English
- AAS 359/ENG 366: African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to PresentA survey of 20th- and 21st-century African American literature, including the tradition's key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature fits into certain periods and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts.
- AMS 322/ENG 242: Native American LiteratureAn analysis of the written and oral literary traditions developed by Native Americans. American Indian and First Nation authors will be read in the context of the global phenomenon of indigeneity and settler colonialism, and in dialogue with each other. Through readings, discussions, and guest speakers, we will consider linguistic, historical, and cultural approaches. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people.
- ASA 201/ENG 209: Introduction to Asian American StudiesThis course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racialization beyond the black-white binary in the context of US war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, globalization, migration, and popular culture. Who or what is an "Asian American"? How have conceptions of Asian America changed over time? How do cultural forms such as literature and film add to an understanding of Asian American identity as a historically dynamic process and social relation?
- COM 375/ENG 265: Writing the World: Nature, Science, and Literature in Early Modern EuropeThe idea that the poet "created a world" was a commonplace of Renaissance literary criticism. In this course we will be thinking about how poetry's worldmaking powers responded to changing ideas of what makes up the world - from revolutionary visions of the cosmos to new conceptions of the nature of matter and life - as well as to the new technologies which made these discoveries possible. How do the "creative" qualities of literature interact with an emerging scientific emphasis on facts and "things as they are"? We will consider these and similar questions in the different contexts of early modern Italy and England.
- COM 457/HUM 457/ENG 457: Ways of Knowing: Philosophy and LiteratureDo works of poetry and fiction produce their own distinctive forms of knowledge, or do they simply help preexisting philosophical concepts get absorbed more easily? This course explores the mutual implications of philosophy and literature for epistemology. We'll read lyrical poems, short stories and novels alongside philosophical accounts of language and mind, linking textual phenomena with features of cognition. Topics include conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality, argument vs. narrative, metaphor and image schema, knowledge by acquaintance vs. by description, defamiliarization and estrangement, logic vs. association, form and spontaneity.
- COM 535/ENG 538/GER 535: Contemporary Critical Theories: Marx's Capital: Reading Volume 2Capital, vol. 2 -- the least well-known volume of Marx's opus -- may paradoxically now be the most pertinent in global contemporaneity. In terse and highly formalized terms, it theorizes the total subsumption of society under interlocking yet clashing circuits of capital. It also gives a powerful account of how the system reproduces itself in and through the negotiation of its inherent crises. We read vol. 2 intensively and supplement it with important works that sustain or develop its theses (inter alia: Marx's unpublished chapter on subsumption, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Aiwha Ong, Neferti Tadiar).
- COM 547/ENG 530: The Renaissance: The Early Modern 'I'Terms like "self" and "subjectivity" and the question of their historical or transhistorical meaning remain at the heart of literary study in the pre-modern period. With those issues in mind, this seminar focuses on the early modern first person, the "I." We begin with some classical and medieval precursors, and with critical and theoretical writing on our subject matter. Then we turn to the heart of the matter: Petrarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare, the first two being the great European masters of the first person, the last said to have buried the first person in the voices of his characters.
- ENG 201: American Literary HistoryThis course surveys American literature from the colonial period to the Civil War. We will read autobiographies, sermons, slave narratives, revolutionary tracts, essays, novels, and poems. We will also discuss how early American literature shaped and was shaped by settler colonialism, and how origin stories continue to define our understanding of America. One goal of the class will be to learn from the political work of land acknowledgements, and Indigenous and African American practices of storytelling and memorialization.
- ENG 203: The EssayThis course introduces students to the range of the essay form as it has developed from the early modern period to our own. The class will be organized, for the most part, chronologically, beginning with the likes of Bacon and Hobbes, and ending with some contemporary examples of and reflections on the form. It will consider how writers as various as Sidney, Hume, Johnson, Emerson, Woolf, C.L.R. James, and Stephen Jay Gould have defined and revised The Essay. Two lectures, one 50-minute preceptorial.
