, intersections, and overarching relationship between early modern politics and notions of theatricality from the opening of the first public playhouse (1576) until just after re-opening of the playhouses following Cromwell’s Interregnum (1660). Students read drama concerning governmentality’s relationship to gender, race, coloniality, divine right, representation, and revolution alongside early modern political speeches, edicts, and treatises. They contend with the way politics informed the period’s dramatic theater and, indeed, the way the period’s dramatic theater came to inform politics. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: ENG 213 and 214.

ENG 247 Contemporary Arab American Literature

This course studies Arab American literature from 1990 until the present. Students examine novels, short fiction, memoirs, or poetry in an effort to understand the major concerns of contemporary Arab American authors. Students are expected to engage theoretical material and literary criticism to supplement their understanding of the literature. In addition to a discussion of formal literary concerns, this course is animated by the way authors spotlight gender, sexual orientation, politics, and history. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level course in English.

ENG 249 Medieval English Dream Visions

This course examines the popular genre of the dream vision in the later Middle Ages, including its sources and receptions, cultural contexts, and major authors. Texts will be read in Middle English.

ENG 254 Modern British Literature since 1900

An introduction to the birth of modern British literature and its roots, with attention to its social and cultural history, its philosophical and cultural foundations, and some emphasis on its relationship to the previous century. Texts are selected from the works of writers such as Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Rushdie, and Lessing. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 255 Black Poetry

How does the African American poetic tradition specifically contribute to the literary canon of African American literature and larger conceptions of American and global literature? This course is both an introduction to Black poetics and a deep exploration. The course considers so-called basic questions (e.g., What are Black poetics?) and more sophisticated questions (e.g., How do Black poetics transform the literary and cultural landscape?). Students read a variety of authors who maneuver between intra- and inter-racial politics, including such canonical authors as Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni, and less well-known authors such as Jayne Cortez and LL Cool J.

ENG 259 Contemporary African American Literature

This course introduces students to contemporary African American literature. They explore literature written after 1975, considering a range of patterns and literary techniques as well as consistent themes and motifs. Students read a mix of canonical and less well-known authors. This course requires a nuanced, complicated discussion about what encompasses the contemporary African American literary tradition. Prerequisites(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: course work in American studies, Africana, or English.

ENG 263 Literature, Medicine, Empathy

Focusing on a range of novels published from the nineteenth century to the present day, and on scholarship in the developing field of empathy studies, students consider the relationships among literature, medicine, and empathy. Students examine representations of medical practice and practitioners and of relations between physicians and patients. They explore claims that literature has the power to develop empathy and should be central to medical education. Authors include George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Abraham Verghese, and Ian McEwan. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 265 The Writings of Toni Morrison

This course surveys the writing of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Texts are selected from her novels, essays, children’s literature, and drama; they also include criticism written about her work. Recommended background: one 100-level English course or AFR 100.

ENG 268 Survey of Literatures of Africa

This course explores folklore, myths, and literary texts of the African continent. These include works written by Anglophone authors such as Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Vera, Njau, Aidoo, Nwapa, Head, Cole, Mda, Abani, Okorafor, and Atta; those drawn from oral traditions of indigenous languages transcribed into English, such as The Mwindo Epic and The Sundiata; and those written by Lusophone and Francophone authors including Bâ, Senghor, Liking, Neto, Mahfouz, Ben Jelloun, and Kafunkeno. The course contextualizes each work historically, politically, and anthropologically. Students are introduced to a number of critical theories and methodologies with which to analyze the works, such as poststructural, Marxist, Pan-African, postcolonial, and feminist. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 269 Narrating Slavery

This course examines selected autobiographical writings of ex-slaves; biographical accounts of the lives of former slaves written by abolitionists, relatives, or friends; the oral histories of ex-slaves collected in the early to mid-twentieth century; and the fiction, poems, and dramas about slaves and slavery (neo-slave narratives) of the last hundred years. Students consider these works as interventions in the discourses of freedom-religious, political, legal, and psychological-and as examples of a genre foundational to many literary works by descendants of Africans in diaspora. The course surveys early works written by slaves themselves, such as broadsides and books by Jupiter Hammond, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs; dictated biographies such as those by Esteban Montejo, Mary Prince, and Sor Teresa Chicaba; and fictional works inspired by the narratives, such as texts by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff, Sherley Ann Williams, and Colson Whitehead. Recommended background: one 100-level English course or AFR 100.

