English (ENGL)
ENGL 0912. Requirement Preparation. (0 Credits)
For Ph.D. and master’s students, registration necessary to maintain continuous enrollment while preparing for a milestone requirement, such as comprehensive exam, master’s thesis, or dissertation submission. Students who are studying for comprehensive examinations while still completing coursework do not need to register for any special status; however, if they are neither registered for coursework nor taking comprehensive examinations during the semester in question, they must register for Requirement Prep.
ENGL 0914. Requirement Preparation in Summer. (0 Credits)
For Ph.D. and Master's students, registration necessary to maintain continuous enrollment while preparing for a milestone requirement during the summer. (e.g., to be used by Ph.D. students after the oral examination/defense and prior to receiving the degree).
ENGL 0930. PhD Comprehensive Examination-English. (0 Credits)
ENGL 0935. Master's Capstone Preparation. (0.5 Credits)
In any semester in which Master's Students or Master's w/Writing Concentration Students are not registered for any credited coursework and in which they have not completed or are completing their Capstone, this .5 credit administrative course is required.
ENGL 0936. Master's Comprehensive Examination-English. (0 Credits)
ENGL 0950. Proposal Development. (1 Credit)
ENGL 0960. Proposal Acceptance. (3 Credits)
ENGL 0970. Dissertation Mentoring - English. (0 Credits)
The English PhD. student is required to register for Dissertation Mentoring, which has a 3 credit fee, the semester after the student's proposal is accepted.
ENGL 1004. Texts and Contexts: Upward Mobility and the Common Good. (3 Credits)
This course will explore Anglo-American literary representations of socio-economic self-transformation by focusing on its inherent tension between mobility and community. Has the fabled path from rags to riches threatened or sustained neighborhoods and nations? What happens to virtue, charity, and social cohesion when the desire for wealth acquisition becomes normative? We will address these and other questions through discussions of a wide range of literary texts, from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr., Ripley. But we will also consider how the pervasive contemporary rhetoric of the “American Dream” in newspapers, magazines, film, and new media negotiates the ideal of upward mobility in relation to such collective ideals, such as mentoring, cooperation, and self-sacrifice.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, EP2, MANR, TC.
ENGL 1101. Composition I. (3 Credits)
Instruction in sentence and paragraph construction, reading comprehension skills and analysis, the basic principles of grammar with an emphasis on diagnosing and solving persistent problems, and principles of argumentation and evidence. Weekly assignments and regular grammar exercises to build confidences and competence in college writing.
ENGL 1102. Composition II. (3 Credits)
Intensive training in the principles of effective expository writing, with an emphasis on sound logic, correct grammar, and persuasive rhetoric. Introduces research techniques, including use of the library, conventions and principles of documentation, analysis of sources, and ethics of scholarly research. Weekly papers will be written and discussed.
ENGL 1501. Imagining New York City in Literature. (3 Credits)
New York City has been the home of some of the most significant U.S. writers and artists. The literature of the city explores and tests the very notion of an American identity, and what it means to be an American. This introductory EP1 course examines literary representations of New York City, exploring topics that include the environment, economic inequality, capitalism, and the changing roles of women, blacks, and workers.
Attributes: AMST, EP1.
ENGL 1800. Internship. (1 or 2 Credits)
Internship.
ENGL 1999. Tutorial. (1 Credit)
Independent research and readings with supervision from a faculty member.
ENGL 2000. Texts and Contexts. (3 Credits)
An introduction to the literary analysis of texts and the cultural and historical contexts within which they are produced and read. Significant class time will be devoted to critical writing and to speaking about literature. Each section of Texts and Contexts will have a focus developed by the individual instructor and expressed in its subtitle. This course fulfills the Core requirements for the second Eloquentia Perfecta seminar.
Attributes: EP2, TC.
Prerequisite: ENGL 1102.
ENGL 2500. Introduction to Creative Writing. (4 Credits)
This class introduces students to the craft of creative writing. Artistic process will be taught as a discipline and a foundational way of thinking that fosters empathy, resilience, and joyful innovation. We’ll study creative writing as a skill that is developed through active practice and literary citizenship. Students will write intensively, read work in multiple genres, and engage in communal workshops. No previous experience is necessary. This course, which is mandatory for all creative writing concentrators, prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 2800. Internship. (2 Credits)
Supervised placement for students interested in work experience.
ENGL 2999. Tutorial. (2 Credits)
Independent research and readings with supervision from a faculty member.
ENGL 3000. Literary Theories. (4 Credits)
This course explores big questions of literary study, questions that we don’t usually slow down to ask, such as: What is literature? Why do we call some texts “literary?” How does language work? And for that matter, how does the human mind work? What are the different ways that we read and interpret literature? What are the most relevant contexts for understanding literature and the broader field of culture, and how do we relate literary and artistic works to those contexts? How do categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, or religion play out in literary form? This course starts from the premise that literary theory is not just about literature, and that its tools are eminently useful in analyzing other cultural phenomena. With this in mind, across the semester we’ll look at theory that informs the ways we read texts, and we’ll look at theory that takes those tools and applies them to cultural objects more broadly. For more information about the particular section of Literary Theories you are signing up for, please look at that class’s “notes” in Banner. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: COLI.
ENGL 3001. Queer Theories. (4 Credits)
An introduction to the academic discipline of queer theory, focusing on foundational thinkers (e.g., Butler, Foucault, Sedgwick, and others) as well as their philosophical and psychoanalytic precursors and interlocutors. The course will also address selected issues currently under discussion in the discipline. These may include the role of activism, the relationship between queer theory and feminism theory, attention to race, and intersections with postcolonial theory. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASHS, ASLT, COLI, DISA, ENRJ, PJGS, PJST, PLUR, WGSS.
ENGL 3002. Queer Iconoclasts: Sexuality, Religion, Race. (4 Credits)
The aim of this course is to interrogate and challenge an assumption that religious communities and queer communities stand in direct opposition to one another. We will investigate citations and reappropriations of religious iconography in queer art and literature from the 20th and 21st centuries in order both to understand the controversies that surrounded these artistic and literary projects and to reimagine literary and artistic experimentation as the site of religious and sexual exploration. Particular attention will be paid to the intersection of sexuality, religion, and race. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, AMCS, ENRJ, PJGS, PJST, PLUR, REST, THEO, WGSS.
ENGL 3003. Introduction to Professional Writing. (4 Credits)
Professional Writing is a writing-intensive course designed to help students understand practices of ethical and effective communication in a range of public, professional, and workplace settings. In particular, it introduces principles of professional communication through a focus on social justice. Emphasizing the application of rhetorical principles to processes of analyzing diverse audiences, designing accessible documents, and composing in culturally sensitive ways, this course will engage participants in a series of individual and collaborative client-based projects that will encourage consideration of how writers use communicative technologies to serve multiple purposes in professional and public contexts, including facilitating justice.
Attributes: ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3006. Nonprofit and Advocacy Writing. (4 Credits)
Nonprofit and Advocacy Writing is an upper division elective designed to help participants understand the professional writing and communication skills as well as the social issues that characterize work in the nonprofit and advocacy sector. As they develop an understanding of the rhetorical ways that nonprofit and advocacy workers communicate and act on behalf of social justice, they will also acquire skills for writing in genres and media commonly employed in such settings, including press releases, newsletters, reports, grant proposals, and more. When the course is run as a Community Engaged Learning course, a significant portion of it (at least 20 hours) will be dedicated to an experiential learning project in partnership with a nonprofit or advocacy organization. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, PJMJ, PJST, PPWD, PPWF.
ENGL 3008. The 19th Century Novel of Manners. (4 Credits)
Courtship, marriage, extramarital affairs, and conflict between social groups are staple ingredients of the “novel of manners”—the term that, for some, designates a distinct subgenre and, for others, serves as a synonym for the realist novel. As we examine the generic traits and thematic concerns of the novel of manners in the long 19th century, we will focus most particularly on “manners,” the elusive concept that lends the subgenre its name. Possible writers include Jane Austen, Frances Burney, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Edith Wharton. We will also spend some time discussing 21st-century perceptions of 19th-century manners and societies they marked, in works such as the hit series "Bridgerton." Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3009. Critical Edge: Writing About the Arts. (4 Credits)
This class is for people with a passion for and strong opinions about movies, books, music, and the theater. We will explore low and high culture, writing features, news stories, interviews, reviews, and opinion pieces. Students will attend performances, gather facts and materials, conduct interviews, and write about everything from live performances to independent film to visual art and contemporary writing. Students will develop interview and research techniques, and we will discuss subjects germane to the creation and viewing of art, including impartiality, originality, intuition, and the difference between being a fan and a critic. Sharing writing in a workshop format, we will focus on structure, coherence, style, and voice. Guest speakers will include professional writers, visual artists, performing artists, and others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3012. Novel, She Wrote. (4 Credits)
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then, “Toni Morrison declares, “you must write it.” The impulse for black female authors to write novels and the diverse manifestations of that impulse will be of primary concern in this course. What compelled black female authors in the second half of the twentieth century to write their first novels? How are themes of sexuality, motherhood, beauty, respectability, and intra-and interracial conflict represented in their texts? In what ways do their novels complement, build upon, and refer back to each other and other works? These are few of the questions we will tackle as we read through the literature. Some of the selected texts will include Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970); Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970); Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982); and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AFAM, ALC, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR, WGSS.
ENGL 3013. Fiction Writing. (4 Credits)
The workshop in the craft of writing fiction, with relevant readings in the game Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3014. Creative Nonfiction Writing. (4 Credits)
A workshop in the craft of creative non-fiction, with relevant readings in the genre. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3015. Poetry Writing. (4 Credits)
A workshop in the craft of writing poetry, with relevant readings in the genre. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3016. Screenwriting Workshop. (4 Credits)
A workshop in the craft of screenwriting, with relevant readings in the genre. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3017. Digital Creative Writing. (4 Credits)
Directed as a workshop, this course will focus on students' writing from the perspective of a producer. We will pay special attention to a variety of media -- digital, social, print -- and the ways they translate to an individual's writing practice. Guest lectures, off-site/online events, and weekly reading will be determined by the instructor and student interests.. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CVW, NMAT, NMDD.
ENGL 3019. Writer's Workshop. (4 Credits)
A creative writing workshop that features peer review of student work and outside literary readings. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3021. The Graphic Novel. (4 Credits)
How can words and images combine to create narratives that exceed the sum of their parts? In this course, we will cover classic and recent examples of comic books and graphic novels to examine various approaches to visual storytelling and sequential art. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, AMST.
ENGL 3024. Poetry and Citizenship. (4 Credits)
Poetry has long had a complicated relationship to citizenship: Plato excluded poets from his ideal city while Frederick Douglass turned to poetry in making arguments for equal rights. What does it mean to be and act as a citizen? Readings will include work by Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich and Myung Mi Kim. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3031. Medieval Monsters. (4 Credits)
St. Augustine once wrote that the word "monster" derived from the Latin word "monstro," to show, implying that monstrous beings were meant to reflect divine creativity. Over time, this word for unusual beings has taken on a more sinister flavor, even within the Middle Ages. This course will explore the medieval taste for the exotic, from ferocious giants and dog-headed men to the peace-loving sciapod. In this course we will examine the discourse of monstrosity as a complex critical lens through which premodern writers asked important questions of race, religion, civic virtue, and human morality. In our study, we will read selections from Pliny, Augustine, and others before moving through a range of medieval texts, including the Beowulf manuscript, medieval romance, and Mandeville's account. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, ENRJ, EP3, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3032. Publishing: Theory and Practice. (4 Credits)
The aim of this course is to develop a clear understanding of the publishing industry, with a focus on innovative practices in form and content. Many classes will feature one or more speakers working today: editors, publishers, authors, agents, marketers, and creators of new forms of publishing online, in print, and elsewhere. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CVW, PPWD.
ENGL 3034. Modern Selves and Science. (4 Credits)
The late-19th and early-20th centuries were marked by developments in science, technology, and political theory that destabilized the ways many people understood themselves. In this course, we will examine how authors like George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf reflected on these developments and offered compelling ways to imagine and challenge the experience of the self in society. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3035. Age of Innocence. (4 Credits)
We tend to imagine certain ages—of humanity or of humans—as ages of innocence. In this course, we will explore how different literary genres (such as fairy tales, dystopian fiction, Romantic poetry, the pastoral, the Bildungsroman) depict innocence as a stage we grow out of or long to return to. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3036. Latin American Short Story. (4 Credits)
Writings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (to name just a few) are some of the treasures of world literature. This course will focus on the short story and novella forms in order to explore as fully as possible the full range of Latin American and Latino literature. Literary geographies will include Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, with special sections on Cuba, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. All readings will be in English. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, AMST, COLI, INST, ISLA, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 3037. US Latinx Literature. (4 Credits)
This course is an opportunity to read and think about Latinx literature in the United States in all its diversity and cultural range. We will read literary texts with special attention to how they handle the messy experiences of cultural difference, economic exploitation, and political conflict. For what are literature and culture made up of but the challenges of life itself? This class will take as axiomatic that any understanding of U.S. life and history will be incomplete without inclusion of the diverse Latinx experience. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3038. Latinx Performance Studies: Image, Fashion, and Politics. (4 Credits)
In this course, students will survey the major theoretical tenets of Latinx performance studies, with a particular focus on issues of image, fashion, and politics. Embodied knowledge is a significant source of Latinx cultural production. As such, we will study gesture, oral storytelling, endurance, and comportment alongside written texts and visual narratives. Working from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, students will compare a variety of media and artistic practices, including decolonial intervention, alternative personae, collaboration, self-image making, drag aesthetics, and future fashion. Students will also practice different kinds of writing related to art and action. Assignments will include an exhibition review, visual analysis, and performance critique. The oral component will be a podcast broadcasted and reviewed by your peers. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 3040. The Stuff of Fiction. (4 Credits)
Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3044. Writing New York(ers). (4 Credits)
In this course, students will develop their reading, writing, and analytical skills through an exploration of the city around us, as represented in the New York publishing scene. We’ll focus on The New Yorker magazine, alongside diverse New York City publications and venues: The Village Voice, New York Amsterdam News, The Forward, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, and others. For our class, New York City’s publishing scene is both common ground and a lens through which to explore our similarities and differences. New York has been shaped by centuries of immigration and emigration, not to mention countless historical, political, and cultural events, and the varied magazines and newspapers, both small and large, embody this diversity. By examining New Yorkers writing about, in, and through New York City, the texts we encounter will both create their own versions of the city and change how we see the city around us. With The New Yorker as our backdrop and inspiration, we will compose our own formal essays and informal, open-ended writing, and we will work toward creating our own versions of New York City as individuals and as a class. The course will include a video essay and experience in designing a podcast, based in part on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This course has no prereqs. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3045. Theory for English Majors. (4 Credits)
This course introduces the English major to debates in literary and critical theory. The goal of the course is to reflect on reading strategies, textual practices, and language itself. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: COLI.
ENGL 3046. Writing for Digital Spaces. (4 Credits)
This is a writing-intensive course that develops students’ understanding of writing beyond print. Students will study and practice composing with the tools, skills, and strategies available for writing online, and they will learn principles of public-facing, online communication by examining and producing popular forms of digital writing across a variety of mediums (social media platforms, websites, blog posts, online videos, advertisements, and many others).
Attributes: PPWD, PPWF.
ENGL 3047. Rhetorics of Resistance and Social Movements. (4 Credits)
This course explores how people pursue social change by employing various modes and methods of persuasion in diverse public spaces. Focusing on theories of public writing and rhetoric as well as interdisciplinary studies of social movements, we will engage with concepts that help explain the persuasive dynamics of historical and contemporary social movements. Accounting for various ethical and other dilemmas faced by activists, including the role of state and institutional power in suppressing protest and resistance, we will consider case studies that illuminate the successes and failures of social movements. Inviting engagement with a range of justice- and rights-based movements—from racial and economic justice to marriage and disability rights—this course also promotes experimentation with a range of rhetorical critical approaches for advancing social causes, shifting public perspectives on issues, and analyzing and producing effective advocacy rhetoric. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJSJ, PJST, PPWD, PPWF.
ENGL 3057. Performance Criticism. (4 Credits)
Performance is everywhere: on our screens, in our streets, in our theaters, and in halls of government. How should we write about these artistic, social, and political performances in order to understand and take stock of our multiply mediated world? In this course, students will explore the many forms of performance criticism published today, from more traditional kinds of theater and film criticism to celebrity studies and the freewheeling culture-writing that centers on political or social performances. A substantial amount of course time will be devoted to class visits from writers, critics, and editors who are engaged in thinking about performance as a socially meaningful practice and who can provide both artistic and professional advice. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a portfolio of writing specifically tailored to the target publications of their choosing. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: PPWD.
ENGL 3059. Creating Dangerously: Writing Across Conflict Zones. (4 Credits)
This course encourages students to think and write about injustice and oppression around the world. How do you make a life in conditions of devastating conflict? How do you write under a state that seeks to undermine and repress your work? We will read, discuss, and respond to works of contemporary authors facing such challenges in a variety of global conflict zones. Examples could include writers responding to the refugee crisis in Syria and beyond its borders; ongoing conflicts in Central Africa; internal struggles in Mexico, Central America, and the US-Mexican border region; the war between Ukraine and Russia; tensions in Israel and Palestine; and the emergence of repressive regimes in Turkey, Hungary, and the Philippines, among other places. The course will also involve collaboration with PEN America, an organization founded in 1922 and dedicated to the protection of free speech and human rights. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, GLBL, HCWL, HUST, INST, PJST, PJWT.
ENGL 3062. Prose Poetry/Flash Fiction. (4 Credits)
A workshop of prose poetry and flash fiction. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3067. Contemporary Women Poets. (4 Credits)
In this course, students will read poetry written by women poets in the 20th and 21st centuries with a focus on the imaginative representation of women's lived experience. We will read the work of poets who address the themes of feminine embodiment and sexuality, women's roles as mothers and daughters, women's work (both professional and domestic), and the role poetry plays in enabling women to discover a language to contain their experience. Among the (possible) poets we will read are Sylvial Plath, Ann Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Anna Swir, Adrienne Rich, Marie Ponsot, Eavan Boland, Louise Erdrich, Kate Daniels, Mary Karr and A.E. Stallings. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, IRST, PJGS, PJST.
ENGL 3068. Writing London: Outsiders. (4 Credits)
From the London of Charles Dickens, teeming with "Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers and vagabonds of every low grade,” to Monica Ali’s Bangladeshi’s living desperate lives behind the “net curtains” of Brick Lane, London has always inspired fiction about outsiders finding their feet in this vast metropolis. This course invites you to discover writers who have used London as a setting or as a controlling metaphor to create stories about immigrants and other outsiders; and to use field trips as an inspiration to write your own stories. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CVW, ENRJ, PJSJ, PJST.
ENGL 3071. Family Matters: Memoir. (4 Credits)
We all have stories about family, but how do you shape this charged material into good narrative? Mary Karr, the celebrated author of three memoirs, writes that "The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher." In this course, students will have the chance to try their hands at some of the most potent history anyone can tackle -- their own. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3075. Pride & Prejudice: An Examination of Black Britain and the Problem of Belonging. (4 Credits)
In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the main characters estimate themselves on their pride (sense of self-worth) and their prejudice (quickness of judgment about others). Beyond being a love story, the novel depicts how our engrained value systems can, through human connection, change. It is therefore a novel about how we perceive ourselves and perceive those others who are radically different to us. In “Pride and Prejudice,” the difference is one of class. In this course we will be looking at difference as race and religion. It is a story about modern Black Britain. When, in the opening of the 2012 Olympics, Danny Boyle showcased what he felt Britain should be proud of, he brought out a socially inclusive narrative: the National Health system, Britain’s support of justice, it’s racial and ethnic diversity. Historically, however, Britain prides itself on is something other than this: Empire, its culture, its museums, its royal family and its stately homes. These have a very different meaning for the immigrants from former British colonial states who have made Britain their home. The British story of immigration is very different to the American story. The first wave of modern immigration, in the ’40s and ’50s, was informed by colonialism. Those living in the former colonies had a legal right to take up residence in Britain. They were needed—often to man the underbelly structure of society (buses, trains, factories)—but that did not mean they were wanted. Some of those coming to live in Britain from abroad not only thought it was the promised land. They thought of Britain as the mother land. Reality was, in most cases, disturbingly different. Colonialism, and its brutality, is not taught in British schools. The wealth of Britain during the industrial revolution and subsequently, is often thought to have emerged single-handedly from a strong Protestant ethic of diligence. That this wealth was built on the debris of colonial states is not common knowledge. Nor is the story of Britain’s slave trade. In recent years, three key events have raised race to a central political platform: - The rise of British Islamism - The Black Lives Matter campaign - Brexit This will be an inter-disciplinary course using literary, theoretical, and historical texts, as well as films and music to try and understand the theme of pride and prejudice in modern Britain. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3076. Public Argumentation. (4 Credits)
This course surveys public argumentation strategies and their uses across diverse media. In addition to studying how traditional arguments work, we will explore how environment, bodily disposition, and psychology impact the way different groups argue, and how these practices inform different modes of public communication. The course is organized into four units: The first tackles traditional argumentation theory; the second addresses spatial, material, and embodied argumentation; the third addresses argumentation strategies employed in conspiracy theories; and the fourth explores protest songs and other sonic forms of public argument. Students will engage local and national arguments, write short response papers, and deliver group presentations. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: PPWD, PPWF.
ENGL 3077. Writing for Public Policy. (4 Credits)
Writing for Public Policy explores the complexities of writing for public policy in contemporary urban, digital, and social environments. Accentuating the use of rhetorical approaches to understand the aims and outcomes of public policy, this course invites students to consider the many ways that public policy professionals utilize written communicative modalities to address diverse audiences, including government agencies, advocacy groups, think tanks, policy institutes, and consulting firms. A series of writing projects will introduce students to real-world forms and formats relevant to careers in public policy writing, e.g., policy briefs, white papers, policy memos, news releases, one-pagers, and others. Projects may address a range of topics, including but not limited to housing policy, education policy, economic development, community development, health policy, and more. As students practice strategies for anticipating the needs of stakeholders, develop evidence-based arguments, craft persuasive content, design accessible documents, and more, they will come to understand how effective, evidence-based policy writing can inform public action and effect social change. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: PPWD, PPWF.