- ENG 205: Making Poems Your OwnTo know a poem well is to make it your own and to learn something about how poems are made. In this class you will learn many great poems well. You will learn about the techniques and history of this art form as we consider significant changes in the history of lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems and think about poets' uses of voice, diction, image, trope, form, occasion, sequence, and closure. We will be reading poems together and writing about them, making poems and imitations of our own, and learning poems by heart.
- ENG 208: UnderworldsIs the underworld a world unto itself, or does it only acquire meaning in relation to the world above? Or is it the other way around -- that our world acquires its deepest, most difficult meanings, in relation to the abyss? The underworlds we'll encounter--some cast in the epic tradition; others, modern underworlds of slavery, criminality, racism, prison, or concentration camp--are all recognizably versions of the world above. We'll explore the writing of underworlds as a revisionary, as well as visionary enterprise, sounding the depths for critiques (and satires) of power, authority, divinity, racism, misogyny, or simply everyday life.
- ENG 261/AMS 357: Conspiracy in AmericaHow do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.
- ENG 293/ASA 293: Chinatown USAThis course looks at the construction of "Chinatown" -- as historic reality, geographic formation, architectural invention, and cultural fantasy -- in the heart of America. We will study novels, plays, films, and photography that focus on or use Chinatown as a central backdrop -or even as a conspicuous absence -- in ways that highlight the complex relationship between material history and social imagination when it comes to how America incorporates, or fails to digest, its racial or immigrant "others".
- ENG 300: Junior Seminar in Critical WritingStudents learn to write clear and persuasive criticism in a workshop setting while becoming familiar with a variety of critical practices and research methods. The course prepares students to write the junior paper which is due in April 2022. Each seminar section will pursue its own topic: students are assigned according to choices made during sophomore sign-ins via system outlined below. Required of all English majors.
- ENG 312/MED 312: ChaucerMany challenges we face today are expressed in Chaucer's works but in a form different enough to shake us out of our heads so we can think honestly about what beleaguers human societies. On the one hand, his poetry is unfamiliar--high art from the fourteenth century cast in a language not ours, Middle English. On the other hand, his poetry is familiar, putting before our minds serious subjects we encounter today like military (and police) violence, sexual assault, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, class conflict, political protest, and social autonomy. This Chaucer class is about the politics of art and the art of politics.
- ENG 313/MED 315: Worlds Made with Words: Old English Poems that PerformThis course concentrates on constitutive problems in OE literature: the "making" or "makers" of the OE poetry and its performers. How were these roles shaped and learned? How was performance depicted? What powers does a poem assume when it makes an inanimate object speak? When it stages a sensorium of sound and sight? We'll actively fabricate 21st-century approaches to how words made worlds in this early medieval poetic tradition.
- ENG 314/THR 384: Hope and History: The Poems and Plays of Seamus HeaneyIn his speeches and online presidential campaign, Joe Biden made repeated use of Seamus Heaney's lines about making "hope and history rhyme." Seamus Heaney, who died in August 2013, was rare among contemporary poets in having both a huge public following and the admiration of his peers: both a Wordsworthian romantic and a Joycean realist; an atheist in search of the miraculous; a cosmopolitan with a little patch of remembered earth; a lover of the archaic who could not escape the urgency of contemporary history. This course follows Heaney's rich career, placing him in the context both of modern Ireland and world literature.
- ENG 319/THR 217/GSS 441: Staging Sex in the City of London: From Country Wives to FleabagsThis course charts a dominant motif of British stage comedy from the Restoration -- when all hell broke loose with the return of the monarchy in 1660, the introduction of the actress, and the emergence of professional women playwrights -- until the present day. We'll look at work by men and women celebrated for their always witty but often controversial representations of the sexual/romantic escapades of their contemporaries. Prepare to be disturbed as well as amused. One issue we'll want to consider: Why did men's work become canonical while their female colleagues, equally successful in their own day, were disappeared from the story?
- ENG 320/THR 310: Shakespeare: Toward Hamlet.The first half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the great comedies and histories of the 1590s, culminating in a study of Hamlet.