ENG 271 American Literature and the Law

This course explores the relationship between law and literature from a variety of interpretive approaches, including the legal studies movement known as “Law and Literature.” What role does literature play in judicial reasoning and how have literary techniques shaped norms and principles of justice in the law? What is “storytelling” in the law and is it similar to “narrative” literature? In focusing on the intersections of literature and law in the U.S. since the early nineteenth century, this course also asks how reading legal decisions and other law texts “as literature” helps to illuminate the role that social norms concerning gender, race, and nationality play in the conception of justice and the meaning of the law, as well as the source of its authority, at particular historical moments.

ENG 273 Shakespeare and Adaptation

This course explores a variety of interpretations and appropriations of Shakespearean tragedies, comedies, romances spanning the past century. In the context of modern cinematic adaptation, Shakespearean plays transform beyond themselves, often distorted or reworked to represent anachronistic cultural concerns. Students analyze linguistic, social, and historical contexts in the Shakespearean original and then comparatively considers these readings against their modern remakings: Are there limits to adaptation? What relates the original to the later work? How do we assess the evolving discourse of film reception studies? The focus shifts between comedy and tragedy, tragedy and romance, often redefining set assumptions about these thematic categories in the Shakespearean context. Adaptations include Japanese epic cinema, Hollywood screwball comedies, prison performance, militaristic stagings, avant-garde experimental film, and formulaic romantic comedies.

ENG 274 “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”: Deviant Wanderings of Four Eighteenth-Century Writers

This course critically compares four writers of the eighteenth-century European tradition who on first glance seem to have little in common: Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ann Radcliffe. Students consider these writers’ gender performance, satire, lexicography, political philosophy, confessional autobiography, Gothic novels, and painterly travelscapes. How does their choice of genre serve as social commentary, (a)moral exposé, or visual escapism? Does their work revise our definition of an eighteenth-century writer? Drawing on critical gender studies, political philosophy, literary criticism, and theories of the Baroque help make sense of how such unlikely comparisons allow us to read this eighteenth-century episteme as an example of moral “enforcement.” Recommended background: ENG 232 and 243.

ENG 277 Medieval Literatures of Resistance: Power and Dissent, 1100-1500

This course offers sustained examination of several major sites of cultural power in the Middle Ages–including institutions and traditions such as the Church and the monarchy, Parliament, and civic government, marriage and the household–and considers the oppositional energies of texts that negotiate those sites. Students read historical documents (poems, letters, and chronicles) and analyze the textual tactics that resist or evade the rules set to govern most aspects of medieval public and private life.

ENG 280 Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, and the European Novel, 1850-1935

The Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) is the seminal moment to understand anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course studies the multiple differences in how Jews appear in European novels and examines Jewish assimilation among composers, authors, and painters such as Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg, Schnitzler, Pissarro, and Chagall. It investigates both positive Jewish images and anti-Semitism in such novels as Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, Melville’s epic poem Clarel, and Roth’s Goodbye Columbus.

ENG 281 Arab American Poetry

This course offers students an introduction to Arab American poetry from the early works of Khalil Gibran to the present. The course develops an appreciation of Arab American poetic forms, craft, voice, and vision within a transnational and diasporic framework. Surveying the poems and critical work of an expansive array of poets such as Lauren Camp, Hayan Charara, Suheir Hammad, Marwa Helal, Mohja Kahf, Philip Metres, Naomi Shihab Nye, Deema Shehabi, students examine the complex, personal, communal, national, cultural, historical, political, and religious realities that manifest themselves at home and elsewhere in the Arab American literary imagination. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, English, or gender and sexuality studies.

ENG 282 Paradise Lost: Contexts and Afterlives

This course studies the historical contexts and artistic afterlives of Paradise Lost. Milton’s epic was greatly influenced by the tensions of its own moment – the English Civil War, the Protestant Reformation, and the imperial projects of Britain and Europe, to name but a few. So too, has the poem greatly influenced art and literature concerned with revolution and revolt, imperial power, religious freedom and/or persecution, gender politics, and humanity’s relationship to nature and “fall” from an “Edenic” world. Students study Paradise Lost alongside its influences and some of the texts it has influenced, considering both how the poem creates meaning in its own context, and how it has come to signify far beyond that context. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 283 Early Modern Sex and Sexuality

This course applies the methods of gender and sexuality studies to early modern literature. Taking up Michel Foucault’s contention that sexual identity was an “invention” of the nineteenth century, students theorize and historicize sex and sexuality in the three centuries prior to this moment. Can we see the traces of identity in sexual desire in early modernity? How is sexual desire related to gender? To race? To class? To other intersectional identities? What might it mean to queer an early modern text? And how do literary genres from the period – poetry, drama, prose – enable the exploration of these questions? Recommended background: ENG 213 or 214.

ENG 284 English Literature Before 1100

An examination of the poetry and prose produced in England before the Norman Conquest. Texts include historical accounts of conflict and settlement, runic inscriptions, riddles, elegies, visions, medicinal recipes, and songs. Most texts will be read in Modern English translation, with some additional instruction in Old English. Prerequisite(s): at least one previous course in English.