ENGL 3087. Narratives of Mind, Brain, and Self. (4 Credits)
This is an honors seminar for students in the School of Professional and Continuing Studies. In the opening lines of "Introduction to Consciousness," Arne Dietrich claims that the material he covers on cognitive neuroscience is disturbing because what is “at stake is nothing less than the nature of our souls.” Far from unusual, this mixing of scientific and spiritual terminologies is endemic to discourses over time about minds and brains. At least since the 1980s, neuroscientists have been writing books for nonspecialists and calling for cross-disciplinary discussions of the implications of their new research. This course will trace the conversation back to the century when advanced research on the brain necessitated creating the new term neurology. Beginning with 17th-century automata and brain imaging (drawn by the great architect Christopher Wren), this course will examine narratives of brains and minds in philosophic, literary, scientific, and legal texts, and end with a discussion of popular films that attempt to represent consciousness. At every point, students will be asked to consider the ethical questions arising at the nexus of narrative techniques and scientific technologies. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
ENGL 3088. Medieval Britain: History and Prophecy. (4 Credits)
In Medieval Britain: History and Prophecy, we will explore the intimate relationship between historical narrative and prophetic vision in medieval British literature. We will examine how medieval texts not only reflect but also shape the cultural and political landscapes of their time, blurring the lines between history and prophecy, past and future. We will read foundational works such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historiae Brittaniae, which reimagines Britain's past with prophetic undertones from Merlin; the Welsh poem “Armes Prydein Vawr,” which envisions a future Britain, united against the English; and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, where history and legend intertwine in the enduring mythos of King Arthur, as one of the first books printed in England. Through these texts, we will examine how medieval authors used prophecy to comment on contemporary issues as well as influence national identities. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3100. Medieval Literature. (4 Credits)
A survey of medieval literature. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3101. Apocalyptic Representation Before 1800. (4 Credits)
Today we often think of the end of the world in scientific contexts: climate change, nuclear and other types of environmental catastrophes, alien or machine annihilation. But for most of human history, the end times were thought of in exclusively theological terms. When and how and why did these sometimes competitive, sometime overlapping frameworks for imagining our end develop? This course will look for answers in early modern and 18th-century apocalyptic representations. Among the authors we will consider are, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Jonathan Swift, Isaac Newton, and Mary Shelley. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3102. Medieval Drama. (4 Credits)
Medieval Drama offers a study into one of the most vibrant forms of the pre-modern period, offering us a vantage point from which to view medieval ideas about war, sex, religion, life and death. As expected, some sources were closely controlled and curated, such as the Christian liturgy itself and the short dramatic tropes, like the Quem quaeritis, which would expand on the scriptural narrative. Yet other, less formal and popularly organized pieces such as the amazing cycle plays of the late medieval period show a remarkable involvement of everyday people, as the trade guilds work to translate the story of creation to the Apocalypse into a relatable experience. Studying this span of history allows us to consider drama’s origins and changing cultural meanings. Using selected highlights, this course will include the medieval morality plays, such as “Mankind” and “Every-man,” along with biblical plays represented in selections from the York, Towneley, and Chester cycles. Having looked at these snapshots of early and late medieval drama, we will complete the course with a glimpse of the Early Modern, where plays such as “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus” will show us how the plays produced in the age of Shakespeare both reflected and rejected the medievalisms which formed their very origins.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3103. Early English Drama. (4 Credits)
English drama from its origin in the Middle Ages to the beginning of Renaissance drama in the early Tudor period. Mystery plays. Moralities (including Everyman) and interludes. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, MVLI, MVST, RSCS.
ENGL 3104. Medieval English Blackness?. (4 Credits)
This course poses a question: How can we talk about blackness in the English late Middle Ages (c. 1350 to 1500)? Through a range of readings in medieval texts, contemporary Black literature, and critical scholarship, we will entertain this question in at least three ways: 1) as an interrogation of possibility—how are we able to talk about blackness during this period, before the emergence of the modern concept of race? 2) as a prompt to describe—what did blackness mean during this period, and how does this square with what it means now? and 3) as a political intervention—how does critical race studies transform the way we read medieval literature, and how can medieval literature shed new light on modern convictions about race? Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, ENRJ, MVLI, MVST, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3105. "Game of Thrones" and the Modern Medieval. (4 Credits)
From "Game of Thrones" and "The Witcher" to classics like "A Knight's Tale," popular culture brings the medieval world forward for contemporary audiences. But before the Starks and Lannisters were the Houses of York and Lancaster. In fact, medieval England witnessed a series of social and political upheavals, from the Black Death to the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation, all of which events writers of the day responded to and reimagined in creative ways. In this class, we will read both medieval works of literature and recent works of medieval fantasy to understand the connections between them. We will also examine how our more recent stories subvert simplistic fantasy tropes and deploy the Middle Ages to explore key political and ethical questions of the present. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3106. After the Apocalypse. (4 Credits)
In this course, we will conduct close readings of post-apocalyptic short stories, novels, and films to think about how they depict the societies, places, histories, and human/non-human worlds that emerge from the destruction of the world. With special attention to the dynamics and theories of disability, race, gender, and monstrosity, we will discuss how representations of apocalyptic futures shift in response to changing social and historical conditions, including how our own multicultural world has changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will be especially interested in the correlation between the causes of the apocalypse and how that event gives shape to the author's vision of the world that emerges after the catastrophe. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, DISA, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3107. Chaucer. (4 Credits)
Reading and analysis of The Canterbury Tales and other major poems. This course will examine Chaucer's major work, The Canterbury Tales, as well as his earlier love poems. We will be spending most of the semester on the Canterbury Tales so that we can explore the range of Chaucer's writings-his romances, bawdy stories, moral tales, and saints' lives. There will be two main goals: to pay close attention to Chaucer's poetry (and, therefore, to become familiar with Middle English) and to discuss the larger concerns to which Chaucer returned again and again-the position of women, social disruption, religious belief, the politics of the court, and the challenge of writing. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3108. Imaginary Travelers. (4 Credits)
Books, shows, and films about traveling have always been popular, but perhaps never more so than in the 18th century. Our class will take a close look at travelers who existed only in authors’ imaginations and changed the way we think about travel and the travel narrative. Where could these travelers go? What might they encounter? The sky was the limit (and sometimes the destination). Along our journey, we will visit the moon, sail alongside the regularly lost Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s "Gulliver's Travels," and visit Bath, England, with Tobias Smollett’s constantly cranky Matthew Bramble and his entourage. Finally, we will travel through time with more contemporary voyagers, including Dana from Octavia Butler’s "Kindred" and Dr. Who. Our focus will be on how these works of imaginary travel help us reconceive the world and our place in it. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3109. Arthurian Literature. (4 Credits)
Readings will include excerpts from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon on the origins of the idea of Arthur. Later we will read Chretien De Troyes*Lancelot(The Knight of the Cart)*, part of the *Alliterative Morte Arthure*, and the conclusion to Thomas Malory's *Le Morte Arthur* Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3110. Satire and Society. (4 Credits)
Laughter and comedy have been used for centuries to point out troubling societal issues. By considering everything from the plays of the ancient Greeks and the comedic dramas of the Restoration period to contemporary mockumentaries, this course will track the progress and effects of comedic satire. How does laughter help us transform society? How can satire be used to elicit real, lasting change? How does satire navigate through systems set in place to monitor and restrict free speech? These are some of the questions we will be considering throughout the course. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3111. Medieval Romance and Adventure. (4 Credits)
Quests, moral dilemmas, divided loyalties, violence, and love: medieval narratives of romance and adventure have got them all, plus dragons. This course introduces you to the medieval genre that gave rise to the modern novel and launched a thousand prestige cable series. The cross-cultural reading list could include readings in late medieval English and translated from Welsh, French, German, Arabic, and Persian. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, EP3, MVLI, MVST, WGSS.
ENGL 3112. The Medieval North: Vikings, Saxons, and Dragons. (4 Credits)
This course will investigate Old English and Old Norse literature in translation. The medieval northern world in which this literature was written and takes place was on the margins of Europe, but many of the legendary myths and stories from this world have come to dominate our perception of the Middle Ages. In this course, we will read their epic literature filled with vikings, berserkers, trolls, and dragons, and we will consider the ways in which the medieval North remains politically and culturally relevant to this day. We will ask questions like, how is the North conceptualized in opposition to other geographical regions in their literature? How do the authors conceive of their own marginality? What is the legacy of the medieval North, and why is it so politicized today? How do medieval authors explore their own mythological and legendary history, and how do we in the 21st century continue to grapple with it? Potential texts include the Poetic Edda, the Beowulf manuscript, The Wanderer, the Saga of the Volsungs, Egil’s saga, and the Vínland sagas, as well as texts from modern authors like Halldór Laxness and Gerður Kristný. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3113. Introduction to Old English. (4 Credits)
An introduction to the language of Old English and some of the early literary works composed in that language. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLA, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3114. The (Medieval) Walking Dead. (4 Credits)
Ranging from stories of undead armies in "Branwen, Daughter of Llyr" to eternally-damned 'zombie' knights in Perlesvaus, and from genres varying from chronicle to romance, this course explores the cultural significance of medieval 'zombies,' revenants, spirits, and other beings that we would classify as 'undead,' in order to understand how such monsters might relate to medieval concerns about living, death, dying, and the afterlife. How do the living relate to the dead in the Middle Ages? What happens to bodies and souls after death? How do concerns about morality and living affect the person in the afterlife?.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3115. Medieval Women Writers. (4 Credits)
We will begin with the autobiographical account of Perpetua, Roman martyr, and then we will look at the plays of Hroswitha, a Saxon nun, the biography of Christina of Markyate, an Englishwoman who rejected marriage for life as a solitary, the romantic lyrics of the female troubadours, short excerpts from the English mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan's Treasure of the City of Ladies, and finally the daily letters of the women of the Paston family (xvth century). Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, MVLI, MVST, WGSS.
ENGL 3121. The Pearl Poet and His Book. (4 Credits)
In this course, we will study intensively some of the greatest poems written in Middle English, all by the anonymous 14th century poet known as the Pearl or Gawain Poet, all contained in a single manuscript, Cotton Neo A.x. We will learn about the art of medieval bookmarking and illustration through hands-on work with the manuscript's digital facsimile, weigh in on intense scholarly debates surrounding the book's four poems (Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness, the crown jewels of the Alliterative Revival), and read other works possibly attributed to this author (St. Erkenwald) to ask critical questions about the formation, and expansion, of literary canons. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3122. Extinction. (4 Credits)
We are in the middle of a “sixth extinction,” a large-scale disappearance of life caused by human activity. How did we—human beings, other beings, and planet Earth—get here? And can the damage be reversed? This course will examine works of literature and art from the 16th century to the present that shed light on our relationship to nature and how that relationship has changed over time, particularly during periods of colonization, imperial and global expansion, and industrialization. At the same time, we will look at works that have taken the threat of extinction as an opportunity to think urgently and creatively about the future. We will focus especially on efforts by writers, artists, scientists, and others to document and conserve biodiversity, pursue “de-extinction,” and imagine new ways of life in a post-extinction world. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, ENRJ, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3123. Surviving the Barbarians in Early Medieval Britain. (4 Credits)
This course explores the literature of ancient and early medieval Britain from the age of the Roman Empire to the time of "Beowulf." It considers the contact and conflict between long-resident populations like the Britons and Picts and invaders like the Romans and the Saxons—groups who would be subjected to their own invasions later. How did certain groups come to view others as "barbarians," and what is like to grapple with that label? This course will introduce students to the changing, material culture of Britain and to several postcolonial perspectives on the medieval evidence. Readings will be translated from Latin, Old and Middle Welsh, Old English, and Old Norse. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, ENRJ, IRST, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3125. Beowulf in Old English. (4 Credits)
This course will involve close reading of Beowulf and related texts in the original, as well as discussion of critical approaches to the poem from romanticism to the present. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3127. Dreams in Middle Ages. (4 Credits)
Much medieval literature presents itself as dream-vision, and this course examines the imaginative possibilities the vision-form presents, and which medieval authors exploit for profit and delight. In making sense of medieval dream worlds, we shall look at both medieval and modern theories of dreams and dreaming. We shall begin by reading, in translation, “The Romance of the Rose,” one of the most influential dream visions of the Middle Ages, and as we read it—and works by Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl-poet, and Julian of Norwich, texts that investigate secular and spiritual love and loss, allegory, psychology, and the human struggle for existence—we shall come to appreciate the diversity, literary and philosophical complexity, and beauty of the medieval dream vision. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3131. Medieval Tolerance and Intolerance. (4 Credits)
Studies medieval literary texts for their representations of various peoples, ethnicities, beliefs, relationships, models of justice etc. Taught in the original (for some medieval English texts)and in translation. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3134. Love in the Middle Ages. (4 Credits)
This course will treat the rules for love written by the 12th century author Andreas Capellanus, together with the work of his Roman predecessor Ovid. Then we will examine the way love was experienced in Marie de France’s short stories (lais), will read the real life letters of Abelard and his beloved Heloise, and will discuss same-sex friendship/love. The course will conclude with Arthurian narratives by Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory and others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, MVLI, MVST, WGSS.
ENGL 3135. Irish and British High Medieval Literature: Connections and Comparisons. (4 Credits)
This course covers the literature of the period 1000 to 1330 in England, Wales, Ireland, and Northern France in the context of spiritual reform, artistic innovation, political consolidation, and cultural exchange. Readings will include selections from all the major genres of high medieval literature: Arthurian romance and other courtly fictions, history and saga, the outrageous lives and afterlives of the saints, and lyric poetry in English and translated from Latin, Welsh, Irish, and French. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, IRST, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3136. Medieval Mystics. (4 Credits)
During a Middle Ages where Catholic Christianity informed virtually all aspects of public and private life, the claim to genuine mystical experience—that is, the claim to direct, unmediated experience of God—could not have carried higher stakes. Starting with foundational texts, we will read the synaesthetic ecstasies of maverick hermit Richard Rolle, the regimented monastic instruction of Walter Hilton, and the complex language games of The Cloud of Unknowing; we will unravel one of the great, gem-like masterpieces of the Alliterative Revival, the anonymous Pearl, probe the intersections of gender, text, and faith in the writings of Julian of Norwich (the first female writer in English) and Margery Kempe (the first autobiographer in English), and examine mysticism’s secular dimension in Malory’s telling of the Quest for the Holy Grail. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, MVLI, MVST, REST.
ENGL 3137. World Cinema Masterpieces. (4 Credits)
World Cinema Masterpieces provides a close analysis of style, narrative structure and visual texture in selected masterworks of major European, Asian and American directors. Directors under consideration include: Renoir, Carne, Lang, Welles, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Bresson, Kurosawa, Ray, Bergman, Rossellini, Fellini, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Fassbinder and Altman. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASAM, INST, ISEU, ISIN.
ENGL 3138. Late Modernism. (4 Credits)
Sandwiched between high modernism of the 1910’s and 20’s and the postmodern turn, texts produced between the 1930’s and 60’s often fall out of accounts of twentieth century literature. In this class, we will interrogate critical assumptions surrounding ideas about “late modernism,” and how re-invention and disenchantment can complicate and enrich our understanding of literary modernism. Our readings will include late works by writers who contributed to the first wave of modernist writing, as well as those by individuals whose careers began in its aftermath. Possible authors include: Jean Rhys, H.D. , Samuel Beckett, Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes, Paul Celan, W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce David Jones, T.S. Eliot, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and George Oppen. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI.
ENGL 3140. Myth of the Hero: Medieval Memory. (4 Credits)
Scholar Umberto Eco once compared the Greek gods to the superheroes of our present day. Yet our own cultural understanding of what a hero is varies, ranging from Zeus to Catwoman and everything in between. This course will explore the development of the concept of the hero, beginning in the pre-modern era with Beowulf. We focus on the works of the eleventh through sixteenth centuries as time periods wherein the concept of the hero changed most dramatically, and the resulting ideas continue to drive what many twenty-first-century societies still consider “heroic” today. In the spirit of theEloquentia Perfecta seminar, of which this course is a part, our studies will involve many speaking and writing opportunities. To help you create this content and generate ideas, we will study the cultural contexts of the hero, as well as those shared characteristics that seem to set the hero apart: otherworldly backgrounds, bodies & minds. This will be an interactive class, arrive prepared to discuss/debate issues of interest. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3143. World Cinema Masterpieces, 1960-1980. (4 Credits)
World Cinema Masterpieces, 1960-1980 explores major works of the French New Wave, expressionism, surrealism, epic, and New German cinema--all produced during a 20-year period of extraordinary diversity and experiment. Among the European, North American, and Asian directors we will consider are: Truffaut, Rohmer, Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Antonioni, Teshigahara, Bergman, Kubrick, Fassbinder, and Malik. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASAM, COLI.
ENGL 3144. Other Worlds. (4 Credits)
This course will explore different kinds of “Other Worlds” in medieval literature, from visions of heaven and to voyages into supernatural worlds. We will analyze how these texts use spatial distance and difference to explore social relations and identities and even to subvert established ideas. The syllabus will include selections from the Lays of Marie de France and the Middle English Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish the semester by looking at how the medieval is re-imagined as an “other world” in modern fantasy literature. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3145. Medieval Love in Comparison: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Perspectives. (4 Credits)
The concept of romantic love preoccupies contemporary society and art, as it has done for hundreds of years. Ideas of romantic love have their roots in the literature and ideas of medieval Muslims, Jews, and Christians, who were themselves responding to even earlier ideas about love and sex. In this class, we will ask: What were the discourses of love among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Middle Ages, and how do they impinge on our understanding of love in the present? Readings will include selections from classical poetry, the Bible, and medieval poetry in English or translated from Latin, Occitan, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, GLBL, JWST, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3146. Science and Magic in Medieval Literature. (4 Credits)
This course considers the entanglements of language, literature, and knowledge about the natural world during the Middle Ages. We will look at medieval practices of what we would come to call natural and biological science, consider medieval understandings of nature's "occult" power, and explore medieval literature about spells, wonders, witches, and demons. By the course's end, students will better understand the connections between language, culture, and scientific facts, and they will have learned about the long history of magic in the Middle Ages. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 3147. Supernatural Stories. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the appearance of the supernatural in works of literature and art, including short fiction, novels, poems, plays, films, and TV shows. Besides terror and horror, what other emotions and reactions have authors tried to evoke? Why are we attracted to stories about the supernatural? Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3148. Science Fiction and Fictional Science. (4 Credits)
How real is the "science" in science fiction? How firm is the boundary between fact and fantasy, the real and the unreal? In this course, we will examine historical and contemporary works that blur the boundary between science and fiction by representing, critiquing, and testing the limits of the latest scientific discoveries of their periods. By engaging with a wide range of fictional works, this course explores the different ways science gets represented in popular culture and considers how fictional works have been used to promote or impede the acceptance of scientific facts. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3149. A World of Their Own: Women in Science Fiction. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the contributions women have made to the science fiction genre, both as authors and characters. From Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece Frankenstein to more contemporary works, such as Octavia Butler's Kindred, Ling Ma's Severance, and leading characters of popular shows like The Expanse, we will explore the multidimensional dystopian, utopian, and Afrofuturistic worlds created by women writers and characters of science fiction. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3151. Metaphysical Poets: Radicals and the Poetic Tradition. (4 Credits)
This course deals with Donne and his followers and their radical divergence from the standard use of metaphor in the Renaissance and early 17th Century. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3152. Race and Religion in Literature: Beowulf to Wuthering Heights. (4 Credits)
How can we talk about depictions of difference in literature? We will attend to this question by reading texts depicting racial and religious difference alongside critical race studies to examine the logic and paradoxes of difference. Texts will include "Beowulf," Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale” and “Prioress’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s "Othello," Marlowe’s "The Jew of Malta," and Emily Brontë’s "Wuthering Heights." Critics discussed will include Geraldine Heng, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Toni Morrison. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, PJRC, PJST, REST.
ENGL 3203. Streets/Gardens/Magical Worlds: Space and Place. (4 Credits)
How do we shape places, and how are we shaped by them? In this course, we will consider places ranging from city streets to gardens and magical spaces. We also will focus primarily on imaginative writings from the early modern or Renaissance period, but we will consider select texts from other periods. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3206. Shakespeare. (4 Credits)
In this course, students will study Shakespeare's poetry and plays in relation to the Renaissance and 21st-century concerns and ideologies. Emphasis will be on Shakespeare and his works as they are read and constructed in regard to power, class, gender, and literary aesthetics. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD.
ENGL 3207. Milton. (4 Credits)
A survey of the major poetry and prose of John Milton with strong emphasis on Paradise Lost. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, REST, RSCS.
ENGL 3209. Ecoliterature from Milton to Today. (4 Credits)
Visions of paradise on Earth and sublime nature alongside bleak landscapes devoid of life. Dreams of plenitude juxtaposed with the sober reality of resource extraction and dearth. Ideas of stewardship and coexistence clashing with the drive for domination and profit. In the writings of Milton and the inheritors of his formidable legacy, from the Romantics to 21st-century ecocritics, such thinking is a call to action that, in the worsening climate crisis, we cannot afford to ignore. What ethics and sense of justice informs it? And how can it help us to reimagine our place in nature as well as our relationships with one another? Such questions will guide us toward our own visions of a hopeful, balanced future. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3221. Shakespeare's History Plays. (4 Credits)
Shakespeare’s first great hit was a series of history plays about the kings who ruled, and the wars they waged, a century and more before his birth. The eight plays produced (Harry Potter-style) over the course of eight years, gave London audiences then-and will give us now-a chance to watch Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare: to see him learn how to pack plays with a pleasure, impact, and amazement, a scene by scene and line by line, with a density and intensity no playwright before or since has ever managed to match. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3222. Shakespeare and Popular Culture. (4 Credits)
Shakespeare: the name is now associated with high, even elitist, art, so it's easy to forget that he was mostly writing for a medium of popular entertainment: the public theater. In this course, we'll consider Shakespeare as popular culture in his own day alongside reimaginings of Shakespeare in popular culture today, including films, television series, music, graphic novels, YouTube and TikTok videos, and more. Throughout, we'll consider how and why he came to be a global icon and why many of the myths and cliches surrounding his work fail to do justice to the nuances and complexities of both Shakespeare and popular culture. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD.