- ENG 339/COM 342/GSS 438: Topics in 18th-Century Literature: Love Gone WrongShakespeare wrote, "the course of true love never did run smooth" and Freud wrote of the "vicissitudes" of the passions, yet most readers regard heterosexual love stories as transparent, intelligible, and above all inevitable. We will read classic 18th-century novels from England, France, and Germany that show roads to and through the love plot to be rocky and full of impasses and swerves, with no certain endpoint. Such "vicissitudes" mark the very form of the narratives we will encounter. Class will examine issues such as gender fluidity, cross-dressing, queerness, love-madness, violence, repression, and panic.
- ENG 340/ECS 368: Romanticism and the Age of RevolutionsThe Romantic era witnesses a revolution in literary styles and subjects during an age of revolutions...American, French, and heated debates about the rights of men, of women, and the atrocity of the slave trade, and amid, within, and across this, the vital power of imagination. Our study shall be literary aesthetics, formations, and practices, and consideration of ethical thought and moral values. In conflicts of judgment, and how we organize our lives together, writing is a powerful medium of negotiation and reflection. The syllabus invites you to engage its texts along these lines--in conversations, informal postings, and formal essays.
- ENG 351: American Literature: 1865-1930A study of the development of American literature within the context of the shifting social, intellectual, and literary conventions of the period. Emphasis will be on the artistic achievement of writers such as James, Howells, Chesnutt, Crane, Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.
- ENG 357: Topics in American Literature: Henry James and William FaulknerThis course examines the careers of two of America's most accomplished novelists. Manifest differences aside, both authors were obsessed with the ensnaring effects of plot, prompting both to imagine fictional realms that are as much "designs" on the reader as on characters.
- ENG 385: Children's LiteratureA survey of classic texts written for children from the past 200 years in (primarily) England and America. We will examine the development and range of the genre from early alphabet books to recent young adult fiction. We'll try to put ourselves in the position of young readers while also studying the works as adult interpreters, asking such questions as: How do stories written for children reflect and shape the lives of their readers? What can children's literature tell us about the history of reading, or of growing up, or of the imagination itself? In the process we will consider psychological and social questions as well as literary ones.
- ENG 390/COM 392/HUM 390: The Bible as LiteratureThis course will study what it means to read the Bible in a literary way: what literary devices does it contain, and how has it influenced the way we read literature today? What new patterns and meanings emerge? This course will examine the structures and modes of the Biblical books; the formation of the canon and the history of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books; questions of authorship; its literary genres; histories of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary; the redaction, division, and ordering of biblical texts; the cultural, political, and intellectual worlds within which these texts were written.
- ENG 446: The Novel Since 2000The last two decades have ushered in an unprecedented era of change and reflection. From the shifting of political and cultural orders at the turn of the millennium to the global circulation of the internet, human modes of expression have developed in dramatically different ways. We will explore novels written in English from 2000 to the present that reflect on change -- cultural, political, technological, environmental -- and in so doing, consider our position as twenty-first century readers in relation to both the past and the future.
- ENG 523/COM 519: Renaissance Drama: Tragedy: Theory and Practice, 1500-1700In this course, we trace and analyze the ways in which tragic drama was theorized and written in the 16th and 17th centuries. Our focal points are i) the recovery of Artistotle's theory of tragedy and its integration with broader notions of the tragic; ii) the ways in which different tragic writers lent on, appropriated, ignored, and creatively subverted these theoretical developments. Other than reminding ourselves that the relationship between theory and practice is a two-way street, we think hard about the connections between tragic drama and questions of history, human agency, religion, modernity, and secularization.
- ENG 555/GSS 555/LAS 505: American Literary Traditions: The Other America: Caribbean Literature and ThoughtHow do Caribbean writers articulate literary and theoretical imaginaries that shift our thinking about this archipelago of islands, its diaspora, and the globe? How does the Caribbean demand an account of entangled legacies of indigenous decimation, enslavement, colonization, and revolution? This seminar will center what the Caribbean necessitates in thought: relation, ruination, decolonization, environmental precarity, the plantation matrix, and translation. We also pay attention to how Caribbean writers have conceptualized counter-humanisms that shift and texture critical theorizations of race, feminism, and queerness.