ENG 286 Race before Race: Articulating Difference in Medieval England

The medieval period is often wrongly perceived as a time that existed before the idea of race: before the Atlantic slave trade and before European colonialism, the Middle Ages might seem to be free of racial bias, and free of difference itself. Such fantasies of a preracial or hegemonic past also have given rise to white supremacist ideologies of racialized nationalism, including the mythic construction of “Anglo-Saxon” heritage. This course addresses these errors by examining how racial categories of human difference were articulated in specific cultural contexts between 1150 and 1415, arguably inventing many of the dehumanizing tropes of racial discourse that persist today.

ENG 291 Fiction Writing

A course for students who wish to have practice and guidance in the writing of prose. Admission by writing sample. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 292 Poetry Writing

A course for students who wish to have practice and guidance in the writing of poetry. Admission by writing sample. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 293 Creative Nonfiction Writing

A creative nonfiction writer tells a true story in an inventive and original manner. Or as John McPhee says, “Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.” In this course students write four creative nonfiction essays in the following genres: memoir, lyric, travelogue, and art review. Students learn to see writing as an act, not as a product. To that end, the course includes workshops in which ideas and critiques of writing assignments are thoughtfully offered. To further fuel the writing assignments and workshops students read a wide-ranging selection of creative nonfiction essays, studying figurative language, character and setting development, and dramatic structure.

ENG 296 Methods and Modes of Literary Study

This course introduces students to major trends, methodologies, and modes of inquiry in the field of literary study. Students identify and discuss the continuing significance of the formation of the Western canon (including counter responses to that formation), identify and demonstrate knowledge of the meaning of different literary genres, perform close readings of a given text, appreciate poetic form and experimentation, critically analyze a given text with reference to its historical significance, deploy theoretical concepts in relation to a given text, identify appropriate theoretical or digital methodologies to apply in different textual circumstances, and conduct research in the field.

ENG 306 Queer Africana: History, Theories, and Representations

This course examines the debates among authors, politicians, religious leaders, social scientists, and artists in Africa, the African Americas, and Afro-Europe about non-normative sexualities, throughout the diaspora. While the course analyzes histories of sexualities, legal documents, manifestos by dissident organizations, and anthropological and sociological treatises, it focuses primarily on textual and cinematic representations, and proposes methods of reading cultural productions at the intersection of sexualities, race, ethnicities, and gender. Recommended background: at least one course offered by the Program in Africana, the Program in gender and sexuality studies, or one course in literary analysis.

ENG 325 Black Feminist Literary Theory and Practice

This seminar examines literary theories that address the representation and construction of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly, but not exclusively, theories formulated and articulated by Afra-diasporic women such as Spillers, Ogunyemi, Carby, Christian, Cobham, Valerie Smith, Busia, Lubiano, and Davies. Students not only analyze theoretical essays but also use the theories as lenses through which to explore literary productions of women writers of Africa and the African diaspora in Europe and in the Americas, including Philip, Dangarembga, Morrison, Gayl Jones, Head, Condé, Brodber, Brand, Evariston, Zadie Smith and Harriet Wilson. Cross-listed in Africana, English, and gender and sexuality studies. Strongly recommended: at least one literature course.

ENG 344 Chaucer and His Context

This seminar encourages students already familiar with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to further explore his other major poetic works in the context of his late fourteenth-century London milieu. Texts include a selection of dream visions, historical romances, and philosophical treatises (“Troilus and Criseyde,” “Book of the Duchess,” “Parliament of Fowls,” and others). Chaucer’s literary contemporaries, including John Gower, William Langland, and the “Gawain”-Poet, are studied along with their poetic forms and historical contexts. All texts read in Middle English. Only open to juniors and seniors. Recommended background: familiarity with Middle English literature and/or language. Recommended background: familiarity with Middle English literature and/or language.

ENG 360 Independent Study

ENG 391 Advanced Fiction Writing

Prerequisite(s): English 291.

ENG 392 Advanced Poetry Writing

Prerequisite(s): English 292. May be repeated once for credit.

ENG 395 Junior-Senior Seminars

Seminars provide an opportunity for concentrated work in a restricted subject area. Two such seminars are required for the English major. Students are encouraged to see the seminar as preparation for independent work on a senior thesis. They may also choose to use the seminar itself as a means of fulfilling the senior thesis requirement. Sections are limited to 15.