ENGL 3226. Stage Vengeance. (4 Credits)
For reasons intriguing to think about, playwrights and playgoers have been obsessed with acts of vengeance from Ancient Greece through New York yesterday. We’ll mull the reasons as we track the acts through three epochs: Ancient Greece, Elizabethan London, and present-day New York. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3227. Early Modern Lyric Poetry. (4 Credits)
Poems from the early modern era, sometimes known as the Renaissance, are often described as among the best lyrics in the English language. We will devote considerable energy to close, careful readings of them, focusing on both Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries, as well as a few related twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. In doing so, we will consider how this poetry experiments with genres like the sonnet, sound effects, and many other poetic devices. We will also consider fascinating questions about language, art, gender, sexual and romantic desire, class, and religious and political turmoil that these poems raise. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3230. Early Renaissance Poetry. (4 Credits)
Renaissance poetry is marked by an extraordinary generic versatility, topical daring, and rhetorical dexterity; it raises many fascinating questions regarding language, aesthetics, nationalism, gender relations, sexual and romantic desire, status and rank, and religious and political turmoil. This course will trace such questions by focusing on genres such as the sonnet, the epyllion, the eclogue, and others. Although we will engage the historical and cultural context of Renaissance England where appropriate, this is not a history course; our primary energies will be devoted to close, careful readings of the language, form, and style of the poems themselves. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3234. A Midsummer Night's Dream. (4 Credits)
This course gives students the opportunity to spend an entire semester focusing intensively on one of Shakespeare's most enduring, and endearing plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream. We will begin with a slow reading of the play itself, then move both backward (to sources in Ovid and Chaucer) and forward (to important critical studies as well as various musical, theatrical cinematic, and novelistic adaptations, including Shakespeare's own revisiting of the material, late in his career, in The Two Noble Kinsmen). Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3235. Dangerous Women. (4 Credits)
"Dangerous women"—the magical, the defiant, and the co-opters of masculine roles—are everywhere in early modern literature. How do they defy conventions and shatter norms? How are they handled by writers, and how do their characters resonate with us? In this course, using the idea of dangerous women as our rubric, we will trace their appearance in literary history and contemporary works of literature and film. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, PJGS, PJST.
ENGL 3239. The Rise of the Novel. (4 Credits)
Following a century of civil wars, something very curious happens in England: Novels appear. People write them, publish them, read them and, most of all debate furiously about what novels are. In this course we will look at the rise of the novel in England, asking: Where did novels come from? Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3241. Immigrant Imaginaries. (4 Credits)
Starting in the 20th century, we will study texts by various kinds of immigrants to explore the relationship between migration, race, and identity. We will examine how colonial expansion and evolving notions of race have shaped histories of migration. Focusing on texts from different global contexts, this course will consider the experiences of diverse migrants—white settlers living in colonized territories, refugees fleeing threatening conditions, second- and third-generation immigrants—to navigate the ways in which migrants conceptualize home, nationality, and belonging. Authors may include Katherine Mansfield, Rudyard Kipling, E.M Forster, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3242. University Life in Text and Film. (4 Credits)
This course turns to literary and film texts centered on university life as a way of understanding contemporary debates about identity formation. Special attention will be paid to the place of racial and social justice issues, and the ways that racial, ethnic, and social minorities have (or have not) found a place within higher education. Texts up for consideration include Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus,” the films “Animal House” and “P.C.U.”, and more. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ.
ENGL 3243. Contemporary Asian Fiction. (4 Credits)
In this course, we will explore literature, cinema, and other contemporary Asian cultural productions and examine the literary forms and politics of contemporary Asian storytellers. We will consider the differences and overlaps in the ways writers have found to explore issues of race, sexuality, memory, citizenship, and belonging. We will investigate how writers surprise readers and how they question and innovate ways of thinking about these issues. Authors may include Akil Kumarasamy, Kevin Jared Hosain, Han Kang, Sanjana Thakur, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ.
ENGL 3247. NYC Latinx Literature. (4 Credits)
This course is about Latinx literature in NYC in all its diversity and cultural range. We will read stories, poems, and plays with special attention to how they describe the range of cultural differences, economic exploitation, and political conflicts in NYC. This class will appreciate that any understanding of NYC life and history would be incomplete without the inclusion of the diverse Latinx experience. There will be food, field trips, and music. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ.
ENGL 3306. Jonathan Swift and the Art of Satire. (4 Credits)
This course is an introduction to the art and nature of satire using the works of Jonathan Swift as the prime material for study. In addition to Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, and A Modest Proposal, we will consider select works from the long satiric tradition as well as works by his contemporaries, including Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, John Gay, and Jane Collier. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, IRST.
ENGL 3311. Opening Heads: Writing About Minds and Brains Before 1800. (4 Credits)
This course reads literary representations of minds and brains within the context of early-modern neurology and some major concepts in current cognitive theory. The literary authors considered may include Milton, Marvell, Swift, Finch, Addison, Pope, Sterne, Austen, and the Scriblerians. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3315. Laugh. Crv. Hum. Quake. (4 Credits)
Over the course of two centuries. British playwrights and players hit upon a huge new panoply of ways to trigger in their audiences the responses tagged above; many of their methods are still at work in the entertainments we seek and savor now. By close readings of the plays and their contexts (cultural, theatrical, social, political) we’ll track the development of those techniques, seeking to make sense of how they worked and why they matter. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENHD.
ENGL 3318. Early Women Novelists. (4 Credits)
This course examines the rise of female novelists in early modern England. We focus on women’s novels because they were—and still are—too often neglected. At the same time, though, we need to think critically about the problems of organizing a course around the authors’ sex. Indeed, we need to think critically about the categorical assumptions raised by this course’s very title. Above all, our goal is to develop rigorous, historically sensitive, close readings of each novel, focusing especially on problems of slavery, race, gender, and class. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, ENRJ, WGSS.
ENGL 3319. Plays and Players: 1600-1700. (4 Credits)
Beginning in the 1660's, the stage mirrored the world in ways unprecedented: new performers (actresses trod the boards for the first time ever); new protagonists (middle-class as well as aristocratic); new shapes of comedy and lighting; new styles of acting; and new audiences keen to absorb, assess, and gossip about whatever transpired on stage, in the stalls, and behind the scenes. We'll investigate all this innovation, through play texts, performances (live and recorded), and all the modes of writing (diaries, letters, autobiographies, reviews)by which spectators sought to preserve the evanescent but often spellbinding experience of going to a play. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3329. Plays and Players, 1700-1800. (4 Credits)
During the 1700s, the London world of entertainment changed in directions that now look, from our vantage, both long familiar and rather strange. The century ushered in the first feel-good comedies, calculated to make their audience cry and laugh by turn; the first exaltation of Shakespeare as more divinity than mere playwright; the first docudramas; the first attempts to record performances for posterity; the first theatrical superstars; and all the elaborate apparatus that sustained the stars' centrality in the public eye: gossip columns, celebrity magazines, souvenirs, and tell-all memoirs. We'll track all the change and strangeness by reading some of the century's greatest theatrical hits alongside all the many modes of documentation in which they came swathed for their first audiences. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3330. The Global Eighteenth Century. (4 Credits)
In the eighteenth century, Britain's imperial expansion and investment in colonialism and slavery were well underway; England was actively involved in a global market (that, among other things, featured products from China and Japan); and it was alternately cooperating with and competing against other European countries. This course will examine both the representation of global expansion in English literature and, just as importantly, the influx of global literature into England. We will read canonical British texts, alongside slave narratives and Arabian tales, giving all equal weight in our efforts to understand the period. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENHD, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3333. Captives, Cannibals, and Rebels. (4 Credits)
Captives, cannibals, and rebels are everywhere in early English writing about the Americas and the British Empire. In this course, we will think about why these figures fascinated authors and readers so much and what they can tell us about anxieties regarding colonization. We will read travel and captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poetry from the 17th and 18th centuries; authors may include Mary Rowlandson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Earle, and William Apess. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENHD, ENRJ, HCWL, HUST.
ENGL 3334. Early Modern Poetry and Drama 1579-1625. (4 Credits)
A survey of major writers during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Poetry and drama by Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Sidney, Johson and others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENHD.
ENGL 3336. Early American Novel. (4 Credits)
The American novel was a late arrival. No novels were published in America during the colonial period, and the first native entries in the genre appeared in the late eighteenth century, shortly after the formation of the United States and generations after the first English novels were published. This course will sketch the tradition of the American novel from its beginnings through the Civil War. To that end, we read a selection of representative early American novels—representative, that is, of the way that we view the history of the American novel today. We will consider the way that the American novel comes into being: what literary categories it draws upon, and how. We will also trace the ways that American novels came to be valued (some more than others), in their own time and ours. And we will consider different ways of reading early American novels, employing approaches old and new. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENHD.
ENGL 3338. Keats and the Romantic City. (4 Credits)
This course takes Keats as our guide to London in the Romantic period. We will focus on a range of poets and prose writers who take the city as their subject and define their art by it. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3339. Romanticism and Confession. (4 Credits)
“I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.” So writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his famous confessions, a ground breaking autobiography that presented the author to the world in all of his glories and frailties. The Romantic period witnessed a breathtaking range of autobiographical writing, and at the heart of this literature we find the language of confession. Not only a willful decision to make the private public, confession also includes legal testimony and other modes of coerced or enforced revelation, prophesies, and even the wild raving of flashing-eyed poets. What becomes of one’s self-identify through the process of confession? Can a confession come without remorse or contrition? How do we understand the delicate balance between what is revealed and what is concealed, what is confessed and what is harbored from view? Our readings will include Romantic-era autobiographical works such as Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, poetic and fictional works, such as William Wordworth’s Prelude and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and key texts in the long history of confession, from St. Augustine to Michel Foucault. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3341. Love and Sex in Early Modern Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will explore ideas about love, eroticism, and human sexuality from 1500 to 1700. Writers to be studied include Petrarch, Aretino, Shakespeare, Sidney, Wroth, and Wilmot.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, WGSS.
ENGL 3342. Women, Crime, & Punishment in Literature. (4 Credits)
This course examines portrayals of female criminality in literature. What formal techniques and narrative strategies do writers use to depict female criminality? What are the moral, legal, and social contexts that determine what constitutes a crime and the need for punishment? In addition to considering literary representations, we will explore constructions of gender and sexuality and the ways in which social values and expectations shape agency and dis-empowerment. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJGS, PJST.
ENGL 3350. Ethnic Camera: Race and Visual Media. (4 Credits)
Camera-generated media are increasingly dominating our visual and cultural landscapes. They have also played a central role in shaping our perceptions of race. In this course, students will explore different photographic genres to investigate the visual origins of race. From historic objects like carte-de-visite photographs to the contemporary selfie, students will learn to interpret the intersection of race and power in our image-saturated world. Other activities may include archival visits, artifact analysis, and play with TikTok. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASAM, ASLT, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3357. Writing Asian America. (4 Credits)
What does it mean to be Asian American? How have Asian Americans grappled with the racist assumptions about Asian-ness imposed by US national culture? What ethical modes of being have Asian Americans imagined, what global histories have they uncovered, what social and political possibilities have they dreamt of, and what can they teach us about the historical present? What does it mean to write Asian America? Fulfills the Pluralism and Advanced Literature Core requirements of the core curriculum. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3359. Asian Diasporic Literatures. (4 Credits)
“To be rooted,” Simone Weil once wrote, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” If so, what does uprootedness do to the human soul? How does diaspora, the often violent loss of a native land, challenge the arts of poetry, drama, and story-telling? What geo-historical forces go into creating such violent dislocations? With what ethical and political dilemmas do they confront the diasporic subject? How does diasporic trauma manifest itself across generations? What role can literature play in healing the wounds of the uprooted? This course addresses these questions by examining Asian diasporic literatures of roughly the last half century. Previous writers have included Maxine Hong Kingston, lê thi diem thúy, Jessica Hagedorn, Jhumpa Lahiri, Min Jin Lee, Li-Young Lee, and Ocean Vuong. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASHS, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, EP3, INST, ISAS, ISIN, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3361. The Female Bildungsroman. (4 Credits)
At its inception, the term "bildungsroman" referred to novels concerned with the maturation, education, and coming of age of white, male protagonists. This class explores how the bildungsroman transforms when it focuses on protagonists of different gender identities, sexualities, and races in a variety of literary forms that might include novels by the likes of Charlotte Bronte or Maxine Hong Kingston, autobiographies by Simone De Beauvoir or Audre Lorde, poetry by Emily Dickinson, or even super hero comics like Marvel's Uncanny X-Men. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, PJGS, PJST, WGSS.
ENGL 3363. Crime and Punishment. (4 Credits)
What makes crime a crime, and what constitutes just punishment? This course will explore ideas about criminality and correction as reflected in literary texts. We will also read crime narratives as taking up other concerns--such as social conformity, religious redemption and political unrest. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3364. Novels of Ideas: 19th Century. (4 Credits)
An intensive study of four major novels from the second half of the 19th century: Melville's Moby Dick, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In exploring the ideological texture of these works, the course will consider the influences of such seminal thinkers as Schopenhauer, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Zola and Frazer. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI.
Mutually Exclusive: COLI 3364.
ENGL 3365. Novels of Ideas: High Modernism. (4 Credits)
Drawing on works of philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, and literary theory, the course will develop close, contextualized readings of five modernist masterpieces, all published within a 20-year span: Proust’s "Swann’s Way" (1913), Lawrence’s "Women in Love" (1920), Svevo’s "Confessions of Zeno" (1923), Mann’s "The Magic Mountain" (1924), and Faulkner’s "Light in August" (1932). Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, INST, ISEU.
ENGL 3400. Age of Romanticism. (4 Credits)
This course covers the broad sweep of British Romanticism, from the 1780s through the 1830s. In any given semester, specific themes may organize the readings, but they are designed to encompass a wide range of poetry, prose, and drama. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENHD.
ENGL 3402. Victorian Literature. (4 Credits)
English literature from 1832 to the latter part of the 19th century. Poets and prose writers. The reflection of contemporary ideas in the literature of the period. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI.
ENGL 3404. Beyond the Bronte-verse. (4 Credits)
Since their deaths, Emily, Charlotte, and their lesser known (but no less talented) sister, Anne, have, like their heroines, enjoyed a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of new lives in worlds as different and seemingly disconnected as biography (The Life of Charlotte Bronte), post-colonial literature ( the novel Wide Sargasso Sea), second wave feminist politics (the critical text The Madwoman in the Attic), young adults novels (Twilight: Eclipse), role-playing games (as chronicled in the comic book, Die), and “Me Too” Era film (Promising Young Woman). This class explores this “Bronte-verse” both by examining the Bronte sisters’ most famous novels in the context of 18th- and 19th-century literary movements and genres (Romanticism, the Gothic, the seduction novel et al.) and by visiting a relatively small sampling of the vast variety of Charlottes, Emilies, and Annes (not to mention Janes and Catherines, et al.) that populate 20th- and 21st-century media, culture, and art. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3409. Education in Literature. (4 Credits)
Writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, and the Brontes all considered what it meant for women to teach and to learn. While Wollstonecraft fought for equal access to education in the late 18th century, later novelists depicted governesses, teachers, tutors, and professors in order to consider what it meant for women in particular to take on such professional roles. What did it mean for a female character to teach? What and how did she teach, and what were the connotations of having a profession at all? In this course, we will study scenes and novels of teaching, research the histories of British and American education, and consider, more broadly, what and how novels and novelists "teach" their readers. Note:Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3410. Jane Austen in Context. (4 Credits)
In this course we will read four of Jane Austen’s major novels, several scholarly essays about the novels, and a few primary texts by other authors. Our work will be guided by two overarching goals. One is to survey some of Austen’s opus and identify her narrative techniques and literary accomplishments. The other is to situate the novels in their historical context and examine some of the political, social, and economic forces that influenced her prose in her own time and continue to shape debates about her work today. We will pay particular attention to gender, class, race, and the history of British imperialism and slavery. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, WGSS.
ENGL 3417. Early Victorian Novels. (4 Credits)
A study of the novels of the early Victorian period. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3418. Later Victorian Novels. (4 Credits)
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, some readers felt as if an era of literature had come to an end. Yet many of Dickens' contemporary novelists were at the height of their powers, and a new generation of authors emerged. In this course we will explore this changing and vibrant period of the English novel, attending both to some of the canonical authors still revered today as well as less well-known authors who deserve renewed recognition. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3419. Not Shakespeare. (4 Credits)
There were others, you know—playwrights who wrote in Shakespeare’s time and who wrote spectacularly well. Shakespeare knew them, admired them, envied them, emulated them, echoed them, influenced them; they were in a way his working world. We’ll read widely and closely in this world of plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Nashe, Jonson, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher. Occasionally, we’ll glance at Shakespeare, too, to reckon with what he was up to in their busy midst. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3420. Poems of Shakespeare and Others. (4 Credits)
Although Shakespeare is best known as a playwright, he also composed many extraordinary poems, especially love sonnets. We will read them together with poetry by about five of his contemporaries. According to an old joke, sex, religion, and politics are the three subjects one should not discuss at dinner parties-- and these are precisely the subjects that recur most intriguingly and intensively in the poetry we'll be exploring together. A sampling of the issues we'll discuss: how does the poetry of the period reflect-- or conceal-- the political tensions that culminated in the English Revolution? why do so many poets of this era write sonnets? how do these texts treat desire and gender? Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3422. Toni Morrison and the Measure of Our Lives. (4 Credits)
This course focuses on the phenomenal career of one of America’s greatest writers: Toni Morrison (1932–2019). As the recipient of numerous literary prizes (Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Nobel, to name a few), Morrison charted and changed the course of modern African American fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. Together, we will read from a selection of Morrison’s novels, essays, short stories, and speeches with specific attention to the author’s role in the emergence of a Black women’s literary tradition. We will investigate Morrison’s literary ancestors; explore the political and social implications of her writing; consider the path she forged for future writers and artists; and contend with her complex legacy in light of her recent passing. Students in this course should expect to attend to themes as varied as slavery, freedom, memory, history, migration, sisterhood, orality, and music, among others. Assignments will include several short research papers, a class presentation, and a creative final project. Note: Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AFAM, ALC, ENRJ.
ENGL 3424. Romantics and Their World. (4 Credits)
British Romantic literary culture flourished in a period of dramatic global change that included the American and French revolutions; war and peace with France; campaigns for abolishing slavery and reforming parliament; and urbanization, industrialization, and an early environmentalism. We will read a wide range of writers who participate in these dynamic events in poems, plays, essays and novels. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENHD, ENST, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3425. Nathaniel Hawthorne. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the writing, life, and social world of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Paying particular attention to questions of literary form, history, national, trans-national, racial, and gender politics, we will read The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, and a selection of his tales. We will also consider Hawthorne's shifting role in the history of American literary criticism.
Attributes: ALC, AMST.
ENGL 3426. Nineteenth-Century British Poetry. (4 Credits)
This course will consider British poetry across the long 19th century, from the era of the American and French revolutions to the years of reform in the latter half of the century. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3430. Regency Romanticism. (4 Credits)
This course takes the Regency (1811-20) as an historical frame to focus our attention on the latter part of the Romantic period. Officially, this era begins with George III's declared lapse into madness and ends with his son's ascent to the throne upon the king's death. But the Regency has come to be defined more generally as an era characterized by two extremes: the decadence exemplified by the Prince Regent's court and the popular protest movements that would lead to the first Reform Act. We will read a wide swath of the period's poetry and prose within this context. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3434. 19th Century British Women's Tales. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the development of the national tale, a feminist genre of the first two decades of the 19thC whose symbolic cross-regional marriages celebrate the British union. We will examine how women writers used the national tale's defining tropes for their own political, national, and feminist purposes throughout the century. Writers we will read include Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Reading will include some literary criticism. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, WGSS.
ENGL 3436. American Dream in Literature. (4 Credits)
In this course we will explore the changing conceptions of success and business in American literature in genres including sermon, autobiography, short story novel, drama and through literary periods including Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Realism, and Naturalism. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3437. Victorian Novel. (4 Credits)
This course introduces students to major authors of the Victorian novel, including such figures as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Henry James, Emily Bronte and others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3438. American Modernism. (4 Credits)
This course introduces forms of literary experimentation associated with the modernist movement, including authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and others. We will examine such contexts as the Harlem Renaissance, American writers in Paris, southern agrarianism, and others, as a way of grasping modernism’s fascination with difficulty. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI.
ENGL 3439. Oddity and Creativity. (4 Credits)
This course focuses on rule-breaking and rule-making literary genres. Readings may include (but are not limited to) medieval allegories and abecedarians, early modern sonnets, 18th-century novels, 19th-century autobiographical poems, 20th-century science fiction, and 21st-century erasure poems and flash fiction. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, EP3.
ENGL 3441. American Modernism. (4 Credits)
A study of the responses by American poets and novelists to the radical social, cultural, and technological changes of the first half of the twentieth century. Authors include William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer. Some attention will also go to film, music, and literary criticism. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3450. The City in Literature and Art. (4 Credits)
In this course, we will discuss the structures, spaces, people, and life patterns of cities in the imagination of writers and visual artists from the end of the 19th century to the present. We will focus on Berlin, Paris, and New York, using the work of Walter Benjamin as a stimulus to thinking about our own relationship to the urban environment. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASAM, ASLT, COLI, INST, ISEU, ISIN, URST.
ENGL 3462. Romanticism and Private Life. (4 Credits)
In an expanding celebrity age, Romantic writers developed a new appreciation for solitude, family, and friendship. Our texts explore the pleasures, benefits, and risks of private life in a growing media culture. Writers include Lord Byron, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, John Clare. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3467. Disobedience in Literature. (4 Credits)
“Of man's first disobedience” — so begins John Milton's epic poem, “Paradise Lost”. Milton was not alone in having his interest sparked: the concept of disobedience, in its various permutations (literary, social, political, psychological, religious) has energized a wide variety of literary works. One might say that without some form of disobedience, there could be no storytelling. Some of the questions that will shape our explorations in this course include: when is disobedience heroic, and when is it destructive or regrettable? What is the difference between disobeying your family and disobeying the law? Can an obedient character be interesting? How are the different modes of authority (religious, juridical, familial) played off against one another in order to license behavior? Using disobedience as our guiding rubric, we will follow important continuities and innovative changes in literary history across the past three centuries. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3468. Transatlantic Modern Women. (4 Credits)
A literature course focused on gender and modernism from both sides of the Atlantic. As many women writers from 1900-1960 were immigrants and travelers, we have a cosmopolitan focus. Writers include: Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Jean Rhys. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENRJ, INST, ISEU, ISIN, PJGS, PJST, WGSS.