- ENG 558: American Poetry: American ElegyThis course examines the literary, social, political, and cultural importance of American mourning poetry. Covering mainly the antebellum period to the present, we explore the expanding role and enduring power of elegy as it evolves across a range of subgenres. Likely topics include deathbed elegies, child elegies, slave elegies, war elegies, lynch elegies, family elegies, eco-elegies, and anti-elegies.
- ENG 563: Poetics: Black Aesthetics: Visuality & Visibility in Contemporary Black PoetryThis course considers how contemporary Black poets have explored & expanded the concept of Black aesthetics the Black Arts Movement first theorized. We focus on texts that reward an interest in how visibility (concerning what can be seen) & visuality (concerning how we process the world in visual terms) operate to produce & make meaning of Blackness. How do oral & aural culture manifest themselves in these works? What is the status of the (visually troubling) Black body in the line of text? What does Black abstraction make visible? We read Black poetry, criticism, cultural studies, & theory to move from these questions to new ones.
- ENG 571/COM 574: Literary and Cultural Theory: Ecological Poetics of the 19th C. AmericasThis course explores how 19th century (mostly) American authors registered the transformation of natural history into the sciences of life, and how attentiveness to the ecological fashioned their ethics. Most of our authors adopted a vitalist and materialist understanding of life, which led them to understand the boundaries of individual phenomena as porous and environmental. Changing their understanding of what the natural is, they proposed a series of cosmological, poetic and ethical responses to the idea that life is common to all creatures and in fact to all phenomena, and that matter is inherently dynamic and vitalized.
- ENG 572/HUM 572: Introduction to Critical Theory: PhenomenologyPhenomenology is a tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to appearances. It is also an epistemological method, committed to perpetual beginning as a way of apprehending the world and our place in it. This course is an introduction to this philosophy of continual introductions, beginning with several of Edmund Husserl's foundational texts, then moving to a multi-week reading of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, alongside recent works of critical phenomenology that engage race, gender, sexuality, and disability.
- ENG 573/COM 580/AAS 573: Problems in Literary Study: Black ModernismsA foundational moment in the history of European modernism in the twentieth century was the discovery of the world of Black others and the use of Blackness as a mechanism for maintaining and sustaining a new style of art. At about the same time, Black writers and artists adopted modernism as the aesthetic that would represent Black subjectivity in a world defined by racial violence. This course has two aims: to explore how black writers and artists in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean responded to high modernism's exoticism and to explore how they adopted and transformed the aesthetic ideology of global modernism.
- ENG 574: Literature and Society: Political Economy, Racial Capitalism, and the EnlightenmentIn this course we look at foundational works of Enlightenment political economy with particular emphasis on how theses on labor and property involve assumptions about, as well as constructions of, gender, kinship, race, and indigeneity. In other words, we trace the development of racial capitalism and examine how theses on human being were inextricable from emerging ideas about markets and value. We pay particular attention to the role of "literary" models in early works of political economy--from Utopia to the Robinsonade--as well as how they anticipated later institutional practices of anthropology and comparative religion.
- ENG 582: Graduate Writing SeminarWhile dissertation seminars invite students to map the territory and the stakes of their thesis, and article workshops tailor writing for specific journals, this seminar focuses on the craft of writing. Our premise is that craft and argument are mutually constitutive and our method is deliberative slow motion, tracking words, sentences, paragraphs with care. The course is run as a writing workshop; we consider questions of voice, pacing, organization, and word choice. Students expected to come prepared with a piece of writing they will work on for 12 weeks.
- ENV 357/AMS 457/GSS 357/ENG 315: Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular CultureThis course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?
- ENV 380/ENG 480/COM 386: Cities, Sea Level Rise and the Environmental HumanitiesThis course explores how cities worldwide will be impacted by sea level rise. Students will consider solutions being put forward to address the impacts, such as managed retreat; hard engineering, such as building sea walls; or soft engineering, such as preserving and restoring natural buffers, be they coral or oyster reefs or mangrove forests. Through global texts engaging the issue of sea level rise, the course considers how ideas, meanings, norms and habituations differ from one location to another and how these differences manifest in and are informed by laws and social practices as well as arts and literature.