ENG 395C

This course provides an introduction to Pacific studies and decolonial literature and theory in Oceania. As the United States, China, and other nations invest billions in extending their ownership and influence in Oceania, Pacific writers, scholars and activists enact a poetics and praxis of decolonization. Students examine the interdisciplinarity of Pacific literary studies as it interrogates and resists traditions of inquiry in anthropology, geography, history, politics, economics, and ecology. Students also consider the publication underrepresentation with which Pacific writers have had to contend and the actions they have taken to provide publishing access through imprints created by and for Pacific writers. Only open to juniors and seniors. Prerequisite(s): one English course. New course beginning winter 2020.

ENG 395D Gender and Species

Grappling with gender and species at once, this course considers two concepts that have enforced binary thinking about what defines and divides human life. Reaching back to medieval and early modern literature, students examine representations that push against received formulations of man/woman and human/animal. How have categories of gender and species reinforced one another in figurations of living bodies and their experiences? Can we liberate our reading from either of these binaries? What are the promises of such a liberation? Readings include theoretical interventions from animal studies, posthumanism, queer and transgender theory, and ecofeminism. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 395E Medieval Romance

Romance was the most popular literary genre of the later Middle Ages. Originating in France in the twelfth century, this highly adaptable form quickly became an international phenomenon, with numerous examples found across Europe and the British Isles. Many romances tell tales of amorous exploits, exotic travels, and quests for knowledge; the celebration of chivalric ideals is a central theme. But many of these tales seem to question and sometimes undermine the very ideals they otherwise espouse: courtly love mingles with sexual adventurism, for instance, and loyalty to one’s lord often results in alienation or death. Students read a selection of romances from France and Britain (all texts are in modern English translation or manageable Middle English) with an eye toward how they variously articulate and deconstruct the notion of chivalry. Prerequisite(s): one English course.

ENG 395G Autofiction

A concentrated study of the interstices between experienced and imagined truth, dilemmas of disbelief, irony, narration, dialogue, persona, and performance in twenty-first-century autobiographical fictions or “autofictions,” as coined by French critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977. Readings of contemporary autofictions, as well as novels written well before Doubrovksy, may include Stendhal, Proust, Wilson, Joyce, Baldwin, Heti, Millet, Lin, Lerner, and Knausgard. A creative writing component is required.

ENG 395H Shakespeare’s Masterpiece? Revisiting King Lear

Reading King Lear today means exploring its histories of (mis)appropriations and cultural reception. In order to explain the play, critics and scholars have been drawn to major historical events in Jacobean England (e.g., the Gunpowder Plot of 1604 or the London plague of 1603), often incorporating these analyses into their critical approaches, such as new historicism, Holocaust literature, ecocriticism, and textual instability. This course considers King Lear both textually and culturally, asking: How does the aesthetic upholding of the play as a “masterpiece” inform, trouble, or extend its long reception history? How do past explanations impress themselves upon contemporary interpretations? Recommended background: ENG 213, 214, and 239.

ENG 395I Literary Imagination and Neuroscience

This course investigates two separate disciplines, inquiring how they speak and think about literary imagination, and asks students to consider what interdisciplinary overlap might exist between the two. The course frames imagination and the Lockean language about mind that accompanies it in the writings of Addison, Burke, Johnson, and Young. It then queries whether romantic writing (Schlegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats) advances radically different ideas than these earlier efforts. Finally it jumps to our contemporary moment and ponders how terms of explanation may once again have changed. The course asks whether or not the neurobiological picture of imagination the cross-neural nature of cerebral processes, cognitive historicism, and imaging techniques is at a great distance from what the eighteenth century once thought.

ENG 395J Frontier and Border in U.S. Literature

The “frontier” has long been a controlling idea for U.S. national identity. A vestige of our settler colonialist past, the American frontier persists ideologically as an imagined “meeting point between savagery and civilization.” This course examines the history of this concept and its role in American literary history. We trace its influence upon more recent configurations of the nation as territory—namely, discourses of “the border” and “the homeland.” Course readings include literature, law, and history from the nineteenth century through the post-9/11 era and relevant works of scholarship and critical theory. This course gives particular attention to Chicanx and Native American literatures and these traditions’ critical perspectives on the contested paradigms that lend this course its title.

ENG 395K The Arctic Sublime

Now the focus of grave concerns over climate change, the Arctic generated a different set of anxieties in the nineteenth century. Perceived as strange and terrifying, and deadly to those who tried to chart and conquer it, the region was a source of the sublime; its inhuman greatness both inspired and appalled. Drawing on various genres, students examine the “Arctic sublime,” considering its artistic and ideological purposes for Romantics and Victorians. Works include Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as well as works of visual art and selections from nineteenth-century theorists of the sublime. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 395L Utopia/Dystopia Fiction

What does it mean to live the “good life”? How is this related to building, planning, desiring, or dwelling in a “good place”? How do plans and policies for good life morph into bad places? Are good places always exclusionary, and thus foundationally bad places for some? This course traces two trends side by side: the early modern vogue for utopia-fictions, such as Thomas More’s Utopia, and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century turn to dystopia-fictions, such as Orwell’s 1984. Students consider relationships of genre, politics, identity, modernity, and colonialism between these two trends, while broadly considering the relationship among power, place, and community.