ENGL 3500. Advanced Literary Theory. (4 Credits)
This course is designed to give students an in-depth study of multiple topics in literary theory not generally covered in the introductory-level course. Emphasis will be placed on reading theoretical texts in relation to the historical and political coditions under which they were produced. Topics will vary by semester but may includee: Franz Fanon and the Algerian war; Herbert Marcuse and the Black Panther Party; Giles Deleuze and May '68; Eve Sedgwick and the AIDS epidemic. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: COLI.
ENGL 3502. Modern British Writing. (4 Credits)
This course explores the diverse range of literary responses, from experimental to popular, to the many changes in English life from 1900-1960 (voting rights for women, two World Wars, the decline of Empire, and the rise of the welfare state). Writers include Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, and more. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ.
ENGL 3504. Virginia Woolf. (4 Credits)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the great writers of the 20th century. In this course, we will read three of her novels and "A Room of One's Own", her influential feminist essay. Never formally educated, she was also one of the great readers and critics of her time. Brilliant, funny, and hugely curious about her world, she wrote about virtually everything that might interest a person in her time: war, sex, friendship, reading, food, money, art, inspiration, jealousy, fashion, walking, and marriage to name some. As we read her work, we will look at how she transformed the tradition she read into revolutionary art. Then, after spring break, we will read four novels by writers who claim Woolf as an influence, major or minor, direct or indirect. Each of these writers, from England, Colombia, the United States, and Egypt, finds a different Virginia Woolf. With your final project, you will have the opportunity to write about the Woolf you discover through reading her words and discussing them in class. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, WGSS.
ENGL 3511. Modern Poetry. (4 Credits)
A study of poets since the 20th century. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3512. British and American Poetry: Romantic to Modern. (4 Credits)
The course traces the development of poetry over two hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic, beginning with the Romantic movement in Britain and concluding with American verse of the late 20th century. However, the course is not just an historical survey. We will also explore poetic genres and poetic technique in the close reading of major works by such figures as Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Dickinson, Whitman, Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Heaney.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3518. The City in Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the symbiotic relationship between cities and literature. How have cities been depicted in poetry, fiction, and other genres? How have urban landscapes and life shaped literary expression, as well as new literary collectives and movements? New York City will serve as one of our examples and sites of exploration, but other cities may also be examined. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3519. The Novel. (4 Credits)
What are novels? This course will explore the novel’s development and its ever-changing, innovative form. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3520. How Fiction Works. (4 Credits)
This course will examine the formal elements of modern fiction by considering the author’s craft in relation to the reader’s experience. Exploring both classic novels and short stories by contemporary writers, it will consider how point of view, free indirect style, character, plot, details, language, and other aspects of fiction are used by writers to create stories we care about.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3523. Very Contemporary American Fiction. (4 Credits)
This course will consider a diverse range of acclaimed literary novels by American writers published roughly within the past five years. We will examine what makes these novels innovative in form, narrative voice, or subject matter; their relation to genre and tradition; and the reasons for their commercial and critical success. We will also explore their critical reception and the form of the book review, and students will write their own reviews of assigned novels. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3529. Theater and the Avant-Garde. (4 Credits)
"Avant-garde" was originally a French military term for the first line of battle, but in the late nineteenth century, it came to signify the radical new art movements cropping up with abundance throughout Europe and, later, the United States. Rejecting social and aesthetic norms, these movements called for artistic (and often political) revolution, and many seized on theater as the perfect place to make a scandal of their ideas. After the Second World War, the center of gravity for the avant-garde shifted from Europe to New York, where a new generation built on earlier innovations and sought to reflect new realities. But throughout the long twentieth century, avant-garde artists put forth wildly different views of theater and its role in society, and some rejected live performance all together. In this course, we will consider the twentieth-century avant-garde's complicated relationship to theater and its potential configurations of politics, text and spectacle, and analyze theatrical experiments in the context of other art forms. We will read manifestos, plays and performance and anti-performance texts of all stripes, and attend several live art events. Assignments will include one practical theatrical project. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, THEA.
ENGL 3532. James Joyce. (4 Credits)
A survey of Joyce's fiction, beginning with "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and culminating in a careful reading of "Ulysses" and a handful of episodes from "Finnegans Wake." Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, IRST.
ENGL 3535. Modern Poetry. (4 Credits)
This course offers students an intensive survey of major thematic currents and formal experiments in British, Irish, and American verse from the late 19th century through World War II. Beginning with Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, the course will devote central attention to the poetic development of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, while also exploring works by such major figures as Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, and Langston Hughes. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI.
ENGL 3537. Satire, Sex, Style: The Age of Thomas Nashe. (4 Credits)
Considered for a long time to be a "minor" Elizabethan writer with "nothing to say," Thomas Nashe managed to produce a varied and astonishing, if ultimately costly and futile, body of work during the last decade of the sixteenth century, spanning erotica, picaresque fiction, and fierce invective, satire, and polemic. This course will offer a close look at Nashe's unique rhetorical style in relation to the vivid literary culture of his times, focusing on how Nashe's work pushes to the extreme various impulses in Elizabethan literature that tend to get overlooked in conventional accounts of the period. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3538. Desiring Mutation: Queer Time, Space, and Form. (4 Credits)
Queer Theory, as it is usually understood, brings into focus non-normative gender and sexual identities. Traditionally, queer theorists like literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (“Epistemology of the Closet”) and philosopher Judith Butler (“Gender Trouble”) uncover gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer expression in paradigm shifting readings of canonical works of Western literature and philosophy. In its introductory phase, this class will engage with what it means to read like a Sedgwick, a Butler, or even a historian like Michel Foucault (“History of Sexuality Vol. I”), that is: to read queerly. In its second phase, we will flip the script, asking if perhaps art from the margins, like sci-fi novels (“The Blazing World,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Frankenstein”), electronic music (Bjork), and comic books (“Fun Home”) in their form and genre innovations might themselves be non-normative, such that consuming them queers the reader. Students will produce a research project drawing from queer, novel, and genre theory to engage these questions in light of their own relationships to media. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, WGSS.
ENGL 3542. Modern Irish Literature. (4 Credits)
This course examines major modern Irish authors such as Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O'Casey and Beckett in terms of contemporary development in Irish culture. The Irish revival and the move to modernism and post modernism will be shown through the poets, playwrights and prose writers of the era. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: INST, IRST, ISEU.
ENGL 3555. Love, Formally. (4 Credits)
How do literary characters fall in love? What shapes their trajectories of desire and what keeps readers engaged and wanting more ourselves? This course examines the literary forms of love in a diverse range of modern and contemporary literary novels in English, from Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice" to Sally Rooney’s "Normal People." Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3560. Film Theory and Criticism. (4 Credits)
What are the relationships among film, our perceiving bodies, and the “real” world? Why can films make us laugh or cry? How might they affect our cultural, political, and sexual decisions? Watching one film each class, we will discuss competing schools of thought relating to film, society, and spectators. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3585. Contemporary Indigenous Fiction. (4 Credits)
In this course we’ll read three contemporary novels: Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021), Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1997), alongside a selection of short nonfiction texts. We’ll explore and compare the three novels carefully, looking closely at narrative elements such as setting, character, imagery, voice, plot, and structure, while considering those novelistic features also in light of a larger history of indigenous peoples’ experiences on this continent. Supplemental nonfiction readings will be drawn from David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2023) and texts such as Vine Deloria's Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014), and Ned Blackhawk’s Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History (2023). In addition to discussing the novels and other texts in class, students will keep a reading journal, take occasional quizzes and a final exam, respond to discussion questions on Blackboard, participate in two group presentations, and write two formal essays (4-5 pages). Note:Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3603. American Renaissance. (4 Credits)
Examination of US literature 1830-1860, with emphasis on individualism and social relations, national expansion, popular print culture, slavery, and the emergence of women's writing in relation to changing ideas of public and private. Authors may include: Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Poe, Fuller, Stowe, Child, Douglass, Longfellow, Fern, Jacobs, Wells Brown. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3604. American Literature to 1870. (4 Credits)
We will look at the lively and surprisingly varied body of texts from the 17th century to 1870 as art, as social record and as representations of a mode of aspiration and experience that may well be uniquely American. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENHD.
ENGL 3606. On the Road. (4 Credits)
This course introduces students to the trope of roads and road trips in modern literature. It starts from Kerouac’s seminal 1957 novel on the topic and examines its implicit assumption that the road trip is a masculine, mid-century, American phenomenon. By zeroing in on a wide range of texts—we will deliberately take a very broad approach—the course aims to challenge this assumption. Together, we will read road narratives by female (Didion) and postcolonial (Selvon) authors, as well as historicize the phenomenon by looking at the literature of pilgrimage (Chaucer) and the Grand Tour (Byron/Sterne) in the European tradition. The main focus of the course is road trips in literature, but attention is also paid to film (e.g., Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou’’ and Scott’s “Thelma & Louise”). Key concepts that are touched on throughout the semester include escapism, spatial politics and the frontier, social mobility, the Bildungsroman, and the imperial gaze. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3608. (De)Constructing the American Renaissance. (4 Credits)
The American Renaissance, a phrase coined by the literary critic F.O. Matthiessen in 1941, initially referred to a small number of white male authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—who were writing in the mid-19th century, approximately the 1830s through the 1860s, and whose works demonstrated an “imaginative vitality” through “their fusions of form and content” and a “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” (Matthiessen). Our course of study will follow the trend in literary studies and scholarship beginning in the late-20th century toward a more inclusive and multicultural canon of literature of the American Renaissance, acknowledging the centrality of race and gender with themes of democracy, citizenship, and freedom in the 19th century. In highlighting the literary contributions of Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and women to the American Renaissance, including works by Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, William Apess, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Jacobs, students will also think critically about what constitutes American literature and what the texts we read and the literary canons they are part of reflect about the social, cultural, and political values and contexts of the time they were written as well as our current time. Students will be invited to vote on course materials to add to our syllabus, including texts, films, and graphic novels from the 20th and 21st centuries. Possible contemporary selections for consideration include but are not limited to Jordan Peele’s "Get Out" (film); Octavia Butler’s "Kindred" (graphic novel adaptation); Colson Whitehead’s novel "The Nickel Boys"; poetry by Claudia Rankine, Amanda Gorman, Langston Hughes, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke; and essays by Audre Lorde and Roxanne Gay. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3609. Feminism and American Poetry. (4 Credits)
This course addresses contemporary American women's poetry and its relationship to recent feminist thought, specifically during and since second-wave feminism (roughly 1968 to the present). What role has poetry played in the arena of feminist politics? How do women writers construct varying identities through poetic language, exploring differences of race, ethnicity, physical disability, and sexual orientation? How might we apply recent feminist theories of language and identity to recent women poets? In response to such questions, we will read feminist theory in relation to poetry, and poetry in dialogue with feminist theory. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AMST, ASLT, COLI, DISA, ENRJ, EP3, PJGS, PJST, PLUR, WGSS.
ENGL 3610. Abolition. (4 Credits)
A community engaged learning course on the history, theory, and practice of freedom under capitalism, from the 19th century to the present. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, SL.
ENGL 3611. Modern American Autobiography. (4 Credits)
After an acknowledgment of earlier memoirists such as Twain, Fitzgerald, Orwell and Baldwin, this course focuses on contemporary practitioners such as Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Gerald Early, Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, Kate Simon, Alice Walker, Geoffrey Wolff, Tobias Wolff. Considerations include shifting notions of public and private, the construction of persona, and the impact of TV and radio on print, especially in regard to "voice", self-disclosure, and pathology. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3613. Modern American Novels. (4 Credits)
Modern American Novels will deal with the works of some of the major writers who rose to prominence in the period between 1920 and 1970. Novelists to be considered may include Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Henry Miller, Steinbeck, Hurston, Bellow, Nabokov, Ishmael Reed, Kerouac, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3616. American Cultures of War. (4 Credits)
In this course on contemporary cultures of war, we will question what counts as “war” with Claudia Rankine and the characters of "The Wire," trace the archetype of the American soldier in embedded documentaries and Hollywood dramas, and compare how American and Iraqi institutions have translated the War on Terror into visual texts for different publics. We will also analyze fiction and essays on war and state-sanctioned violence by Judith Butler, Patricia Williams, Hassan Blasim, and others, asking, how the critiques apply to our immediate lives. And how do our perspectives enrich these interventions? Students will grow as scholars of contemporary war film and literature, critical thinkers and writers, and citizens in the age of “perpetual war.” Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, PJST, PJWT.
ENGL 3617. American Short Story. (4 Credits)
Covers the development of the short story in America as it evolved through classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, and existentialism; with emphasis on recurring cultural issues: images of women, the Puritan heritage, the American Dream, American materialism, and others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3619. Crip, Queer and Critical Race Studies. (4 Credits)
This course will help students develop familiarity with work in the fields of crip, queer, and critical race studies. How does our thinking about identity, selfhood, and relationship change when we acknowledge that our selves are embodied—and that embodiment takes on a variety of forms? In addition to reading works of theory, we will also explore strategies for effectively engaging with critical discourses when analyzing literary works. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, DISA, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS, PJGS, PJST.
ENGL 3620. Ordinariness. (4 Credits)
The “ordinary”: what is usual, customary, habitual, indistinct. In life, the ordinary blends into the background, unseen or unnoticed until something brings it to crisis. In fiction, however, where there is no background other than what description conjures, the ordinary is a carefully manufactured aspect or narration. The purpose of this course is to pay attention to some of the ways that realism, as a particular narrative subgenre, conjures ordinariness. We’ll consider the ways that realist fictions construct ordinary details (commodities, objects, settings, weather), ordinary actions (laboring, walking, falling in love), ordinary time (work days, boring dinners, long afternoons), and ordinary feelings (frustration, ennui, affection, resentment). Novelists will include Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane; we’ll also read some theoretical work by Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Lauren Berlant, and Kathleen Stewart. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3623. Coming of Age in America. (4 Credits)
This course draws on fiction and autobiography, together with readings in the social sciences, to explore experiences of crisis, development, and identity formation in the lives of young people. Readings include Toni Morrison’s "The Bluest Eye," Maxine Hong Kingston’s "Woman Warrior," James Baldwin’s "Go Tell It on the Mountain," Alison Bechdel’s "Fun Home," along with studies of identity formation, gender, stigma and marginality. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENRJ.
ENGL 3624. Melville. (4 Credits)
A seminar devoted to Herman Melville's writings, from the early travel narratives to the late poetry, including a careful reading of Moby-Dick. We will discuss Melville's views on race, sexuality, war, politics and art. This course is an excellent opportunity for students to refine their close reading skills. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3625. Early American Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will examine texts written in and about early America. Special attention will be given to such topics as relations between Europeans and Native Americans, the circulation of ideas between the Americas and Britain, the American Revolution, the tensions between religion and commerce, and controversies over class, gender, sexuality, race, and slavery. As we read a wide variety of authors, we will investigate how literature reflected and shaped the colonization and development of the Americas and the United States. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENHD.
ENGL 3630. Black American Icons. (4 Credits)
This course provides a focused exploration on the formation of Black American icons from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period, and it examines how race, gender, sexuality, and religion inform their work. Authors may include Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama, among others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3631. Contemporary American Fiction. (4 Credits)
Novelists of our own time: Roth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Morrison, and others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3633. The Enlightened Earth: American Environment Cultures After 1960. (4 Credits)
Since the beginning of modern environmentalism in the 1960s, American artists have fostered distinct subcultures related to activism and politics. In this class, we will examine four of these: conservationism, ecological feminism, environmental justice, and climate futurism. Using literature as an anchor for other media, we will examine the poetics of the environmental imagination at the intersection of art and the cultures of activism. Which environmental arts do we need in the 21st century? This course will answer that question in historical, theoretical, and aesthetic terms. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3634. The Literature of Climate Crisis. (4 Credits)
In this course, we will study a range of literary responses to climate crisis. With a focus on the interrelation between imaginative literature and climate crisis, the course will study representative examples of climate crisis literature in conjunction with select samples from the scientific, journalistic, and political literature on climate change, climate crisis, and climate emergency. Works to be studied will be drawn from a broad chronological and global reach—from ancient creation stories to contemporary works. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3635. Future Environments: Human Life After the End. (4 Credits)
This course explores what our imagination of the future looks like, or, more precisely, the social and environmental changes that destruction, extinction, and the annihilation of the world we know now will entail. Beginning with tomorrow and moving into the far future, we will consider increasingly apocalyptic, and ultimately post-human, visions of the future. As we will see, while some authors imagine the future as dystopic, grim, and ugly, others imagine the future as beautiful and breathtaking in new, if perhaps terrifying, ways. Authors may include Zadie Smith, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Samuel Delany. We will also examine films and discuss such issues as the loss of arable land and environmentally motivated mass migration. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3636. Introduction to African American Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will survey African American Literature from the 18th century to the present. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3637. The Rhetoric of Social Movements. (4 Credits)
From Black Lives Matter to Standing Rock to the Arab Spring to #MeToo, this course introduces rhetorical theory and analysis through the study of rights-based social movements and their symbolic communicative efforts to argue for legitimacy, equality, and freedom from oppression. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, PJSJ, PJST, PPWD.
ENGL 3641. Slavery and American Fiction. (4 Credits)
Historians have described slavery as "America's original sin," a period from which time will never fully distance us. Current events bear this out. This course will focus on fiction about slavery and the debate over abolition during the turbulent, pre-Civil War years of America. We will read works by a diverse array of authors ranging from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Herman Melville. Our goal is not so much to follow a linear path to reach a specific end, but rather to listen to and try to understand different American voices as they talk about a set of issues that grew more urgent before them—and which are still very much with us. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENHD, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3645. The Middle Passage. (4 Credits)
In the United States, slavery and daring attempts to escape it have become the subject of such popular works as "12 Years a Slave," "Underground," and "Harriet." We have heard less, however, about the “middle passage,” one of the most difficult parts of the slave trade to represent. The middle passage refers to the involuntary migration of enslaved people across the Atlantic Ocean and, specifically, the weeks and months they spent aboard ships as they crossed from Africa to the Americas. In this course, we will read works that depict the middle passage and grapple with its history. How have writers represented this catastrophe, even as they faced the impossibility of truly representing its horrors? How can studying the middle passage provide us with insights into slavery, as well as other, more contemporary forced migrations? What’s at stake in studying the middle passage today? We will see that in spite of the aesthetic problems it poses, the middle passage has inspired a wide range of Black writers, theorists, and artists to produce both histories of oppression and visions of freedom, as well as portraits of everyone from the overthrown and dispossessed to the riotous and resilient. Possible texts might include: Toni Morrison’s "Beloved," Julie Dash’s "Daughters of the Dust," Paul Gilroy’s "The Black Atlantic," Zora Neale Hurston’s "Barracoon," and M. NourbeSe Philip’s "Zong!," among others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3646. Black Disability Studies. (4 Credits)
This course will examine the intersections of blackness and disability in African American literature and culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. We will consider how disablement as experience and as discourse has shaped racial subjecthood for African Americans, influencing notions of racial health and citizenship in the United States. In addition, we will explore how Black writers, thinkers, and activists acknowledge the ways disability intersects with blackness to understand more fully the complexities of racial injury and subjection. We will tackle these matters by examining the work of Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, James Weldon Johnson, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Mamie Till-Mobley, among others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AFAM, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, DISA, DIUL, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3647. Seeing Stories: Reading Race and Graphic Narratives. (4 Credits)
This course reveals how American writers of color (Asian American, Native American, African American, Latinx, etc.) have transformed the genre of the graphic narrative to speak to issues of racial difference and social inequality. How do these authors both entertain us and push us to engage in rigorous, critical interpretations of their wildly fanciful texts? Some potential course selections include: Thi Bui’s "The Best We Could Do," Kyle Baker’s "Nat Turner," Mira Jacob’s "Good Talk," Lila Quintero Weaver’s "Darkroom," and Jonathan Nelson’s "The Wool of Jonesy." Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3648. Novels by Women. (4 Credits)
This course will begin in early 19th-century England and end in late 20th-century America. It will feature four novels by women (probably but not definitely Jane Austen, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison), as well as a range of secondary materials. Our goal is to develop rigorous, historically sensitive, close readings of each novel. Among other things, we will pay special attention to problems of race, gender, and class. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, PJGS, PJST, WGSS.
ENGL 3650. Stayin' Alive: Performing Blackness and Whiteness in 1970s US Film and Literature. (4 Credits)
Using films—Hollywood and independent—as the primary texts, this course will introduce students to many of the debates surrounding the political and social climate of the U.S. in the 1970s marked by the increasing influence of identity politics, the Ethnic Revival, and black power. Using texts ranging from Sounder (1972) to Saturday Night Fever (1977), this interdisciplinary class will use film, media, and performance studies to consider the ways in which intersecting modes of identity develop and change across U.S. historical eras, particularly through the dissemination of media images. Ancillary reading will draw from autobiographies, journalism, history, and popular criticism. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, ALC, AMST, ASAM, ASLT, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3651. The Hunger Games and Survival Literature. (4 Credits)
How do people survive in extreme situations and societies? What can literature teach us about living with hardships and tragedies, extraordinary and ordinary? This course will examine Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy and also consider a broader tradition of survival literature, including but not limited to travel and adventure narratives; memoirs of war, genocide, and slavery; dystopian and sci-fi writing; and writing by and about the marginalized, including minorities, refugees, and others. Please note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3652. New Wave Immigrant Literature. (4 Credits)
If the immigrant of the late 1800s and early 1900s valued assimilation, the post-1965 newcomer to America has forged a new cultural identity. This course will look at the attempts to situate oneself in America while maintaining a tie to one’s family’s country of origin in works by authors such as Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Cristina Garcia and others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS, PLUR, URST.