- GSS 373/AMS 383/ENG 332: Graphic MemoirAn exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs from the American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, we examine the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.
- GSS 504/ENG 507: Race, Gender and the AnthropoceneWhat does the Anthropocene have to do with gender, race and sexuality? This course explores the ways in which urgent environmental issues intersect with questions of gender, race and sexualities. Exploring films, images and non-fiction writing, we engage themes such as the invention of the wilderness idea; being Black in nature; Indigenous lifeways and land rights; feminist and queer ecologies; animal, tree and plant intelligence; slow violence; the commons; COVID and climate; masculinities, militarization and climate change; gender and environmental justice, and strategies for change.
- HUM 598/CLA 588/ENG 585: Humanistic Perspectives on the Arts: Thinking in Public, Writing for the WorldThis course examines the ever-evolving role of the university-trained scholar in contemporary culture. In the varied ecosystems of contemporary publishing, what are the boundaries between academic and public-facing work? What obligations, if any, do scholars have to engage with the public? How do institutional structures like discipline and field bear on what we choose to write about in non-academic venues? What does it mean, as a scholar, to be "very online"? Through these questions, and others, we attempt a critical and creative evaluation of the paths for scholarship outside, or alongside, traditional venues for academic writing.
- JRN 240/CWR 240/ENG 280: Creative Non-FictionVast differences in power, income and social status divide our society, and these differences are explored deeply in literary non-fiction. In this course students will read masterpieces of non-fiction writing about social inequality and will examine to what extent it is possible for authors to know the struggles of their subjects, and to create empathy for them. Students also will sharpen their own skills at writing non-fiction in both first- and third-person styles: the personal essay, participatory reportage, immersion journalism, reconstructed narrative non-fiction and reflective autobiography.
- SLA 411/RES 411/ENG 441/COM 456: Selected Topics in Russian Literature and Culture: Crosscultural Links between Russian and American Literature & CultureMajor American cultural figures have found inspiration in Russian literary masterpieces. The course explores connections between (1) three Russian writers - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, & Chekhov -. & (2) the multiplicity of ways in which twentieth and twenty-first-century Americans, in their own works, have incorporated, responded to, & reimagined these Russian creations. The main focus is on prose. Some attention to film and drama. We examine dimensions of the works which highlight ethical and societal dilemmas human beings face, the 'big questions' of life, and questions of what makes for a meaningful life.
- THR 308/AMS 307/COM 385/ENG 260: Metatheater, Then and NowIn 1963, Lionel Abel invented the term "metatheater" to discuss self-referential, anti-illusionist devices -- introduced, as he thought, by some Renaissance playwrights -- which had become ubiquitous in the theater of his day. "Very meta!" was soon used to describe almost every play ever written. But some plays are more "meta" than others and the methods and motives of their authors vary considerably. This seminar will spend six weeks focused on Greek, Renaissance, and Modern examples of the genre before turning to contemporary American playwrights who have found new and often jaw-dropping uses for metatheatrics.
- THR 316/ENG 217: Modern Irish Theatre: Oscar Wilde to Martin McDonagh to RiverdanceThis course explores the many different ways in which the whole idea of a distinctively Irish theatre has been transformed every few decades, from Wilde and Shaw's subversions of England, to the search of Yeats and Synge for an authentic rural Ireland, to the often angry critiques of contemporary Ireland by Murphy, Friel and Carr. Plays of the Irish diaspora (O'Neill and McDonagh) are examined in this context. The course will also explore the ways in which ideas of physicality and performance, including the popular spectacle of Riverdance, have conflicted with and challenged Irish theatre's peculiar devotion to poetic language.
- THR 329/ENG 263/GSS 442/MTD 329: A Queer and Mysterious Analysis of William IngeThis course combines queer centered analysis of mid century American Drama and songwriting with student generated research and performance. Using Inge's plays Picnic and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, we will investigate the codes both real and imagined embedded in the work, and the narratives we assume, project on, and long for in the American theatre cannon. Students will do research and build individual work in conversation with these themes as well as participate in workshopping a new production of Dark at the Top of the Stairs.