ENG 395N Revenge and Horror: From Early Modern Tragedy to Contemporary Horror

In this course, students analyze revenge and horror across drama and film. Class discussions consider revenge in its thematic resonances within revenge tragedy and horror alongside readings in feminist and queer theories and critical race studies. Early modern revenge tragedy is rife with displays of horror on stage, leaving audiences with high body counts and psychological scars. In revenge tragedies such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, understanding the horror aspects can provide insight into analyzing revenge narratives in films such the Scream franchise. Discussing work such as Julia Kristeva on the powers of horror and pivotal work by Robin R. Means Coleman in Horror Noire, this course will dig into the philosophical underpinnings of horror and revenge. We will ask what acts of revenge are driving motivations in modern horror? Why does revenge play a part in many horror narratives? How do power and identity play a part in both genres of revenge tragedy and horror film?

ENG 395O Cinema’s Inner World

The cinema seems best able to show the outsides of things: specific places, the details of daily life, the faces of people. A complex inner life is perhaps better left to literature. Yet some film directors nonetheless aim their films at an inner world, a world of psychology, of faith, of imagination. This course looks at a range of topics associated with cinema’s inner space: cinema as dream, outer space as inner space, the reading of interior space. Films are drawn primarily from the European art cinema, although some Hollywood, independent, and experimental films from the United States also serve as examples. Directors may include Deren, Lynch, Hitchcock, Godard, Bresson, Fassbinder, Fellini, and Tarkovsky. Prerequisite(s): one course in English.

ENG 395Q Reading Feeling: Literature and Affect Theory

What does it mean to recognize the body as affectable? How might this recognition inform our understanding of power? How has affect contributed to the study of literature, and how might literature contribute to the study of affect? Students read literature of various genres side-by-side with the development of “affect theory.” They trace the tendrils of feeling and emotion to some foundational roots in philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, and cognitive science, but the focus is on the affect theory that develops out of feminism, queer theory, and women of color- and queer of color-critique. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: ENG 296.

ENG 395R Gothic Bodies: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte

Focusing on the work of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Bronte, students in this seminar examine the conventions of Gothic fiction and Gothic representations of the monstrous body, exploring the meaning and the “politics” of the corporeal in Britain from the 1790s through the mid-nineteenth century, and considering its relation to conceptions of sexuality, gender, race, and social class. Readings include Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Bronte’s Jane Eyre, as well as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, among a range of other works of fiction, criticism and literary theory.

ENG 395S Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: 1970s U.S. Culture

Progressive political movements in the 1960s promised cultural visibility and social equality to oppressed and marginalized communities. 1970s US art and popular culture reflects the ongoing and often painful tension between white supremacist gatekeepers and multicultural voices. Students work with a range of artefacts that may include Hollywood and art films, popular music, selected television episodes, art photography, science fiction stories, and sports magazines. Inspired examples of political engagement (protests by A.I.M.–American Indian Movement, second-wave feminism, gay liberation) are analysed by comparing self-representation with representations in the media. Students learn to analyse multiple kinds of written and visual texts with a view to understanding how politics and culture intersect and generate meaning. Prerequisite(s): one English course.

ENG 395T African American Literary Criticism

This seminar takes as its premise that black literature engages with and reflects parts of the world in which it is produced. In this course, students sort through the various conversations authors and critics have with each other. They read canonical authors and less well-known figures in an effort to tease out the nuance present in this body of work. Each text is paired with another in a form of dialogue. These exchanges are not set, so it is up to students to understand how the texts speak to each other. Literary criticism requires us to think through privilege, citizenship, capitalism, intraracial dynamics, gender and sexual dynamics, and political movements. The course theme may vary from year to year (e.g., disability, literature of the left, black queer studies).

ENG 395U Postmodern Novel

The seminar examines diverse efforts to define “postmodernism.” Students read novels by Joyce, Pynchon, Wallace, Eco, and Rushdie. Contemporary reviews, secondary criticism, narrative theory, issues of socially constructed reality, and some problems in the philosophy of language mark out its concerns. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG 395W Advanced Early Modern Studies

Advanced Early Modern Studies: This seminar focuses on one or two advanced approaches to scholarship within early modern studies. These approaches may include (but are not limited to): the history of science; histories of racialization and/or colonization; early modern political thought; classical reception; ecocriticism and literature of the environment; the relationship between early modernity and modernity; travel writing; gender, sexuality, and early modern women authors.