ENGL 3653. Major American Authors. (4 Credits)
This course provides an introduction to major American authors. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3658. Migrations/Movements/Masks. (4 Credits)
Working at the intersection of literary studies and performance studies, this course will use literature, film, drama, and music as primary texts of study to examine cultural production as a site of identity formation, cultural belonging, and embodied archive. This course asks a few questions: How do migrations—the crossing of borders, the restructuring of boundaries—impact identity? How does historical context render identity a fluid and malleable construct? How do the masks we don actually reveal aspects of American identity or identities as they simultaneously obscure? Texts will include works by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lynn Nottage, and films by Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 3659. Selfie Lit. (4 Credits)
Although we associate selfies with present-day technologies, writers have long been interested in trying to capture their outer and inner selves. In this course, we will examine confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, and other, related genres as we explore traditions of self-representation. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3660. Dystopian Environments. (4 Credits)
Why have dystopian environments become so prevalent in recent works of literature, film, art, and music? What is the history of the idea and representation of dystopia? This course will survey dystopian works, classic and new, and students will think about how they depict society, place, and human/non-human worlds. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3661. Journeying and Storytelling. (4 Credits)
Why do journeys, quests, and other forms of travel form the basis of so many works of literature? What is the relationship between journeying and storytelling? This course will examine works ranging from Homer’s "Odyssey" to contemporary accounts of voyages, treks, and migrations, to think about connections between the exploration of space and the creation of narrative. How are stories about geographical discovery also stories about the discovery of the self? Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3663. Graphic Novels Through the Ages. (4 Credits)
Although many people think of graphic novels as merely a fancy synonym for comic books, the format predates Superman by centuries. In this course, we’ll trace the graphic novel across a variety of genres and periods, including the medieval bestiary, the early modern pastoral, modern satire, and, of course, contemporary comics. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3664. Queer Latinx Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will introduce students to a range of queer Latinx literary projects, beginning with some helpful and significant theoretical frameworks and moving thematically through questions of queer space, queer crisis, and queer devotion. How do queer Latinx writers negotiate their relationship to the queer spaces of the border, the city, and the club? How does the AIDS crisis generate reflection on Latinx revolution, loss, and disability? How does queer Latinx devotion question our attachments to history, religion, and family? Through close readings of literary experiments in narrative fiction, autobiography, theory, film, and poetry, this course will ask students to think about how varieties of queer theory can be both a resource and a limitation in thinking about the complicated forms of representation in these texts. It will help students explore alternative ways to think and talk about Latinx sexuality, especially as it is inflected by questions about race, ethnicity, and nationality. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, LAHA, LALS, PJGS, PJST, PLUR, WGSS.
ENGL 3666. Documenting Queer Art: Biography and Memoir. (4 Credits)
Biography and Memoir introduces students to the history of queer art and aesthetics through a study of biographical method, archive, and life writing. Students will field a variety of texts shedding insight into visual culture analysis, historical recovery, and post-1960s contemporary art movements and practices. Case studies may include Andy Warhol, Douglas Crimp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sylvester, and Perkins Harnly. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3667. Afro-American Afro-British 1900-1960. (4 Credits)
Anglophone literature of the African diaspora with a focus on the USA and Britain, including canonical and less well-known poets, novelists, and essayists. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3669. 20th/21st Century on Stage. (4 Credits)
We will explore twentieth- and twenty-first century theatre as literature and as a social and cultural barometer. How does theatre reflect and record social and political history and even its own history? We will read and reflect/report on plays and musicals and examine the era and environments in which they were created. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3673. Postmodern Literature and Culture. (4 Credits)
Postmodernism marks the time and space after WW II; the globe has become the global market, producing wide ranging cultural and political effects. These effects are explored in various experimental novels by American writers including Philip K Dick, Pynchon, De Lillo, William S. Burroughs, and David Foster Wallace. The course will concentrate on a selection of novels that attempt to make sense of a world dominated by commodities and images in a time of endless war. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI.
ENGL 3677. Latino/a US Literatures. (4 Credits)
An introduction to Latino-American literature. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, AMST, ASLT, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 3680. One Big Book. (4 Credits)
An intensive study of one major text from before 1850 situated in both a historical and current context. This course involves in depth reading about the political, social, economic and cultural debates and concerns of the period when the text first appeared, including a discussion of other contemporary literary texts. It will also examine the enduring impact and debates about the text ever since, examine adaptations, and consider its current relevance for today’s problems. For the specific text please see the note section for this class in the registration portal. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENHD.
ENGL 3683. Literature Beyond Borders. (4 Credits)
Borders hold a mythic place in the American imagination and serve as the setting for foundational genres of risk and excitement, including the Western and related tales of escape and rule-breaking. At the same time, borders are real places where rules about citizenship, identity, and belonging get enforced. How have authors and artists explored the contradictory space of the border, which can signal both freedom and constraint? How have they challenged established ideas about where borders should be and who belongs on either side of them? Case studies will include the U.S.-Mexico border in works like Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic; the Canadian border in The Handmaid’s Tale; and borders within the U.S. in works like Tommy Orange’s There There. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, HCWL, HUST, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 3686. Women's Diaries. (4 Credits)
What do a young Christian mother in third-century Carthage, a 20-something African-American woman in late-19th-century Memphis, and a Jewish adolescent in war-torn Holland have in common? More than one would think! In this course we'll explore the diaries that Perpetua, Ida B. Wells, and Anne Frank wrote and other people published, and we'll examine the assumptions and prejudices about this kind of writing and about women's writings in general. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, WGSS.
ENGL 3688. Fantastic Women. (4 Credits)
The texts that have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity conjure up a remarkable number of magical, monstruous, and larger-than-life women. Endowed with extraordinary powers that mark them as “(the) Other” and make them a threat to the patriarchal order, these fantastic women have exercised and continue to exercise a powerful attraction on our imagination. This course examines the stories about these women as told in different contexts and media and focuses on the question of what makes these figures both villains and heroes, always dangerous, but impossible to ignore. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3691. Black Atlantic Literature: Modernisms. (4 Credits)
From Picasso’s fascination with African masks to Gertrude Stein’s caricaturing of African American vernacular, this course will examine Black Atlantic literature in order to think about how the cultural production of the racialized other is incorporated into the aesthetic projects of “western” modernists of the Euro-American tradition. As a method for both teaching and reading, this course will implement Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading, simultaneously approaching works of European modernism, alongside modernist works from the non-western world, two traditions that trouble romanticized conceptions of the other. The course will address the ways in which appropriation, racial masquerading, and mimicry were constitutive to European modernism and therefore complicate the order of modernism’s origins as first beginning in the west and the “derivativeness” of the rest. Many modernists aimed to express the experiences of modernity through formal techniques of fragments, montage, stream of consciousness and refashioning the familiar; at the same time, modernism turned to the past, the racialized and ethnic other, the queer, the supernatural, and other seemingly “unknown” or “primitive” subjects. In this vein, we will also interrogate the discourse of “primitivism,” which runs across aesthetic, cultural, spiritual, and temporal categories and simultaneously refers to an original period of time, a proclivity to nature, and a colonial romanticization and debasement of non-western peoples. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3695. Black Protest, Black Resistance, Black Freedom, Black Rage. (4 Credits)
This course will consider the canon of African-American literature through an expansive definition of protest. We will examine how the meaning of protest has evolved from the 18th century to the present. As we interrogate the relationship between blackness and protest, we will also discuss how that history has consistently shaped American identity. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, ALC, AMST, APPI, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3701. American Writers in Paris. (4 Credits)
As a capital of modern Western culture, Paris has long been attractive to experimental artists from other countries, a home in exile to find supportive audiences, publishers, and collaborators. For American writers in the 20th century, this activity took place in roughly two movements: after WWI , the "Lost Generation" of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and others, and after WWII a circle of African American authors including Wright, Baldwin, and Himes. Through a selection of their works, as well as the art and music of the period, this course will explore the creative aims and cultural contexts of these two innovative groups. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, INST, ISEU, ISIN.
ENGL 3702. American Naturalism. (4 Credits)
American Naturalism surveys some of the most uncompromising literature that U.S. writers have ever produced. Naturalism, an offshoot from the post 1865 turn toward realism in U.S. literature and art, has a generally harsher outlook characterized by deterministic surroundings and influenced by new developments in science, especially Darwinian evolution. Many naturalist writers were denounced in their own time as sordid and immoral, charges that we will explore and assess. Though mainly associated with the 1890-1910 period during which it flourished, American naturalism is not restricted to work produced between those dates. Naturalism continued to thrive after that era-this course ends with Wright’s Native Son, a book that was published in 1940. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3703. Dreaming of Liberation. (4 Credits)
In this course, students will explore how dreaming and imagination have shaped the pursuit of justice and liberation for people of color. Examining a range of texts (from speeches, poetry, and art to nonfiction, collective statements, and film), we will focus on the role of imagination in liberation movements. We will also consider other principles and practices that sustain movements over time—namely, community, care, love, ethics, and resistance. Suppose the path to another world and the creation of another possibility are rooted in our imaginations. What steps must people of color take to make our “visions of freedom” material? What methods must we employ to ensure that our liberatory dreams are as inclusive as possible and can be brought to fruition? These are some questions we will attempt to answer throughout the semester. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CVW, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3704. How to Bloom: Nature Writing, Justice, and Liberation. (4 Credits)
What does it take for a flower to bloom? What about a person or a self? In this course, we will read works of nature writing by writers of color who explore these and related questions. We will also create our own works of nature writing to see what happens when we immerse ourselves in the contemplation of the non-human world. As we will learn from the texts we read, writers of color have found nature to be everything from a refuge to a model for how to survive and thrive. Can we take inspiration from nature to imagine ways of being that are not defined by racism and other forms of discrimination and exclusion? Can plants, non-human animals, and even rocks guide us in our search for ways to connect, establish communities, and care for those around us, including all inhabitants of Earth? By the end of the semester, you will have learned about a rich tradition of nature writing oriented around issues of social and environmental justice, liberation, and reparation. You also will have produced a nature journal and a multimedia essay about your own relationship with nature. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CVW, ENRJ, ENST, ESEJ.
ENGL 3802. Literature and Imperialism. (4 Credits)
This course explores key debates in the study of literature and in the history of imperialism. Attention will be paid to the importance of literary form and historical representation as well as the relation between the two. A major concern of the course will be to examine the problems posed for any study of culture by legacies of imperialism. Readings will likely include Joseph Conrad, Mahasweta Devi, Naruddin Farah, Rudyard Kipling, Salman Rushdie, Tayeb Salih, Olive Schreiner, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AASR, ALC, ENRJ, GLBL, INST, ISIN, PJST, PJWT.
ENGL 3803. Empire and Sexuality. (4 Credits)
For many years now, scholars have traced the intersections between gender and sexual identity formations and the modern exercise of state power. This course engages with these conversations through an attention to gender and sexuality as sites of power, subjection, and subject formation within racial, colonial, and imperial projects. Literary texts considered in the course situate sexuality as central to colonial and neocolonial rule as well as the forms of resistance that emerge from within it. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, GLBL, INST, ISIN, PJGS, PJST, WGSS.
ENGL 3804. Writing Resistance: Empire and Episteme. (4 Credits)
This class will cover several different literatures of resistance--analyzing how authors opposed empires and oppressive governments. From the ancient playwright to Irish nationalist, and Algerian anti-imperialists to Latin American revolutionaries, we will cover and discuss how these authors opposed not only systems of power but systems of thinking imposed upon them. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, IRST, PJST.
ENGL 3834. History of the English Language. (4 Credits)
The subject of this course will be the history of English from the Old English period to the present day and the range of varieties that are found throughout the world. We will study the visual forms English has taken from early runic engravings through medieval manuscripts to recent texts; the radical changes that have taken place in the structure of English over the centuries; the position of English as an "international" language; variation in English grammar and pronunciation; how individual speakers vary their use of the language; and how far it is possible to speak of "good" and "bad" English. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, MVLA, MVST.
ENGL 3835. Aliens and Encounters with the Unknown. (4 Credits)
The foreign, the strange, the unfamiliar: our stories are filled with encounters between the known and unknown, whether they describe travelers visiting foreign lands or science-fiction journeys among the stars. This course will focus on moments of first contact, exploring what makes someone an insider or an outsider and investigating what happens when this border is troubled. Focusing on the multifaceted figure of the alien in novellas, films, and graphic novels, we will begin with historical accounts, including European descriptions of conquest and colonization. Turning to science fiction, we will consider alien invaders as expressions of Cold War anxieties, as well as the film “Alien” and transgressions of bodily boundaries. We will conclude with a consideration of immigration, paying particular attention to Shuan Tan's graphic novel “The Arrival.” Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3836. Fiction Into Film. (4 Credits)
Cinematic adaptation of novels and short stories. Problems of narrative, genre, film language, imitation, etc., will be studied in the works of film makers such as Bresson, Merchant/Ivory, Antonioni, Wyler, Renoir, Lean, Bunuel, etc. Lab fee. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: COLI.
ENGL 3837. From Page to Screen. (4 Credits)
This course will explore film and TV adaptations of works of literature, including novels, poems, and plays. How does the process of adaptation work? What liberties are taken as texts are translated from page to screen? How does adaptation play with our notions of originality, imitation, and creativity? Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3838. Postcolonial Literature and Film. (4 Credits)
This class introduces students to creative works of literature and film from formerly colonized nations in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. How do such works respond to, critique, and resist the continuing effects of colonialism? How do they navigate the tensions between colonial and indigenous traditions of representation? By the end of the semester, students will understand the cultural, political, and historical contexts of these works, as well as key concepts in postcolonial studies, such as identity, hybridity, discourse, power, and migration. Authors and filmmakers may include Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, Shani Mootoo, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Hanif Kureishi, Stephen Frears, and others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ALC, ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3839. Postcolonial Literatures. (4 Credits)
In this course, we will examine postcolonial literatures, a rich and complex body of writing. The term postcolonial primarily refers to those parts of the world that emerged in the 20th century from European colonial empires. Each formerly colonized region has been shaped by the violence of colonization. As a result, the literatures of these regions are animated by political and creative struggles, including anti-colonialism, resistance, liberation, nationalism, neocolonialism, globalization, diasporic migration, and linguistic contest. We will study these and other phenomena, while also looking at history, literature, and literary theory from the period of decolonization. The main regions covered will include the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI, ENRJ, GLBL.
ENGL 3840. The Classic Mystery. (4 Credits)
Literary and social evolution of the mystery genre from its 19th century origin in Poe, Collins and Doyle, to the 20th century development of "locked room" and "hard-boiled" forms, and more recently, the rise of the woman detective. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
ENGL 3841. Contemporary Fiction. (4 Credits)
What makes comtemporary fiction "contemporary"? How does it differ from pre-World War II fiction or so-called "modernist" writing? This course explores the fundamental transformation of the way contemporaries see the world, dealing with writers as diverse as Kundera, Nabokov, Philip Roth, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Joan Didion, Marquez, Mishma, Robbe-Grillet, Patrick Suskind, Calvino and Vonnegut. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 3842. The Short Story. (4 Credits)
A fun and rigorous romp through great short stories, such as those by Poe, Hemingway, Atwood, and O'Connor. We will read and discuss a range of fabulous short fiction to find out how such narratives work and how they challenge our expectations about ourselves and the world around us. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3851. Horror and Madness in Fiction and Film. (4 Credits)
How and why do we respond to horror, madness and rage in film and literature? What are our reactions and responsibilities? Starting with the Alien series, the course moves to works by Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, COLI.
ENGL 3855. The Jazz Age: Literature and Culture. (4 Credits)
The 1920s era known as the Jazz Age is the subject of this course, which examines changes in the literature and culture of the period between World War I and the end of Prohibition in 1933. The class examines popular culture, politics, and economic change in these years through the lens of writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, and Treadwell, as well as the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the first wave of women's liberation. Sample topics include the Great Migration, World War I, urban transformations, consumerism, homosexuality, and the influence of jazz and blues in music. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 3901. Autism and Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will look at poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction about a disability that both challenges those who live with it and at the same time endows them with original and valuable perspectives about the world and human experience. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, DISA.
ENGL 3908. Wild London. (4 Credits)
London is one of the great cities of the world, a place defined by rich layers of human culture dating back millennia. But what about London’s nature? Can we also see London as a place defined and constituted by the natural world? In this course, we will explore historical and present-day London as a site for encountering animals, plants, forests, waterways, and other elements of nature. We will also read British literature from the early modern period to the 21st century to see how London’s landscapes and waterscapes have changed over time—and how they have nevertheless consistently inspired poets, novelists, and others to produce new modes of writing and thought. Finally, since this is a study abroad course, we will make excursions into different parts of London to find “wild London” for ourselves. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3909. Interspecies Friendship. (4 Credits)
Humans and killer whales, gorillas and cats, pigs and spiders, and even a lion, meerkat, and warthog: stories of interspecies relationships abound. What can we learn from literature about friendships that cross species boundaries? What insights are to be found in considering how other species experience the world, and how might friendship help us understand differences? This course will consider a wide range of works on interspecies friendships, including poems, nonfiction essays, short stories, children’s tales, films, and video games, as well as your own experiences. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3910. Nature and Horror. (4 Credits)
What happens when nature turns against humanity? In this course, students will explore contemporary works of fiction that imagine how humans react to a natural world that becomes increasingly or suddenly antagonistic to humanity. A couple of examples would be the appearance of Kaiju in Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla or the exploration of a terrifying ecology in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Overall, this course asks students to reconsider their relationship to nature by reading these works of horror in conversation with scholarly works of eco-criticism. Throughout the semester, students will examine how authors transform scientific theories and research into sources of terror. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENST, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3916. Animals in Literature. (4 Credits)
An investigation of 19th-century writings on the "animal mind" as a context for understanding such literary endeavors as Melville's "Moby Dick" and Jack London's "Call of the Wild". Topics to be addressed include animal rights, animal/human relations, domestication, and animal language. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 3917. Unreal City: Modernist London, 1900-1950. (4 Credits)
This course explores the rise and development of literary modernism in Britain, using London both as a location for study and as a living site for class excursions. Readings include works by James, Conrad, Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, Freud, and Orwell. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 3918. The Phenomenon of Oprah’s Book Club. (4 Credits)
Before announcing the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, Oprah chose the popular English writer and social critic Charles Dickens as the last selected author of the original Oprah’s Book Club (OBC). Oprah chose his work because several of her viewers are Dickens lovers, and she wanted to learn why this English author is beloved by so many; why his work has left such a lasting impression on the American public; and, most importantly, how literature can be used as a catalyst for social change. Focusing on works that depict England as a site of tourism, imperialism, and/or the transatlantic slave trade, this course will explore the phenomenon of OBC, thinking through its formation and rise as well as its strategies and approaches to selected texts. We will read the work of Charles Dickens alongside Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman (an autobiography that charts Angelou’s move with her son from California to New York and later to London and Cairo with her new love) and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (a novel in which Whitehead comments briefly on Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal one, complete with engineers, conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels). At times, we will read like Oprah, embracing innovative, multimedia approaches to reading and traveling to key sites mentioned in our selected texts. At other times, we will deviate from Oprah’s approach and focus more on genre, form, theory, and literary and historical criticism. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 3922. Internship Seminar: Careers in English. (4 Credits)
Fordham's English majors in New York City enjoy numerous opportunities for Internships in fields like publishing, magazines, and TV and on-line media. Inernships provide students with the chance to explore different avanues of potential professional development through hands on experience. Previous English majors have pursued internships ranging from daily newpapers and television networks, to theater and arts organizations and public service and non-profits. The internship seminar allows students to gain a full elective's worth of credit for their internship work. The internship seminar meets once a week to discuss readings relating to on-site work in the field. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
ENGL 3923. Stories of Brains and Minds. (4 Credits)
This course brings together narratives that philosophers, scientists, and literary authors have been telling about brains and minds throughout the modern era. Beginning with trailblazing early-modern neurological, philosophical, and literary texts, the course moves toward contemporary cognitive studies, where thought experiments involving bats, zombies, and digital minds are key. The literary texts we will study most often figure human minds in relation to nonhuman animals and machines, including sentient apes, horses, and robots. These narratives bring into focus a concerted human effort over time to understand self and identity. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD.
ENGL 3930. Introduction to Queer Literature. (4 Credits)
In this course, students will read texts by a diverse range of Anglophone authors, emphasizing the cultural history of same-sex identity and desire, heteronormativity and oppression, and queer civil protest. It will also consider the problems of defining a queer literary canon, introduce the principles of queer theory, and interrogate the discursive boundaries between the political and personal. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, PJGS, PJST, WGSS.
ENGL 3943. Sociolinguistics. (4 Credits)
The course will introduce students to sociolinguistics, the study of languages as they are used by ordinary human beings to communicate with one another and to develop and maintain social relationships. Topics will include language variation and change, codes, speech communities, ethnography and gender. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
ENGL 3964. Homelessness. (4 Credits)
Since ancient times, homelessness has been one of the most popular themes in Western literature. Homeless characters often, though not always, achieve some kind of heroic stature. The historical reality of homelessness is, of course, much harsher. This course will consider the relationship between the literary representation of homelessness and the lived experience of the trauma. On the one hand, we will analyze literary accounts of homelessness in some (though probably not all) of the following works: King Lear, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, and When the Emperor Was Divine. On the other hand, we will study memoirs by people who have experienced homelessness and read about the social and economic inequities that have contributed to the current homelessness travesty, especially in New York City. In addition, students will volunteer for 20 hours at an organization that serves people experiencing homelessness, housing insecurity, or food insecurity. A portion of class time will be devoted to discussing the relationship between this service work and the course readings, as well as our own lives. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, PJEC, PJST, PLUR, SL.
ENGL 3965. Writer's Workshop 2. (4 Credits)
An intermediate workshop class for creative writing. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Pre-req: ENGL 3013 or ENGL 3014 or ENGL 3015 or ENGL 3016 or ENGL 3017 or ENGL 3018 or ENGL 3019 or by writing sample submission. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
Prerequisites: ENGL 3013 or ENGL 3014 or ENGL 3015 or ENGL 3016 or ENGL 3017 or ENGL 3018 or ENGL 3019.
ENGL 3966. Fiction Writing 2. (4 Credits)
An intermediate workshop class for fiction writing. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Pre-req: ENGL 3013. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 3967. Creative Nonfiction Writing 2. (4 Credits)
An intermediate workshop class for creative nonfiction writing. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Pre-req: ENGL 3014 or by writing sample submission. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
Prerequisite: ENGL 3014.
ENGL 3968. Poetry Writing 2. (4 Credits)
An intermediate workshop class for poetry writing. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Pre-req: ENGL 3015 or by writing sample submission. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
Prerequisite: ENGL 3015.
ENGL 3999. Tutorial. (3 Credits)
Independent research and readings with supervision from a faculty member.
ENGL 4003. Seminar: Joyce’s language of the devil, or lots of fun in Dublin. (4 Credits)
Grab a page or a sequence of pages from Joyce, let the language play over you, and you will be charmed, surprised, and delighted. In this seminar, we will not only read "Dubliners," "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses," and passages from "Finnegans Wake," but we will also encounter—and challenge—a variety of critical and historical approaches to Joyce’s writing. You will craft a final research project to develop your skills as a reader, writer, and thinker. As Joyce writes, we will confront, and laugh at, at least “two thinks at a time.” Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENSM, IRST.