ENG 395Z Curb Your Enthusiasm: Mockery, Irritability, and the Satire of Feigned Performance, 1600-2100

Searching the past 500 years of British stage comedy, do the roots of bigotry and prejudice, as identified in contemporary comic performance, announce themselves? Is there a line from Shakespeare’s, Jonson’s, Behn’s comedies; eighteenth-century comedy of manners; Victorian philosophical satire; Wilde’s exaggerated speech; Beckett’s flatness; Orton’s outrageousness to the contemporary snarky comedy of Fawlty Towers, Key and Peele, and Curb Your Enthusiasm? Is religious imposturing, a complaint of seventeenth-century writers such as Spinoza against the clergy’s case for belief in miracles, a probable source for the highly theatrical practice of feigning? Early modern theater, no less than subsequent theater, has seized on religious hypocrisy to provide material for comedy. To understand the social processes – the mechanism of action – of such migration, the seminar explores and contextualizes theatrical practices of mockery, irritability, and satire.

ENG 457 Senior Thesis

Students register for ENG 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ENG 457 and 458.

ENG 458 Senior Thesis

Students register for ENG 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ENG 457 and 458.

ENG S10 International Cinema in the 1960s

The 1960s saw the rise of “new wave” cinemas across the world; not only the French new wave, but also the Czech, British, Japanese, and Hungarian new waves brought youth, energy, and sometimes political rebellion to the screen. The auteurs of the European art cinema (Godard, Antonioni, Bergman) made films that were as intellectual and as challenging as any classic novel. This course introduces students to formal and ideological film analysis through a survey of key international films from the 1960s.

ENG S11 Reading Piers Plowman: Intensive Study of a Late Fourteenth-Century Allegory

This course offers an intensive close reading experience of William Langland’s allegorical poem Piers Plowman. Langland, a major contemporary of Chaucer, is studied for his use of alliterative Middle English verse, his visionary politics, and his reformist religious views.

ENG S13 Beowulf: A Close Reading

This course offers a deep close reading of the Old English epic poem, “Beowulf.” Students compare multiple translations of key passages, study the poem’s historical and cultural contexts, and appreciate its major themes.

ENG S16 Minding Birds: Culture, Cognition, and Conservation

What are the consequences of minding birds, in several senses (caring for them, being bothered by them, endowing them with faculties of intellect and emotion, or simply believing that they have minds of their own)? This course invites students to take birds seriously as thinking, feeling neighbors by examining literary representations of birds from antiquity to the present alongside recent ornithological studies. Three distinct units focus on separate families: hawks, crows, and sparrows. Students venture outside to record field notes on local species in each of these groups, and compare their findings to representations in literary and scientific texts. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

ENG S20 Queer Thought, Queer Insurgency

Queer theory provides a critical method that complements intersectional feminist approaches to literature and visual culture by analyzing the construction and regulation of gender and sexuality through social, legal, and medical norms of embodiment and identity. This course explores canonical queer critique in relation to the early history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, an era in which the radical currency of the term “queer” links scholarly, activist, and artistic responses to the AIDS crisis and its homophobic cultural politics. Students also consider present-day LGBTQ+ scholarship, literature, and art to explore the insurgent visions and world-making projects that animate queer thought today. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course, or GSS 100.

ENG S21 Knowing Dickens

This course enables students to (better) know Dickens by introducing them to three of his works of fiction, to biographical studies of the writer, and to his autobiographical fragment. In addition, students examine one of his novels in its original, serialized form, in the weekly journal, Household Words. Students read Sketches by Boz, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and write their own concluding chapter(s) to that last, unfinished novel, in additional to critical essays and pseudo-Victorian journal articles. Prerequisite: one 100-level English course.

ENG S26 Overstories: Telling the Lives of Trees

Who tells the stories of trees, how do they tell them, and why? How are the lives and voices of forests captured and constructed? Students in this course address these questions by examining a range of novels, histories, and scientific studies focused on trees and forests, and by constructing their own narratives — fictional and/or historical — about their lives with trees, including those on the Bates campus and in the surrounding community. They consider how trees and forests have been identified by writers as models for human beings and human communities. Students hear from those who work with trees, including foresters and arborists, and consider the ways in which the lives of trees and those of human beings are intertwined. Readings include Richard Powers, The Overstory; John Fowles, The Tree; Lauren Oakes, In Search of the Canary Tree; and Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Lives of Trees. Prerequisite(s): ENVR 205 or one 100-level English course.

ENG S27 Our Mutual Friend: Novel and Film

The last completed novel of Victorian author Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend is considered a harbinger of British modernism, though it was first published in the 1860s, and T. S. Eliot first used a line from the work — “He do the police in different voices” — as the title of what became his famous poem “The Waste Land.” Multi-voiced and, at times, apocalyptic — a study of human predation, social veneers, and the polluted waste land that was Victorian London — Our Mutual Friend is considered to be among the most complex and significant English novels by generations of critics and writers. Students in this course closely read Dickens’s work, consider its meaning, structure, context, and its relevance in the present day, and compare it to the award winning BBC film adaptation of the novel. (Post-1800). Prerequisite(s): Any 100-level English course.

ENGS 283 Early Modern Sex and Sexuality

This course applies the methods of gender and sexuality studies to early modern literature. Taking up Michel Foucault’s contention that sexual identity was an “invention” of the nineteenth century, students theorize and historicize sex and sexuality in the three centuries prior to this moment. Can we see the traces of identity in sexual desire in early modernity? How is sexual desire related to gender? To race? To class? To other intersectional identities? What might it mean to queer an early modern text? And how do literary genres from the period – poetry, drama, prose – enable the exploration of these questions? Recommended background: ENG 213 or 214.

ENG S32 Print Cultures: The Poetics of Printing

An introduction to the study of print cultures and the history of the book by closely examining one type of printed text, poetry. Students consider how the invention of the Gutenberg press and developments in printing practices began to influence poets, before tracing the relationship between print technologies and poetic practices up through the present day. The class read widely, studying: Tottel’s Miscellany (the first printed anthology of English poetry), George Herbert’s image poetry (1633), William Blake’s illuminated Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789), and the 20th- and 21st- century concrete- and pattern-poetry movements, including poetry by Augusto de Campos, Guillaume Apollinaire, e e cummings, Mary Ellen Solt, Marilyn Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, and Jen Bervin. Students also compose their own poetry and experiment with type-setting/printing on a hand press.

ENG S43 Shakespeare in the Theater in London

A study of Shakespeare’s plays in performance, intended to acquaint the student with problems that are created by actual stage production in the interpretation of the plays. Students see Shakespearean productions in various locations, including London and Stratford-on-Avon, England.

ENG S50 Independent Study

ENG s17 Foucault: An Introduction

Twentieth-century French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, produced writings that profoundly challenge the disciplines of politics, philosophy, sociology, criminal justice, colonialism, gender and queer studies. Foucault both coined or invigorated theoretical terms such as govermentality, biopower, genealogy, épistémè to expose the specific historical rationalities embedded in ordinary academic discourse which he opposed. His books and lectures from the Collège de France where he lectured from 1970-71 through 1983-1984 compose his work’s corpus. This unit primarily studies two works: The Order of Things, the book that made Foucault world-renowned, and the later four volumes, first published in 1976, The History of Sexuality. The unit distinguishes the seminal concepts and structures Foucault posited from the broad, changed explanations of those who draw on his writings. Why read Foucault? Because he is one of the world’s most influential thinkers in the past 100 years.

FYS 341 King Arthur: Myth and Legend

The story of King Arthur of Britain and his Knights of the Round Table is one of Western civilization’s most enduring legends. This course explores those elements of the Arthur story that make it so universally compelling and the ways in which its details have been adapted according to the needs and desires of its changing audience. Topics considered include feudal loyalty and kinship, women and marriage, monsters and magic, the culture of violence and warfare, and the stylistic and narrative features of the legendary mode. While students read these legends critically, they also explore their popularity: How and why has the myth of Arthur proven so universally appealing?

FYS 442 Shaking It Out: Writing and Critiquing Personal Narratives

To “essay” means “to attempt; to try.” This course offers students rigorous study and practice of the art of the creative nonfiction essay, looking specifically at the ways writers use creative impulses to write better textual critiques, and vice versa. Readings include classics from writers such as White, Angelou, Baldwin, Thompson, Dubus, Didion, and Wallace, and several contemporary American essays by writers like Hilton Als, Leslie Jamison, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

FYS 474 The Literary Insect

All generations of humankind have been keen to describe the habits and habitats of our small, formidable, creeping cousins. What makes bugs so interesting? Why does literature need them? Does our fascination with beetles, bees, and butterflies go beyond the fear and admiration that come from the tremendous differences between our bodies and theirs? This seminar looks at literature in many genres–fables, poems, novels, memoirs, and natural histories–to find out what humans have learned from the literary insect, and to ask further questions about bug life. Participants also venture outside to explore insect habitats nearby.

FYS 482 Reading Cats and Dogs

People have always written about their pets. Taking the most common species of nonhuman companions as its focus, this seminar moves through five centuries of English literature, meeting cats and dogs along the way: Sir Gawain’s precious hounds in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the old feline who captures Keats’ imagination (if not his heart), the dog called Crab who graces Shakespeare’s stage, the mysterious Cheshire Cat planted in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and many others. With their strong genetic ties to tigers and wolves, cats and dogs inevitably remind of us what is untamed in our own behavior.