ENGL 4005. The Medieval Traveler. (4 Credits)
This course follows the routes of pilgrims, crusaders, merchants, nobles, and peasants as they charted a course for lands of promise and hoped-for prosperity. In The Medieval Traveler, we will read selections from the diaries, chronicles, and historical literature written by and about travelers in the Middle Ages. We will begin and end with travelers who sought miracles, marvels, and new trading routes on the cusp of the known world. We will focus in particular on the practicalities of medieval travel, as well as the reasons for traveling: the sacred, the profane, and everything in between. This will be an interactive class; be prepared to discuss and debate issues of interest. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENHD, GLBL, HIST, ICC, MVLI, MVST, OCST, REST.
ENGL 4006. Writing for Publication. (4 Credits)
See your name up in lights! Try your hand at getting published! Most publications rely on genres such as profiles, Q&As, reviews, personal essays, and service pieces supplied by both staffers and freelancers, working in print or multimedia. In this course, you will learn how to assess publications and find those that might publish you; write persuasive "pitch" letters (also known as queries) in which you propose article ideas; write and revise articles in a variety of genres; and learn how to use social media to promote your published work. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
ENGL 4007. Seminar: Othello. (4 Credits)
This course explores how Shakespeare’s Othello has shaped (and been reshaped by) modern conceptions of race. Beginning with a close reading of the play itself alongside Shakespeare’s sources and the cultural context of early modern England, we will move on to examine how modern scholars, artists, and performers have wrestled with Othello's complex and unsettling representations of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and social scapegoating. Among the contemporary texts we will discuss are adaptations by writers such as Toni Morrison, Keith Hamilton Cobb, and Djanet Sears, as well as films by Spike Lee (Jungle Fever) and Jordan Peele (Get Out). Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4008. Seminar: Black Letters. (4 Credits)
Riffing on the word “letters” in the course title, this course will consider the letters that Black writers exchanged with each other and how these exchanges helped found African American literature. What kinds of writerly relationships grew out of correspondence between authors? How did some writers adapt and transform the letter form into other kinds of literary works? How did these authors use letters to navigate the realms of the personal, artistic, and political? Authors and texts studied will include the letters exchanged between Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright; Alice Walker’s "The Color Purple," which takes its form as an address to God; and David Scott's meditations on epistolary exchange. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, ENSM.
ENGL 4009. Seminar: Shakespeare and the Hollow Crown. (4 Credits)
In this seminar, students take a deep dive into just eight plays. Shakespeare dove in first: His first great hit was a series of history plays, produced ("Harry Potter"-style) across eight consecutive years, about the kings who ruled, and the wars they waged, a century and more before his birth. The series remains a hit: It’s been performed, recorded, and filmed innumerable times. Through close reading, listening, and viewing, and through wide research, we’ll track the arc of Shakespeare’s dive, and hope to explain its lingering, layered, rainbowed luminescence. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
Mutually Exclusive: ENGL 3221.
ENGL 4010. Seminar: American Crime Stories. (4 Credits)
Crime narrative has long been a staple of American literature and culture, traversing both high, so-called literary fiction and lowbrow popular efforts that were sometimes named for how much they cost (dime novels) or for the cheap, coarse paper they were printed on (pulp fiction). We’ll be reading a selection of crime stories from the antebellum era to contemporary times, but the main focus will fall on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the period when the distinctively American, hard-boiled style evolved in print and film noir became an identifiable American movie idiom. Authors include Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, ENSM.
ENGL 4014. Jean Rhys: Rewriting English. (4 Credits)
The seminar offers an intensive study of the work of Caribbean-born English writer Jean Rhys, from the early stories and novels of the 1930s to the last and most famous novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” published in 1966. We pay particular attention to the way Jean Rhys' writing reimagines the linguistic, literary, and cultural coordinates of English, not only in her last novel's rewriting of Charlotte Bronte's “Jane Eyre,” but also in the early novels “Quartet” (1928), “After Leaving Mr Mackenzie” (1930), “Voyage in the Dark” (1934), and “Good Morning, Midnight” (1939). The seminar studies Rhys' work within the comparative contexts of European modernism, mass media and popular culture, feminist and gender theories, and postcolonial studies. The seminar fulfills both English (elective) and comparative literature (senior seminar) major requirements. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: COLI.
ENGL 4015. London Modernisms: 1890-1956: Unreal City. (4 Credits)
Modernist authors responded to a world in which scientific, technological, and medical advances, urbanisation, and armed conflict radically reconfigured and often violently reshaped the boundaries of culture, the nation-state, and the self. As a centre of global trade, cultural exchange, and imperial domination, London was a key crucible for the development and flourishing of a range of modernisms. In this course, we will bring together perspectives from literary criticism, critical and cultural theory, and intellectual and social history to explore the ways in which London responded to modernism and modernists responded to London. In doing so, we will consider how texts by authors such as Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Selvon spoke to pressing contemporary debates around gender and sexuality, terrorism, immigration, imperialism, war, technology, and socioeconomic inequality. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ICC, INST, ISEU.
ENGL 4016. Seminar: Medea through the Ages. (4 Credits)
In this course, students explore the ways in which the story of Medea has been received and reinvented across the ages. Using the lenses of intertextuality and adaptation, we will explore the various versions of the myth in both literature and film. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CLAS, COLI, ENHD, ENSM, WGSS.
ENGL 4018. The Poet's Choice. (4 Credits)
"The Poet's Choice" offers a broad and occasionally irreverent survey of English poetry from canonical greats such as Shakespeare and Whitman to well-known contemporaries such as Seamus Heaney, Robert Hayden, Adrienne Rich and emerging young talents, such as Monica Youn, Terrance Hayes, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ALC.
ENGL 4019. Seminar: Love Letters from Ovid's Heroides to Heloise's Letters to Abelard. (4 Credits)
The love letters that Ovid wrote under his name occupy pride of place in the anthology of "love letters by great men" that had originally been only a prop in the "Sex and the City" movie. Ovid, however, first gained fame as a writer of love letters by ventriloquizing the female voice in "Heroides." Written in the voice of mythical heroines and addressed to their fickle lovers, "Heroides" has been both greatly influential and easily dismissed as repetitive and unoriginal. In this seminar, we will examine the reception and reinvention of the love letter collection as a genre created by Ovid, and we will focus on the female voice—"ventriloquized" or "real," "fictional" or "historical"—in Heroides, the letters of Heloise and Abelard, and beyond. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: CLAS, ENHD, ENSM, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 4020. Adrienne Kennedy: Text and Performance. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the playwriting and performance work of Adrienne Kennedy with methods that combine literary study, dramaturgical analysis, and embodied practice. Drawing from performance research practices, students will engage with Kennedy’s writing by examining it textually and historically alongside relevant cultural, political, and theatrical ideas; and in dynamic interchange, by exploring, interpreting, and embodying her work as creative artists––allowing it to inspire and infuse their own artistic practice. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENRJ, ICC, THEA.
ENGL 4021. Seminar: Love and Latinx Literature. (4 Credits)
The world of literature contains many stories about love, both joyful and doomed. In this course, we will read Latinx literature with a focus on stories about love. These stories will cover a wide range of experiences, as vast as love itself. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENSM, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 4022. Seminar: Literatures of AIDS. (4 Credits)
Over the past 10 years, there has been something of a boom in AIDS cultural representation, and a corresponding reevaluation of the early years of this plague in literature, film, visual art, and exhibitions. At the same time, we are observing the 30-year anniversaries of the first published report of the disease, the first activist collective formed, and the first retrospective of artist responses to this pandemic. Popularly coined “AIDS 2.0,” this cultural field of retronostalgia, reprints, reissues, and reproductions has been highly criticized for its sanitary and homogeneous (re)presentations of this tumultuous period. In this seminar, we will interrogate the “literatures” generated in this moment. We will consider the consequence of this phenomenon and how cultural amnesia, material memory, and what Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed call “generational unremembering” complicates the discourses surrounding AIDS cultural pasts. Students should anticipate a course that combines close readings of visual art, performance, and literary texts with a careful examination of AIDS art oral histories. Course materials may include work by Castiglia and Reed, Jih-Fei Cheng, Ann Cvetkovich, Avram Finkelstein, Brad Gooch, Lucas Hilderbrand, Alex Juhasz, Jonathan Katz, José Esteban Muñoz, David Román, Marita Sturken, Sean Strub, and Eric Wat. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENSM.
ENGL 4023. Seminar: The Lyric: A Modern History. (4 Credits)
This seminar will study lyric poetry in English written between the late 1700s and the present. We will approach the poems from multiple perspectives: formal, aesthetic, political, social, and racial. The time period coincides with the rise of lyric poetry from a minor genre to a major one; with an expansion of the lyric’s main traditional themes, love and death, to themes of self-exploration, social protest, autobiography, philosophical inquiry, modernity, sexuality, and more; and a proliferation of lyric types that is still ongoing today. In addition, since the lyric originates as a text to be set to music, we will give some attention to musical settings composed during the same era. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENSM.
ENGL 4024. Seminar: Narratives of the Apocalypse. (4 Credits)
Though we have the term “apocalypse” from scriptural texts, today we most often think of the end of the world in scientific contexts: climate change, nuclear and other types of environmental catastrophes, alien or machine annihilation. When and how and why did this happen? This course looks for answers in apocalyptic narratives across time with a particular focus on representations in the early modern period when “new science” emerged from a theologically centered culture. Among the writers we will consider are Francis Bacon, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Astell, Jonathan Swift, and Mary Shelley. Each student in the seminar will develop an “apocalyptic” research project that may be designed to connect the course materials with more recent eschatological representations in novels, film, or other art forms. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4025. Seminar: Field Work. (4 Credits)
Field: open space, meadow, the world outside. Doing “field work” or going outside is not typically thought of as a method for composing works of literature. Yet countless authors, especially those who write about nature, have relied on it for material, insight, and inspiration. In this course, we will read works of nature writing to see what happens when writers immerse themselves in outdoor environments and give themselves up to the experience of understanding them. We will also engage in our own experiments with field work to see what we can learn from sustained interaction with the natural world. What happens to our thought processes when we take the time to observe a bird, a tree, or a stream? How important—or real—are the supposed differences that set human beings apart from non-human ones? Can we grasp why, ultimately, so many writers have found time spent in contemplation of the non-human essential to the experience of being human? In addition to reading works of nature writing from the early modern period to the present, you will complete a final research project that asks you to apply the insights of your own field work to the analysis of a literary text about nature. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4026. Seminar: Race and Speculative Fiction. (4 Credits)
This course explores a number of critical methods (posthumanist theory, genre theory, race and ethnic studies) in relation to speculative fictions, race, ethnicity, and social justice. As speculative fiction has become an increasingly vital part of America’s vernacular culture, we seek to explore how minority writers transform and engage this (super)genre. We will consider the proposition that elements of speculative fiction—that is, the violation of certain “realist” principles—help enable writers to reimagine standard tropes found in ethnic writing, related to issues such as immigration, social difference, systemic oppressions, and historical tensions. In this regard, we will sidestep the assumption that such whimsical fictional worlds are somehow escapist or merely meant as superficial modes of entertainment. Indeed, our foundational premise begins from the perspective that speculative fiction offers American writers the opportunity to generate scathing and compelling social critiques through and by the elastic boundaries offered in these reality-defying representational terrains. Seminar participants are in for a generically “wild” ride, with course offerings related to magical realisms, outbreak narratives, dystopian futures, and monster-based fictions. Primary text materials will be scaffolded by theoretical and critical readings (including but not limited to work from Rosi Braidotti, R.B. Gill, Fredric Jameson, Kodwo Eshun, and others). Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ENRJ, ENSM.
ENGL 4027. Seminar: Race, Ethnicity, and Contact in Early Medieval Ireland and Britain. (4 Credits)
In this seminar, students will encounter the earliest writing from Ireland and Britain and reconsider what they think they know about the ethnic and racial “origins” of English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish literature. They will discover the roles played by cultural contact, conquest and subjection, ethnogenesis, and racialization in key texts for British and Irish literature. Students will have the opportunity to conduct original research on figures such as St. Patrick, King Arthur, Bede, and King Alfred and on a wide range of texts translated from Latin, medieval Irish, medieval Welsh, and Old English. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENHD, ENRJ, ENSM, IRST, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 4030. Seminar: The Afterlife of Austen. (4 Credits)
Few authors have enjoyed a posthumous popularity that matches Jane Austen’s. More than two centuries after they first appeared in print, her novels continue to be not only widely read but also rewritten, sequeled, and adapted to screen. In this research seminar we will examine several Austen novels and their afterlife in literature, film, and popular culture.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4031. Seminar: The Tempest. (4 Credits)
Since the publication of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, writers from around the world have drawn inspiration from it. In particular, the play has become a touchstone for postcolonial writers from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean seeking to understand the roots of colonialism, empire, and race. This course will trace the complex and creative conversations that have taken place for 400 years between these writers and Shakespeare. It will also engage in a close reading of the play itself and situate it in the contexts of Shakespeare’s day. In addition to regular participation and some smaller assignments, students will be expected to complete a short research paper and a creative adaptation project. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4032. Seminar: Joyce's Ulysses. (4 Credits)
This seminar undertakes an intensive, chapter by chapter reading of Joyce's serio-comic epic, Ulysses, in the context of literary modernism and in relation to several theoretical frameworks: psychoanalytic, reader-response, gender studies, deconstructive, and post-colonial. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENSM.
ENGL 4033. Sound in U.S. Culture, History, and Literature. (4 Credits)
While people have long been interested in studying the sensory experiences of everyday life, music popular and otherwise, and the technologies that produce and reproduce sound, only recently has “sound studies” become a self-defined interdisciplinary field that has drawn in scholars from art history, film studies, history, literary studies, music history, and other fields. Over the course of the semester we will explore different ways in which such scholars have approached the study of sound, assess the value of various keywords they have used to interpret sound in the United States, and assemble an archive of primary sources—texts, sites, events, figures, and objects—that help us ask new questions about U.S. culture. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT.
ENGL 4034. Seminar: Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake. (4 Credits)
One of the most intriguing and entertaining literary works ever crafted, James Joyce’s "Finnegans Wake" sends us on seriously hilarious trips around the world, through human (especially Irish) history, and into the sleeping mind. Joyce’s “book of the night,” a comic masterpiece, constructs not one thing, but "two things at a time," multiple meanings that uproariously cross national, linguistic, sexual, historical—just about all kinds of—boundaries. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. Nearly always, though, things emerge that charm, surprise, and delight. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENSM, IRST.
ENGL 4044. Incarceration: History, Literature, Film. (4 Credits)
This seminar considers the history of classifications of deviance and abnormality, along with the rise of penal systems and surveillance in the modern state. Focusing on mass incarceration from Reconstruction to the present, the course examines perspectives on criminality, civil disobedience, and punishment, in relation to the complex history of race in the U.S. Through poetry, first-person narrative, and film, the course considers a range of subject positions and analyzes the perspectives they convey concerning individual experience and social structure. Close attention is given to individual voices, in light of the factors that shape point of view, identity, and social role. The course takes up prison writings as a critique from within of the political, social, and economic structures that shape American life. It also considers narrative representations of prisons and prisoners, ranging from letters, poems, and essays to popular films, to allow for study of diverse perspectives on incarceration. The course aims to give students the historical insight and analytical ability needed to identify the values that are at stake in contemporary controversies concerning social order, racial inequity, and mass incarceration. This seminar does not aim at reaching a solution or definitive conclusion. It seeks rather to help each student develop the analytic skills necessary to examine diverse perspectives and to put them into historical context. Analytical tools include brief readings in linguistics and semiotics. The course aims to give students the understanding they need to respond in an informed manner to contemporary issues involving race, social and economic inequities, and the problem of mass incarceration. In this Eloquentia Perfecta course, students will present written work for peer review and revision. Seminar members will give individual and small group presentations, as well as presenting research projects orally. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ADVD, AMST, APPI, ASAM, ASHS, ASLT, ENRJ, EP4, PJCJ, PJST, VAL.
ENGL 4045. Seminar: The Art of the Epistolary Novel. (4 Credits)
This course will examine the genre and aesthetics of the epistolary novel. We will discuss "The Color Purple," "An American Marriage," "Erasure," "The White Tiger," and "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, ENSM.
ENGL 4090. Seminar: The Victorian Novel. (4 Credits)
The Victorian period (roughly 1830 to 1900) is known as the great age of the British novel. It was also the age of industrialization, urbanization, imperial expansion, campaigns for women’s rights, and much more. In this research seminar, we will read a range of Victorian novels and study their generic conventions and innovations, together with their responses to the period’s rapid social and cultural changes. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4096. Hobbits/Heroes/Hubris. (4 Credits)
Centering on Tolkein’s "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," this course will examine heroes and heroines, with all their cultural, philosophical, and individual limitations. We will take a close look in particular at epic journeys in order to tease out the ever-changing definition of heroism. What are the boundaries of heroic figures’ ethics and morality, and what happens when they get crossed? How do heroes and heroines walk the fine line between self-confidence and hubris? Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: EP4, MVLI, MVST, VAL.
ENGL 4106. Seminar: The Great Depression: Literature and Culture. (4 Credits)
This course studies one of the deepest economic. social, and cultural crises in American history, from the 1929 stock market crash through 1941. We will be reading major American writers of fiction, poetry, and drama (to include, among others, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Stevens, Odets, Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright). But we will also attend to popular culture--newspapers, magazines, film, and radio. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENSM.
ENGL 4107. Seminar: Ecology on the Edge: Climate Change and Literature. (4 Credits)
This seminar offers a reconsideration of literary studies from the perspective of climate change. Ranging from ancient to contemporary texts from across the anthropocene (in transhistorical, transcultural, and transecological perspective), the seminar will investigate the relevance of climate change for assessments of literary history conceived in the broadest of comparative senses. The seminar will explore the interrelation between literature and ecology simultaneously from two vantage points: on the one hand, by reading select contemporary works of literature and criticism that seek to confront the imminent consequences of climate change for our own times; and, on the other hand, by reading ancient and early modern texts to reconsider how literature has long imagined and has long been shaped by ecological crisis. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENSM, ENST, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC.
ENGL 4108. Seminar: Exhibiting Latinidad: Curation/Display/Intervention. (4 Credits)
Museums have played critical roles in defining Latinidad for mass publics in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, curators and their exhibits can assume great power over our understandings of authenticity, cultural authority, and the historical “truth” about Latinx cultures. By retracing exhibition histories from classic shows like “Cuba-USA” and the “Decade Show” to the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time LA/LA” initiative, we will confront the different material, textual, and visual dilemmas provoked by museums. We will also ponder alternative exhibition practices for Latinidad’s representation and remembrance in the future. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AHGL, AHMO, ALC, AMST, ASAM, ASLT, ENRJ, ENSM, LAHA, LALS, PLUR.
ENGL 4109. Seminar: Latinx Speculation. (4 Credits)
Alien. Alienated. Alienation. These are a few words to describe the ways in which science fiction intertwines with the contemporary Latinx condition. The otherworldliness of being undocumented, surveilled, and threatened by mechanized technologies reads like science fiction. However, Latinxs know otherwise, having to endure the anti-immigrant sentiment pervading the political landscape. In turn, we impart an intimate knowledge of “being alien” from a variety of standpoints. From legislative measures threatening mass deportation to the militarization of borders, this dystopic reality elucidates the “other worlds” Latinxs occupy and traverse. For these reasons, we must question not only the meaning of the past but also the future. Latinx artists and writers have been endemic to imagining otherwise. By reading novels, artworks, and oral history transcripts on the topic, students will utilize speculative modes of inquiry to reimagine the terms of national citizenship, alienation, and Earthly belonging. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4111. Seminar: Medieval and Contemporary Women, Travel, and Power. (4 Credits)
This seminar explores women and mobility, addressing the rewards and challenges experienced by women travelers. Our case studies will follow the Queen of Sheba, as portrayed in the Kebra Nagest, the ancient Ethiopian text, as she journeyed to meet King Solomon; the English traveler Margery Kempe, who sought personal authority; Near Eastern ocean voyager Mary Magdalene, who took on a mission in Europe; and Egeria, the Spanish abbess who wrote of her travels to Jerusalem in the fourth century. All of these readings will be in modern English, and we will compare them with writings by present-day travelers, such as Cheryl Strayed’s journey of self-healing or Alison Hong Nguyen Lihalakha’s flight from war and search for identity. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM, MVST.
ENGL 4112. Seminar: Borders, Migrants, and Refugees. (4 Credits)
This seminar will explore writings by and about people who cross international borders for political, economic, and other reasons: migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. We will discuss novels, short stories, film, memoir, poetry, and other genres, as well as work in other disciplines and writings produced by those involved in migrant solidarity movements. Our primary focus will be on works by and about people crossing the Mexico/U.S. border in recent decades, though we may begin with some earlier texts on the borderlands. Depending on student interest, we may expand our scope to include other contexts, such as migration from Africa or the Middle East to Europe. Authors and directors may include Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Francisco Cantú, Yuri Herrera, Cristina Ibarra, Valeria Luiselli, Gregory Nava, Alex Rivera, and others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4113. Seminar: Writing Whiteness. (4 Credits)
"As long as you think you are white, there's no hope for you" (James Baldwin). What could Baldwin have meant by such a provocative statement? This course will address the question by tracing the process by which some Americans have come to think of themselves as "white," a category defined both against their own ethnic and national origins and against racial "others." Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4115. Seminar: British Romanticism: Town, City, Nation. (4 Credits)
This course approaches British Romanticism from three perspectives. First, we'll become versed in country things by examining writing about life in rural communities, from the local balls and provincial ballyhoo of Jane Austen's "three or four families in a country village" to the impoverished shepherds and superannuated farmhands of Wordsworth's northern Lake District. Second, we'll map the vibrant literary culture of London, paying special attention to writing that ponders the joys and also the frustrations of life in the ever-expanding metropolis. Then, in the third section of the course, we'll examine global scenes by following the networks of empire (the transatlantic slave trade, the opium industry) and examining the significance of Mediterranean places and cultures, both ancient and contemporary, to Romantic-era writers. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4116. Seminar: The Beat Generation and U.S. Culture. (4 Credits)
This course explores the literature of the post-1945 period in the U.S., focusing in particular on the Beat Generation. How do the period’s writers contest our common conceptions of the 1950s and '60s as an idyllic period in U.S. history? How do their works refract tensions surrounding race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality that would erupt in the social movements of the 1960s and persist in modified forms today? In what ways do their works create alternative narratives of U.S. national identity, especially through road narratives that retrace and reinscribe traditional concepts such as Manifest Destiny? How do they engage with contemporaneous changes surrounding censorship, the Cold War, environmentalism, drug culture, feminism, gay liberation, and the black arts movement? Authors covered in the course may include Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lorraine Hansberry, Diane DiPrima, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O’Hara, among others. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENSM.