FYS 485 Contemporary Comedy

This course explores the contemporary comedy landscape by looking at humor writing (short stories, novel, and internet venues), television, stand-up comedy, podcasts, and other comedy artifacts while considering issues of audience and the various tools of humor. Topics include comedy forms, comic personae, and the subject matters of humor, including but not limited to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

FYS 499 Reading Literary Space

Stories are not only structured and shaped, they move through different kinds of cultural spaces and geographies. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argued that poems, too, have found their basic images in archetypal spaces: houses, rooms, and shells. Recent years have brought a “spatial turn” to the humanities, where issues related to race, gender, and sexuality have been productively organized by an attention to maps, contradictory spaces, networks, and mobilities. In this course students read poems, short stories, and theoretical texts with an emphasis on spatial interpretation.

FYS 504 Crows and Ravens: Feathered Minds, Lettered Voices

Crows and ravens abound in literature. From Aesop to Poe, these most uncanny members of the family Corvidae have enchanted and bewildered their human neighbors. This seminar uses cognitive ecology to approach the varied representations of crow and raven species in fiction and poetry. The course asks how human and corvid minds are seen to interact within specific environments, and what these interactions mean for both human and avian evolution. How have we adapted to life with crows and ravens, and vice versa? How does literature itself count as an element of the environments we share with these animals?

FYS 524 International Cinema

An introduction to the study of film through a survey of international fiction films. Students learn how to describe and appreciate the formal elements of film-narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Films are drawn from a broad historical period (1950 to the present) and from an equally wide range of genres (thriller, horror, science fiction) and countries of origin. Art cinema (more artistic, less commercial) receives special emphasis.

FYS 531 Contemporary American Essay

This course explores various essays from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Students focus on topics, publication histories, and, of course, craft. They read a few canonical essays as well as some lesser-known essays and lesser-known writers. In order to improve their own writing, they read contemporary news sources and texts about the craft of nonfiction writing. Several questions guide the course: What topics are appropriate for nonfiction and how did they get to be socially understood as such? How do authors navigate difficult topics within the essay form? What ideas, tips, tricks, hacks, and styles might we learn from these essay writers to create our own essays?

FYS 536 Great Expectations: Making and Remaking a “Classic”

How does a “great” novel come to be, and how does our sense of its worth and limitations change over time? What factors – personal, cultural, material – lead to its creation and recreation? Students examine Charles Dickens’s 1860-1861 novel in its original, weekly format, consider its immediate contexts, its alternative endings, and its recreations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in such works of fiction as Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip (2006), and Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2012), and in film adaptations. In the process, they consider the changing significance of a Victorian “classic.”

FYS 537 Inventing Originality

Originality, a concept undergoing varying descriptions and likely socially constructed, is frequently linked to creativity and as being defined as the first appearance of an idea. “Inventing Originality” focuses on late eighteenth-century romanticism as the possible historical beginning of the concept. The seminar next examines originality – how expressed by imitation in classical, medieval, and early modern texts. Then, querying twentieth and twenty-first century literary experimentations in poetry and fiction, it especially attends to Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Dadaist poetry, and postmodernist efforts to randomize thought. Finally, the seminar studies originality in the context of group teamwork, especially by those practicing accessibility and inclusion

FYS 554 Screening Justice: Law and Legal Narratives in Film and TV

Visual storytelling has become central to how “justice” is both conceived and administered in the American legal system. From police body camera footage to the images on civilian bystanders’ smartphones, to conflicting “truth” claims of video confessions, courtroom television, and victim impact videos, a form of documentary realism is today embedded in the law and its institutions. This class asks students to consider how legal processes–including the profound injustice and systemic racism of mass incarceration–might also be shaped by media fiction. Law and legal narratives – especially criminal legal narratives – are longstanding preoccupations of fictional film and television and ever proliferating in contemporary popular culture. How does the fictional life of the law shape the course of real justice? What forms of spectatorship are constructed by these media representations, which alternately position the viewer as a witness, detective, and juror?

FYS 559 Art of the Short Story: Writing and Critiquing Short Fiction

How has the short story developed over the past seventy years, and where might story writers go next? Reading from the mid-twentieth century to the present, this course explores the recent history and diversity of contemporary American short fiction. What can a short story accomplish that a novel cannot? How do story writers find their subjects, and how do they continue to repeatedly innovate within the genre? While analyzing contemporary stories from the canonical to the obscure, students also experience the climate of the creative writing workshop by writing a complete short story of their own.