ENGL 4117. Seminar: Modern Geographies. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the ways shifting conceptions of space impacted modernist writing. Developments in technologies of communication and transportation enabled both people and ideas to move across space in new ways, challenging national identities and the relationship between the self and others. Much of the innovation we associate with literary modernism emerged in response to this increasingly globalized landscape. Our analysis of modernism and its spaces will include discussions of urbanism, public space, colonialism and post-colonialism, and expatriate and travel writing. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENSM.
ENGL 4118. Seminar: Dickinson, Whitman, and Company. (4 Credits)
This course examines the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and their contemporaries. As we study the writings of Dickinson and Whitman across a variety of areas—love poems, poems about loss, poems about nature and art, historical and comic poems and religious poems—we will also link them to less familiar non-canonical poems from a variety of traditions. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AMST, ENSM.
ENGL 4119. Seminar: God and Money in Early America. (4 Credits)
In Matthew, Jesus said “Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” that is, religion and wealth, at the same time. So how did American colonist reconcile their desires for salvation and prosperity? Did piety and profits always “jump together”? Reading both British and American literary text and recent scholarship in early American studies, this seminar will explore the language of spiritual and material wealth in colonial New England, the South, the West Indies, and the Mid-Atlantic. We will examine writing concerned with theology, morality, ethics, social class, economics, and economic self-making over the course of nearly two centuries – both on their own terms and in terms of how religion and economics shaped one another. Authors will include William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, APPI, ASLT, ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4120. Seminar: Milton. (4 Credits)
“Knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world,” John Milton claims in Areopagitica, an essay advocating against censorship. How do we tell one from the other? This course follows Milton’s attempt to do the sorting through his major poetry and his political, social, and theological advocacy. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM, REST.
ENGL 4121. New York City in Fiction. (4 Credits)
This course will explore both short stories and novels written in and about New York City during the 20th century. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, URST.
ENGL 4122. Seminar: Love/Fiction. (4 Credits)
How do literary characters fall in love? How do fiction and fantasy shape the experience of love? What keeps readers engaged and loving love stories ourselves? This reading-intensive, discussion-oriented seminar examines the forms, discourses, and effects of love in a diverse range of modern and contemporary literary novels in English. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENSM.
ENGL 4123. Seminar: Paris Modernism. (4 Credits)
When the autobiographical hero of James Joyce’s novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” plots his escape from Dublin, it is to Paris that he plans to go—the city where he believes he will be able to live, write, think, and be free from the expectations governing his life at home. He was certainly not alone in imagining that Paris could provide a creative refuge. In the early part of the 20th century, and particularly after World War I, writers, artists, and creative people of all kinds flocked to Paris, and together they forged the movement we now call “modernism.” What was it about Paris that drew them, and what did they find there? In this course, we will study a range of works by expatriates, including Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. We will consider them alongside contemporary developments in French literature, looking at works by authors including Colette, André Breton, Frantz Fanon, Jean Cocteau, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, and Simone de Beauvoir. While our primary focus will be on literature, we will also encounter performers like Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, filmmakers like Marcel Carné and Agnès Varda, and visual artists like Picasso and Lee Miller. Students will produce short pieces, give oral presentations, write a midterm paper, and do a final research project—either scholarly or creative. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENSM, INST, ISEU.
ENGL 4125. Seminar: Im/Possible Worlds: Race, Social Difference, and Pop Genres. (4 Credits)
This course will focus on popular genres and forms—including graphic narrative, young adult novels, and speculative fiction—that have often been dismissed as lowbrow or uncultured. We will reconsider them in light of their aesthetic complexity and political texture, including their treatment of racial and social differences and their use of such popular constructs as aliens, magical objects, vampires, and associated motifs and figures. Course selections may include: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4126. Ten Short Films About Morality. (4 Credits)
This seminar will focus on a close analysis of acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic masterpiece, The Decalogue (1988-89). The ten one-hour films of the series each examine the ambiguities of the Ten Commandments in the modern setting of late twentieth-century Poland. The films will be paired with substantial essays examining the “ten words” of the commandments from various religious, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives, as well as some key texts in critical and film theory. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENGL, EP4, VAL.
ENGL 4127. Seminar: Novels By Women: Jane Austen to Toni Morrison. (4 Credits)
An intensive study of novels by Jane Austen, George Elliot, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. Our reading will be supplemented by literary criticism and historical contextual material. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENHD, ENSM, WGSS.
ENGL 4128. Seminar: Love and Sex in Early Modern Literature. (4 Credits)
Some things don’t change—but love and sex do. This class looks at the cultural history of sex and love in the early 1600s through the lens of early modern plays and poetry. We’re looking past Romeo and Juliet, to plays celebrating Bacchanalian excess, and poems lauding Italian dildos. The play texts aren’t easy reads, and we’ll examine historical sources as well. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM, WGSS.
ENGL 4135. Bible in English Poetry. (4 Credits)
This course studies some of the books of the Bible which have been most influential on English literature, together with English poetry and critical texts, from the Middle Ages to the present, which have been influenced by these biblical books. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AMCS, ENHD, EP4, VAL.
ENGL 4137. Hysteria, Sexuality, and the Unconscious. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary seminar is sponsored by the Department of English and the Department of History. The seminar explores issues raised by hysteria, sexuality and the unconscious in turn of the twentieth-century western culture-topics that cross disciplinary boundaries. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: BEHR, BIOE, COLI, ENGL, HIST, ICC, INST, ISEU, ISIN, WGSS.
ENGL 4141. Death in the Middle Ages. (4 Credits)
This course will examine death culture, including rituals of death, the instructions for a good death, visual depictions of death, and the great theme of the afterlife. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, EP4, MVLI, MVST, VAL.
ENGL 4142. Contemplating the Cloisters. (4 Credits)
In this course, we study important texts, artworks, and musics of the late monastery through class meetings held both at Lincoln Center and the Cloisters Museum in Upper Manhattan, itself a patchwork of five European monastic houses and home to some of the world’s greatest medieval artworks, including the Unicorn Tapestries, the Merode Altarpiece, and the Belles Heures of Jean de Barry. As the heart of communal religious life in the Middle Ages, the cloister was an open space where the triple monastic duties of prayer, study, and work could be practiced and was a preeminent site of reading, reflection, and dialogue between some of the great thinkers of the day. Through our own reading, reflection, and lively dialogue, we will think critically across disciplines about medieval monastic lifeworlds, their practice, and their aesthetic productions. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ICC, MVAM, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 4143. Shakespeare: Text and Performance. (4 Credits)
This course will study Shakespeare’s plays first as texts and then as performance, focusing on the literary/historical aspect of a play, and then the same play as a theatrical script for realization in a performance setting. Through close readings from these widely disparate points of view, we will try to grasp how the theater acts to engage audiences and create meanings, and how time and culture are expressed in both text and performance. We’ll investigate questions about adaptation, authorship, the status of “classic” texts and their variant forms, the transition from manuscript, book and stage to film and digitally inflected forms of media. Assignments will include readings, memorization, essays, and presentations. The final project can be an essay, the student’s short video of a Shakespeare excerpt, or a brief performance. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ICC.
ENGL 4144. Hamlet: Text and Performance. (4 Credits)
We will study Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ as a historical/literary text and as a theatrical script. Through close readings from disparate points of view, we will encounter how the theatre acts to create meanings, and how time and culture are expressed in text and performance. Areas of study will include set design, costumes, film adaptations, literary rewritings, pop culture renditions, and references in music and advertising. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ICC, THEA.
ENGL 4145. Dramaturgy. (4 Credits)
The word dramaturgy, "the art or technique of dramatic composition or theatrical representation," describes a series of practices that include aspects of playwriting, directing, and theatrical scholarship. This interdisciplinary seminar takes a capacious view of the practice of dramaturgy, approaching it as both a creative and a scholarly practice. As dramaturges, we will be literary and performance scholars, researching theater history, dramatic theory, and the broader cultural and historical contexts of our theatrical projects; we will also work as practitioners, collaborating with our peers to translate diverse texts into theatrical events. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ICC, THEA.
ENGL 4146. The Body in Contemporary Women's Literature and Art. (4 Credits)
How do we understand relationships among identity, gender, race, and the human body? How do recent women writers and artists explore this question? This course will examine visual art and writing since the 1980s that depicts—and seeks to understand—human embodiment, challenging the idea of a physical norm in order to expand how bodies (especially women's) are represented and known. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ICC, PJGS, PJST.
ENGL 4147. Food and Globalization. (4 Credits)
This course will examine scholarship on food and globalization from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropological, sociological, historical, and literary. It will also examine the interdisciplinary fields of food studies and globalization studies to discuss the development of global exchange networks and their impact on consumer cultures and notions of identity in the united states and beyond. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENST, ESEL, ICC, INST, ISIN.
ENGL 4148. Medieval Drama in Performance. (4 Credits)
Divine mysteries and scurrilous scatology, Everyman's workaday struggles and a king's political quandaries, lavish one-night courtly entertainments and massive Biblical plays performed by an entire community: the drama of the English late Middle Ages (roughly 1350-1500) was resourceful, local, non-professional, and endlessly inventive. In this course, we study medieval English drama along three axes: as literary texts full of humor, pathos, and meaning; as evidence for historical performance practice and theater history; and as scripts brimming with possibility for performance. Combining intensive reading of medieval play texts with key works by important theater practitioners, we examine medieval drama on its own terms and ask what it means to read and perform these works in the 21st century. To help answer this question, students collaboratively design, direct, and stage a medieval dramatic work of their choosing as a final project. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ICC, MVLI, MVST, THEA.
ENGL 4149. Modern Drama as Moral Crucible. (4 Credits)
The creators of modern drama made the theater an arena for moral struggle and personal commitment while, at the same time, questioning the possibility of both. Playwrights studied in this course will include Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and August Williams, among others. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, COLI, EP4, INST, ISEU, VAL, WGSS.
ENGL 4150. Race and Contemporary Film. (4 Credits)
This course examines contemporary cinema in an effort to understand the racial present. Drawing on theories and methods from sociology, anthropology, history, and literary theory, we will develop a provisional model of interdisciplinary cultural analysis that will help us better understand how representations of race function in our own historical moment. At the same time, we will investigate exactly what constitutes “our own historical moment.” What is the historical present? How and why does it differ from one racial group to the next? And how do these competing racial temporalities affect present-day racial politics? With such questions in mind, we will conduct a series of case studies in racial representation. Each case will be organized around a recent film, and each film will be examined from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with particular emphasis on how various academic disciplines both illuminate and obscure various aspects of the racial representation at hand. NOTE: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, COLI, ENRJ, ICC, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 4151. Performing Medieval Drama. (4 Credits)
In the English late Middle Ages (roughly 1350-1500), theater was a thoroughly local affair. Performances spanned from one-night-only entertainments, acted by lavishly costumed noblemen for their peers, to massive cycles of city-specific religious plays, performed annually over a period of days by an entire community. Scurrilous scatology stood alongside the most divine of mysteries; the humble, menial struggles of Everyman had their place on stage just as much as the social and political quandaries of a king. In this course, we will study medieval English drama both as a body of literature and as a repository for medieval performance rhetorics we can experiment with in the present day. A series of assignments over the course of the semester will help us understand late medieval plays and their unique theatricality. The semester culminates with a collaboratively staged and publicly performed medieval drama of the student's choosing. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, MVLI, MVST.
ENGL 4152. The Tempest: Text and Performance. (4 Credits)
This course will study Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as a historical/literary text and simultaneously as a theatrical script that we will act in the classroom, focusing on a single scene at a time. Through close readings from disparate points of view, we will investigate how the theatre acts to engage audiences and create meanings, and how time and culture are expressed in both text and performance. Students will read several adaptations of the play, as well as viewing film versions and adaptations such as Prospero’s Books. We’ll investigate questions about adaptation, authorship, the status of a “classic” text and its variant forms, and the transition from manuscript to stage to film. Assignments will include readings, essays, and presentations. Quizzes will include regular exercises in blank verse, especially iambic pentameter. The final project can be a scholarly essay, the student’s short video of an excerpt from The Tempest, or a brief performance. No acting background is necessary. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ICC, THEA.
ENGL 4155. The Seven Deadly Sins. (4 Credits)
Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth—for Christian ethics, these seven vices have traditionally mapped the landscape of sin in service to the project of locating and extirpating evil from the human soul. For nearly two millennia, the seven deadly sins have provided an enduring system for explaining why we trespass against one another and provided a tool by which the faithful may examine their conscience and seek forgiveness. While serving ethical, spiritual, and social ends, they have simultaneously caught the imagination of numerous artists, playwrights, authors, and musicians who have found in them a wellspring of inspiration for probing contemporary social issues and plumbing the depths of the human condition. In this course, we will read broadly across this tradition, from its original formulation through its medieval heyday to its modern resurgence. Drawing on an eclectic selection of texts, plays, paintings, and films, we will investigate how the representation and enactment of the seven deadly sins has invited audiences, viewers, and readers into ethical reflection upon themselves, their communities, their institutions, and their world. We will also critically reflect on the fascination these seven vices inspire even into the 21st century. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, EP4, MVST, VAL.
ENGL 4156. Seminar: Satire before 1850. (4 Credits)
Satire is as ancient as the oldest poets we know about and as modern as your favorite streaming series. This course will look at the remarkable heyday satire enjoyed in the 18th century, focusing on works by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Mary Montagu, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and others. This is not a creative writing class, but students will be invited (not required) to imitate the techniques these authors employed by composing satirical pieces on current topics. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4184. Postwar American Literature and Culture. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary seminar analyzes cultural trends and counter-cultural movements of the post-WWII war era as represented in American literature and history. Topics include the Cold War and containment culture, the racial politics of suburbanization, the Beats and the counterculture, student radicalism, the civil rights struggle and Black Power, the anti-war movement, environmentalism, the sexual revolution, cultural conservatism, and questions of history, identity, and responsibility. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, ICC, PJSJ, PJST.
ENGL 4185. Caribbean Islands and Oceans. (4 Credits)
Islands and oceans: these geographic features have defined both the history of the Caribbean and imaginative writing about it. Drawing on work by literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, and others, this course will examine novels, poetry, travel narratives, essays, and films about the Caribbean from 1492 to the present. As we read, we will think about how authors have used the metaphors of island and ocean not only to portray the Caribbean as a paradise but also to critique the impact that forces of empire and colonialism have had on the region and its ecologies. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AMST, ASLT, ENHD, ENRJ, ICC, INST, ISLA, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 4190. Shakespeare/Dylan: Plays, Songs, Conversations. (4 Credits)
In this course we’ll explore the works of two strongly connected yet vividly different creators—William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan—by means of core methodologies now central to two distinct yet notably overlapping scholarly disciplines: literary study and musicology. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ICC.
ENGL 4206. Comparative Studies in Revolution. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary capstone seminar engages students in a series of literary and historical studies of revolutionary (and counter–revolutionary) movements (e.g. the Haitian revolution of 1791, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the events of 1965 in Indonesia). Examining historical documents, works of fiction, literary theory and historiography, the seminar will investigate how the disciplines of history, literary criticism, and cultural studies more generally, seek to explain revolutionary historical change. Particular attention will be paid to the authority of textual evidence placed within interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and multi-media contexts. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AMST, APPI, ASAM, ASHS, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, GLBL, ICC, INST, ISIN, PJSJ, PJST.
ENGL 4207. Comparative Studies in Empire. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary capstone seminar will study the interrelation between different imperial formations (e.g. Roman, Ottoman, Mongol, British, Chinese, and American) and the various linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions that give them imaginative and historical shape. Attention will be paid to the importance of literary form and historical representation. Juxtaposing historical and fictional texts from different cultural and historical moments, the seminar will explore how these texts foreground problems of historical documentation and textual authority. The seminar will also study how these foundational problems, shared by the disciplines of history and literary criticism, are embodied in other media, notably music and film. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, APPI, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, ICC, IRST.
ENGL 4208. Narrative Across Media: Literature, Music, Film. (4 Credits)
This course examines the ability of the same stories to be told in different media, in this case fictional narrative, music (classical and blues), and narrative film. We will concentrate on films and literary works in which music plays a pivotal role and on music in which literary narratives play a pivotal role. We will also consider literary works that, as part of the story they tell, reflect on the act of telling a story. Writers to be read are likely to include, among others, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Lord Byron, Langston Hughes, Henry James, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf. Context will be supplied by several theories of narrative both ancient and modern. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ICC.
ENGL 4209. Literature of Peace and War. (4 Credits)
The decision to wage war is one of the most consequential moral choices we make. The struggle to achieve and maintain peace is one of the most challenging and abstract human goals. For all the ways that war and peace are tied up with politics, we can come to a better understanding of human experience of peace and war through art. This senior values seminar explores literary and cinematic representations of peace and war from Classical times to the present day. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: EP4, PJCR, PJST, PJWT, VAL.
ENGL 4210. Comparative Studies in Atlantic Revolutions. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary seminar engages students in a series of literary and historical studies of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) movements that took place in the Atlantic world (e.g., the English Civil War; the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions; uprisings of enslaved people in Curaçao and Jamaica; and the Spanish American wars for independence). Examining historical documents, works of fiction, literary theory, and historiography, the seminar will investigate how the disciplines of history, literary criticism, and cultural studies more generally seek to understand revolutionary historical change. Particular attention will be paid to the authority of textual evidence placed within interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and multimedia contexts. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENHD, ENRJ, EP3, GLBL.
ENGL 4211. Empire and Sexuality. (4 Credits)
For many years now, critical queer and trans scholars have traced the intersections between gender and sexual identity formations and the modern exercise of state power. In particular, this body of scholarship has excavated the complicities between the mainstream LGBTQ movement and structures of empire-building, neoliberal capital, and racial governmentality. This interdisciplinary women’s, gender, and sexuality studies course explores how two disciplines—literature and political science—study the role of gender and sexuality within racial, colonial, and imperial projects. We will examine and compare how these two disciplinary approaches pose their own questions and employ distinct methodologies to produce scholarly knowledge. As we read works of literature, policy documents, and legal documents, the course charts how sexuality is central to the formation of racial categories, as well as the management and control of populations. Following a central insight of decolonial feminism, we will work to connect interpersonal and intimate violence to the political: institutions, structures of power, and their relevant histories. Our course texts offer challenges to Eurocentric conceptions of identity, as well as alternative imaginings of desire, subjectivity, kinship, and sociality. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ENRJ, GLBL, ICC, INST, ISIN, PJGS, PJST, WGSS.
ENGL 4215. Law and Literature. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the intersection and tensions between law and literature. Our society is governed by laws, but the application of those laws is a human project, subject to change, judgment, protest, and revision. While laws reflect our values, they are no substitute for values, and some of our most important civil discussions emerge out of disagreements over the justice of a law. Where law makes rules, literature thrives in creativity and ambiguity and excels at telling the story of the special case. Reading literature and law side by side helps us better understand law and its limits and the distinction between law and justice. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: EP4, VAL.
ENGL 4216. Animal Welfare in Literature and Culture. (4 Credits)
This course is an investigation of writings on the "animal mind" and animal welfare. Topics to be addressed include animal rights, animal/human relations, domestication, and animal language. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, ENST, EP4, ESEJ, ESEL, ESHC, VAL.
ENGL 4217. Health, Self, and Capital: The Art of Living and Its Discontents. (4 Credits)
This course draws on the two disciplines of history and literary studies to examine the intersection of health, self, and capital in Western ideas about the art of living over four seminal and interrelated moments—antiquity, the Enlightenment, the early 20th-century Lebensreform movement, and today’s $4.5 trillion global wellness industry. The course is divided into two parts. In the first, we take an analytical and critical approach to the theories and history of ideas about the art of living and wellness. In the second, students will apply the methodological approaches and tools we have developed in the first half of the course to complete collaborative research projects and deliver presentations addressing the discontents of traditional conceptions of the art of living and articulating new trajectories. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, ICC.
ENGL 4227. Black Literature and Film. (4 Credits)
From Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) to Sapphire’s Push (1996), African American literature has inspired several film adaptations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries (like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X [1992] and Lee Daniels’ Precious [2009]). Indeed, the number of cinematic adaptations of African American literature suggests that there is not only a particular fascination with transforming literary works into films but also an abiding interest in seeing how a text will translate onto the big screen. In this course, students will analyze selected texts (such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun [1959], Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [1982], and Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale [1992]) alongside their cinematic counterparts (such as Daniel Petrie's A Raisin in the Sun [1961], Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple [1985], and Forest Whitaker’s Waiting to Exhale [1995]) to discuss how literary and filmic texts measure up on their own worth, as well as to examine how these texts mutually inform one another, particularly in the ways that they become remembered in the American cultural imagination. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AFAM, AMST, ENRJ, ICC, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 4228. Black Protest from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter. (4 Credits)
This course will consider the canon of African American literature through an expansive definition of protest. We will examine how the meaning of protest has evolved from the 18th century to the present. As we interrogate the relationship between Blackness and protest, we will also discuss how that history has consistently shaped American identity. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, AMST, APPI, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, EP4, PJRC, PJST, VAL.
ENGL 4229. The Color Purple & Its Adaptations. (4 Credits)
This course will examine Alice Walker’s novel "The Color Purple" and its adaptations as a film, Broadway musical, and musical film adaptation. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENRJ.
ENGL 4236. Seminar: Latin American Short Story. (4 Credits)
Writings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (to name just a few) are some of the treasures of world literature. This course will focus on the short story and novella forms in order to explore as fully as possible the full range of Latin American and Latino literature. Literary geographies will include Mexico, the Caribbean, Central & South America, with special sections on Cuba, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. All readings will be in English. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, ENSM, LAHA, LALS.
ENGL 4237. Seminar: Latin American and Latino Short Stories. (4 Credits)
This seminar will focus on contemporary Latino and Latin American short fiction. Short stories from Latin America are among the treasures of world literature, and U.S. Latino writers are continuing this tradition. Pulling together these materials will be themes of resistance and struggle, but also love, sexuality, and fantasy. In the short stories we will read, anything is possible, and the imagination is unlimited. We will read recent literature from the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, and Chile, and all the works will be in English, although we will consider the question of translation and literature throughout the course. The course is a seminar and active participation will be required. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: ENSM.
ENGL 4246. Media, Disability, Futurity. (4 Credits)
This interdisciplinary capstone course explores the theme of futurity through the lenses of media studies, disability studies, and narrative studies. Futurity is not just the stuff of science fiction, but is rather an integrated part of the rhetoric we use when imagining the kind of world we want to build. Media and other digital technologies are often a part of this narrative imagining, and with those tools we often imagine which bodies we might repair, represent, or rebuild. Using a variety of interpretive and analytical methods, students will ask what futures are available to which bodies and why; how bodies are figured as legibly human, and how dominant narratives enable or foreclose the full expression of a range of embodiments. The object of analysis is simultaneously representative, linguistic, narrative or historical: this course argues that any critical examination of embodiment necessarily touches upon not only key cultural studies categories such as race, class, gender and sexuality, but also upon the question of technology’s relationship to the body and its narrative figuring of health and flourishing. Students will finish the course with a nuanced understanding of how contemporary texts both visual and linguistic determine a shared cultural imagining of a better world, and how we might work to craft that image in a more inclusive and socially just way. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, COMC, DISA, ENRJ, ICC, PJSJ, PJST.
ENGL 4318. Seminar: Early Women Novelists. (4 Credits)
A study of the rise of female authors in eighteenth-century England. We will address problems of gender, race and class, as well as the basic literary and historical dimensions of each text we read. Authors will likely include Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Charlotte or Emily Brontë. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM, WGSS.
ENGL 4370. Disgust in Literature and Psychology. (4 Credits)
This course will analyze disgust in literature (and related disciplines) and in psychology as primary emotion that exists in every culture. We will study fiction, poetry, and film--and also psychological research, as we explore what it means to be disgusted, and why we are motivated to read and view things that provoke disgust. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ASLT, ICC, PSYC, PYCA.
ENGL 4401. Seminar: The Brontës in Context. (4 Credits)
Students will study novels by the three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—in the context of social and cultural developments in 19th-century England. Please note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ALC, ENSM.
ENGL 4403. Extraordinary Bodies. (4 Credits)
From freak shows to the Americans with Disabilities Act, people with non-normative bodies have received special, and not always welcome, attention from their peers. This course will study the experience of people with anomalous bodies from a variety of personal and social perspectives. Please note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AMST, ASLT, BEVL, COLI, DISA, DIUL, EP4, VAL, WGSS.
ENGL 4408. Seminar: Romantic Revolutions. (4 Credits)
The Romantic era was punctuated by revolutions and uprisings in America, France, Haiti, and elsewhere. We will ask how an atmosphere of rebellion and a counter-spirit of repression informed the period's literary culture, with an intensive study of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, and Mary Shelley. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4409. SEM: Romanticism Sublime & Everyday. (4 Credits)
This course views British romantic literature through one of the period’s most important lenses (the sublime) and its opposite (the everyday). We begin with two main theorists of the sublime, Burke and Kant, and then read a range of poetry, novels, and nonfiction prose. Likely writers include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen. Our topics will include how the sublime was gendered and racialized in the period, and its role in fostering a rhetoric of empire. We will also ask what it meant to reject the sublime for an emphasis on the quotidian instead. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4410. Seminar: Birdsong. (4 Credits)
The close association of poetry and birdsong is ancient and global. We will explore that endlessly renewable connection with a special emphasis on Romantic-era transatlantic poetry. Writers have long listened closely to birds and been inspired by their singing to experiment with literary innovation, yet the question of how we listen to birds takes on new urgency in our own era of climate crisis, marked by declining bird populations and extinction. In our wide range of readings, we will see that birds alternately sound warnings as canaries in the coal mine and figure hope as “the thing with feathers.” In addition to works of literature, we will read non-fiction prose, including essays and memoirs, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of birds inspired by environmental and sound studies. We will put our learning into practice by birdwatching in local parks, taking advantage of NYC’s location on the Atlantic flyway. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENHD, ENSM.
ENGL 4420. Ethics and Intelligence. (4 Credits)
This seminar will engage students in an intensive examination of the history, literature, and ethics of secret intelligence. Tracing the historical emergence of contemporary intelligence agencies from the early modern period up to the present, and with special attention to literary works from contrasting cultural traditions, the seminar will focus on three areas of expertise that have historically shaped the articulation and administration of both clandestine and public intelligence and information: the work of translators, the work of missionaries, and the work of government agencies. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: COLI, EP4, VAL.
ENGL 4421. Disability, Literature, Culture: Neurological, Mental & Cognitive Difference in Culture & Context. (4 Credits)
Disability studies, the central focus of this course, is an inherently interdisciplinary field. Drawing particularly on two of its constituent disciplines, literature and sociology, this course will explore the questions and problems raised by neurological, mental, and cognitive disabilities, as they relate to identity, community, and belonging. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AMST, COLI, DISA, DIUL, ENRJ, ICC, PJSJ, PJST.
ENGL 4425. Seminar: Nathaniel Hawthorne. (4 Credits)
This course will explore the writing, life, and social world of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Paying particular attention to questions of literary form, history, national, trans-national, racial, and gender politics, we will read The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, and a selection of his tales. We will also consider Hawthorne's shifting role in the history of American literary criticism. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ALC, AMST, ASLT, ENSM.
ENGL 4490. British Literature, History, and Culture of the Great War. (4 Credits)
Focusing upon poetry, fiction, drama and memoir written between 1910 and 1925, this interdisciplinary course explores the historical, cultural and aesthetic impact of World War I. Literary works are paired with historical readings, early silent film, popular music and medical discourses. Using London and Great Britain as texts, the course features field trips to several important archives, including the The Imperial War Museum in London and Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. Major modernist writers treated in the course include Thomas Hardy, G.B. Shaw, W.B Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ICC, IRST.
ENGL 4542. Seminar: Modern Irish Literature. (4 Credits)
This seminar in modern Irish literature invites us to rethink the familiar canon of Irish writing to include a broader and more inclusive range of voices than conventional surveys of the topic might include. We will continue to read works by the writers whose portraits grace the walls of pubs and Barnes and Noble bookstores -- writers including Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. We will also read works that represent a fuller range of voices from Ireland and beyond. We will read works by women writers (Maria Edgeworth, Eavan Boland), works originally composed in the Irish language (Eileen O'Connell, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), works by activist writers (Maud Gonne), works by Pavee writers (Rosaleen McDonagh), and works from other parts of the world where experiences of colonization and decolonization, Catholicism, civil rights struggle, and peace-making invite illuminating comparisons, connections, and reckonings with both shared and divergent historical experiences (Joy Harjo, Kirsten Greenidge). The course will conclude with a unit on the Irish vampire literature tradition and its political and historical contexts. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENSM, IRST.
ENGL 4548. World War II: History, Literature, and Film. (4 Credits)
In this interdisciplinary, team-taught course, we will study World War II from the perspectives of history, literature, and film. Our main goals will be to introduce a widely scoped account of the unfolding of the war (causes, conduct, aftermath) and the meaning of the war as it has been expressed through story and image from its very beginnings. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: HIST, HIUL, ICC.
ENGL 4600. Anger in Asian American Literature and Culture. (4 Credits)
Ever since the first Chinese immigrant carved a protest poem into the walls of the Angel Island detention center, Asian American literature has been suffused with anger—both the anger Asian Americans feel as minoritized subjects and the anger they are forced to absorb in a virulently racist, white supremacist society. Drawing on scholarship from philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies, this interdisciplinary course asks what Asian American anger can teach us about both the lived experience and the structural conditions of race. Treating anger less as a character flaw than as a social product, we will explore several interrelated questions. How does the production of anger relate to the processes of racialization? How might Asian American anger complicate the Black-white binary that dominates U.S. racial discourse? In what ways might it enable a global understanding of race? What aesthetic and ethico-political problems does it pose? What possibilities does it open up? How have Asian American artists and writers grappled with those problems? And how have they sought to actualize the possibilities of Asian American anger? Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ACUP, ADVD, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, ICC, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 4603. Asian American Critique. (4 Credits)
This capstone course explores canonical and cutting-edge research in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies. Examining the field’s interventions in disciplines such as history, sociology, media studies, and literary studies, we will discover how Asian Americanists have enunciated a distinct set of themes, methods, analyses, historical narratives, and ethico-political projects. Topics may include Asian American critiques of racial capitalism; neoliberalism; biopolitics; environmental devastation; human-animal relations; contemporary aesthetic categories; the Asian Century; and the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. This course fulfills the ICC and pluralism requirements of the common core. Previous exposure to ENGL 3356, “Approaches to Asian American Studies,” or ENGL 3359, “Asian Diasporic Literature,” is encouraged but not required. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AAST, ACUP, ADVD, AMST, ASLT, COLI, ENRJ, ICC, INST, ISAS, PJRC, PJST, PLUR.
ENGL 4604. Seminar: Jazz Age, Literature, and Culture. (4 Credits)
The glamour and glitz of the 1920s era known as "The Jazz Age" are the subject of this course, which examines changes in the literature and culture of the period between World War 1 and the end of Prohibition in 1933. The class examines popular culture, politics, and economic change in these years, through the lens of writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, as well as the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the first wave of women's liberation. Sample topics include the Great Migration, World War I, the New Negro, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, urban transformations, consumerism, homosexuality, and the influence of jazz and blues music. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: AMST, ENSM.
ENGL 4605. Sem: Anti-Racist Methods. (4 Credits)
Why is the study of literature so white? This research seminar introduces students to different methods that scholars have used over the past four decades to make the study of literature more inclusive, from expanding canons and opening up the definition of literature, to investigating archives and theorizing their silences and absences as themselves telling a story. We will test these different methods as we learn how to search and research in digital archives. Final projects will allow students to pursue independent research and help create new knowledge about literary history. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ENRJ, ENSM, PJRC, PJST.
ENGL 4606. Seminar: James Baldwin. (4 Credits)
An overview of Baldwin's three-and-a-half decade literary career (1953-1987), considering novels, essays, short stories, and television appearances. Themes will include race, politics, activism, sexuality, national identity, violence, love, and truth. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attributes: ACUP, ADVD, AFAM, AMST, ASLT, ENRJ, ENSM, PLUR.
ENGL 4701. Writer's Workshop 3. (4 Credits)
An advanced workshop class for creative writing. Admission by writing sample submission only. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 4702. Fiction Writing 3. (4 Credits)
An advanced workshop class for fiction writing. Admission by writing sample submission only. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 4703. Creative Nonfiction Writing 3. (4 Credits)
An advanced workshop class for creative nonfiction writing. Admission by writing sample submission only. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 4704. Poetry Writing 3. (4 Credits)
An advanced workshop class for poetry writing. Admission by writing sample submission only. For more information, go to the Fordham Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshops webpage. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 4705. Creative Writing Capstone. (4 Credits)
This capstone course is the exit requirement for English majors concentrating in creative writing. Students will work on comprehensive portfolios that encompass their creative and professional work and can help pave the way for a post-Fordham career. In addition, students will work on a high-level, collaborative public exhibition project. The principal aim of the capstone is to introduce our graduating students to the realities of the writer’s life, which necessarily involve not just individual work but also affiliation, cooperation, and community. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 4706. Master Class: Dragons, Daggers, and Dukes: Writing Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Romance/Mystery. (4 Credits)
Genre fiction is, by definition, writing that bows to limitation: Conventions shape the parameters of a story. Yet, in excellent genre fiction, the imaginary world is doubly creative despite constraints or conventions. In this class, we’ll tackle bestsellers—pop fiction that engages and enthralls readers. We will study and experiment before setting into a final manuscript in the genre of your choice. Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 4998. English Honors Thesis Tutorial. (4 Credits)
Seniors with a 3.6 GPA or higher in English who wish to complete an ambitious project under the direction of a faculty member should register for this course. Discuss this option with the associate chair or the director of creative writing, as well as with a potential faculty adviser, and then submit an application to write a thesis in the term prior to the semester in which the thesis will be completed. To write a thesis in the spring semester, you must submit the application by October 15 of the previous semester; to write a thesis in the fall semester, you must submit the application by March 1 of the previous semester. At the end of the semester in which the thesis is completed, there will be an honors defense with the adviser and one departmental reader. Note: Four-credit courses that meet for 150 minutes per week require three additional hours of class preparation per week on the part of the student in lieu of an additional hour of formal instruction.
ENGL 4999. Tutorial. (4 Credits)
Independent research and readings with supervision from a faculty member.
ENGL 5001. Pro.Sem: Res.methods Engl. (3 Credits)
An introduction to English studies at the graduate leve, emphasizing bibliography, scholary writing, and critical intervention. Although the emphasis of the course will vary according to the aims of the instructor, areas covered may also include book history, textual editing, historical research, and other issues of professional concern to graduate students. All incoming doctoral students must take this course during the fall semester of their first year.
Attribute: ENGT.
ENGL 5002. Critical Theory. (3 Credits)
A representative but not inclusive sampling of key theoretical studies from roughly the past seventy-five years. After reading a series of now classic essays to lay a foundation, the course will consider closely the writings of a small number of influential thinkers, possibly including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, among others.
Attribute: ENGT.
ENGL 5018. Modern American Drama. (3 Credits)
A survey of major American plays from the early 20th century to the present, examined alongside contemporary scholarly debates in theater and performance studies. Topics of study will include theater and media, theories of spectatorship, ideologies of acting, performance as work and the performance of work, liveness and authenticity, and representations of difference. Playwrights studied will include (but not be limited to) Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Adrienne Kennedy, David Mamet, Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Annie Baker, and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
Attribute: ENG3.
ENGL 5019. Staging Blackness: Black Drama and the African American Literary Tradition. (3 Credits)
A literary, historical, and performance-oriented exploration of African American literature.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5020. Fear on the Homefront: The Literature of Peace and War. (3 Credits)
The decision to wage war is one of the most consequential moral choices we make. The struggle to achieve and maintain peace is one of the most challenging and abstract human goals. For all the ways that war and peace are tied up with politics, we can come to a better understanding of our human experience of peace and war through art. This seminar explores literary and cinematic representations of peace and war from Classical times to the present day. We look at war stories and the special case of civil war, as well as the more recent phenomenon of fear on the homefront. We end with a unit on pacifism and peace work. In every unit, we will read nonfiction sources highlighting ethical and moral ideas about war (by Abraham Lincoln, Simone Weil, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer and others). Authors include Homer, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, and many others.
Attribute: PJST.
ENGL 5021. Modernism, Cinema, and Literature: Edison to Cuarón. (3 Credits)
Without cinema, perhaps there would have been no artistic movement known as “Modernism.” This course investigates this premise through the study of a range of films, theoretical texts, and literary works that shed light on a mutual influence: that of cinema on the development of modernist literature, and that of literature on the development of the art of film, from the late 19th century through the modernist period and into the present. We will study the works of filmmakers Georges Méliès, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, John Ford, Orson Welles, Wu Yonggang, Maya Deren, Satyajit Ray, Wong Kar-wai, Agnès Varda, and others. Readings will include key works of film history and theory on concepts such as montage, Surrealism, melodrama, and film noir. At each stage, we will consider modernist cinematic aesthetics in relation to literary works such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5022. Shakespeare's History Plays. (3 Credits)
Shakespeare's first great hit was a series of history plays about the kings who ruled, and the wars they waged, a century and more before his birth. The eight plays produced (Harry Potter-style) over the course of eight years, gave London audiences then-and will give us now-a chance to watch Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare: to see him learn how to pack plays with a pleasure, impact, and amazement, a scene by scene and line by line, with a density and intensity no playwright before or since has ever managed to match.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 5023. The Phenomenon of Oprah's Book Club. (3 Credits)
Since its inception in September 1996, Oprah’s Book Club (OBC) has transformed the literary landscape—from ushering in a new wave of enthusiastic readers and spiking the sale of books around the globe to reshaping the advertising and marketing of literature and offering readers strategies for engaging it. This course will explore the phenomenon of OBC, thinking through its formation and rise as well as its strategies and approaches to literature. We will tackle these matters as we examine closely themes of racial beauty, sexual assault, racism, imprisonment, disability, and politics in OBC-selected texts, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5024. Cultural Studies and Literary Studies: Keywords. (3 Credits)
This course is designed to encourage critical analysis of the language we use in the study of literature and culture. Our primary texts will be short essays drawn from "Keywords for American Cultural Studies" and other related volumes. These essays will draw us to longer works of theory and scholarship; for instance, keyword essays on “race” and “racialization” will be linked to major works of critical race theory. Students will try out forms of research and writing other than the standard critical essay, including but not limited to writing both individual and collaborative keyword essays of their own.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5025. Black Protest from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter. (3 Credits)
The history of Black cultural production in the United States is a legacy of protest. Since Black bodies were first considered property and then only fractionally human, claiming personhood through arts and letters is a revolutionary act. This course will consider the canon of African American literature through an expansive definition of protest. We will theorize how the definition of protest has evolved since the 18th century while continuing to inform our own sociopolitical moment. We will find protest in both obvious and unlikely places—from the seemingly conservative poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the nearly instantaneous archive of resistance enabled by social media and 21st-century screen technologies. As we interrogate the meanings of blackness and protest, we will also reveal how that history has consistently shaped American identity. Throughout the course, we will encounter narrative, memoir, essay, speeches, poetry, and film. Here are some of the questions we will consider in this course: What happens to the canon of African American literature when seen through the lens of Black protest? Are protest, revolution, resistance, riot, and rebellion interchangeable? What is the relationship between Black protest and gender? What is the relationship between Black protest and sexuality? What value can we place on Black protest songs? Is there a genre most apt for Black protest? If so, why? How does Black protest instruct beyond Black identity? What is its political utility? What does it mean to be a “Black protest text”? Who is the audience for Black protest? What do we do with those texts resistant to a Black protest tradition? Ultimately, in this sociopolitical moment, is there a limit to Black protest? How and why?.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ, PSRR.
ENGL 5026. Ethnic Camera: Race and the Visual Archive. (3 Credits)
This seminar examines the intersections of race, culture, and technology. Assessments of different camera-generated records will elucidate how ideas of race have been visually prevalent in various photographic genres including (but not limited to) tourist keepsakes, postcards, ethnographic documentation, portraiture, street photography, fotonovelas, conceptualism, and the contemporary selfie. Students will be challenged to not only compare long-standing and emergent thinkers at the cutting edge of race and visual culture studies but also to “read” image-based texts. The origins of these visual genealogies will be foregrounded in the seminar while giving students opportunities to see how visions of racial difference continue to shape contemporary life.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5027. To Bear Witness: Poetry & Social Justice. (3 Credits)
How do we practice writing poetry as witnesses of our time? In her important 1993 anthology, "Against Forgetting," Carolyn Forché defines “poetry of witness” as writing that serves as evidence, voicing resistance against political violence or trauma. Since the 1990s, a revival of documentary poetics and a transformed media landscape have widened our sense of “witness.” In this workshop, we will explore a range of modes and strategies that allow us, as poets, to engage with challenging material, whether historical or contemporary. Together, we will imagine and create an ethical poetics of witness.
Attributes: CVW, CVWG, ENRJ.
ENGL 5028. Expatriates in Paris. (3 Credits)
This course will read broadly across modernist literary writings of Paris-based expatriate communities. The course will include U.S.-based writers, and also writers from a range of places that may include the Caribbean, North Africa, Latin America, Ireland, and Canada.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5102. Global Postmodernisms. (3 Credits)
A survey of literary development in postmodernity and global literary studies.
Attributes: ENAL, ENBL, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5103. Feminism and American Poetry. (3 Credits)
This course will address mid- through late-twentieth century poetry by women in relation to second-wave feminism, feminist theories, and queer theories. The writing and publishing of women's poetry played an important role in second-wave feminism, often serving as the artistic arm of the movement, assuming identity politics as its governing principle. We will first examine women poets of the feminist and black arts movements who developed a series of radical new poetries to “embody” gender and racial identities. We will then discuss the ways that poets and theorists since that time have challenged the tenets of identity politics and, accordingly, pushed poetics into new terrains in search of diverse groundings for politics and aesthetics alike. Figures discussed may include Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra María Esteves, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and others.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 5104. Natural History and Ecology. (3 Credits)
This course will examine the genre of natural history, which flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as Europeans engaged in ambitious projects of empire-building that brought them into contact with thousands of new plants and animals. Prior to the development of anthropology as a distinct discipline, natural histories also included within their purview the description of non-European peoples. We will think about how natural histories portrayed environments and the relationship between human and non-human actors. We will also read recent works from the fields of ecocriticism and ecology to think about the meaning and value of studying natural history today.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG2.
ENGL 5106. Early American Novel. (3 Credits)
This course will explore novels about America and Americans in the Atlantic world published during the long eighteenth century, including works by Behn, Defoe, Winfield, Rowson, Imlay, Foster, Tyler, Brown, Tenney, and Sansay. By considering a range of contexts, including the British tradition of picaresque and sentimental fiction, the theory of the novel (Lukacs, Watt, McKeon), and theories of Atlantic culture (Roach, Gilroy, Dayan), it will explore the history of the early American novel in terms of race, slavery, commerce, migration, mobility, and the many contingencies of colonialism. in the Americas.
Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5107. From Slave Narratives to Black Lives Matter. (3 Credits)
This course works from the proposition that everything has a history, and we can understand something better if we know that history. To better understand Black Lives Matter, we’ll look at its literary history, with an emphasis on the literature of abolitionism and civil rights. We’ll be reading works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, among others—and then we’ll collaborate to choose works from the Black Lives Matter movement to study together.
Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5108. Visionary Epic Writers from the Late Renaissance to the 19th Century: Spenser, Milton, and Blake. (3 Credits)
In this course, we'll discuss manageable selections from three classically “canonical” English writers who worked between 1591 and 1827, from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Spenser, Milton, and Blake (both a writer and visual artist) all wrote epics—historically the career-topping genre for ambitious writers. All three were powerful, even extreme imaginers—visionaries who in some ways affirmed the dominant values of their times but who also questioned, attacked, and saw beyond them—pre-moderns, in other words, who often uncannily foreshadowed post-modernism.
Attributes: ENG2, ENHD.
ENGL 5109. African American Literature. (3 Credits)
A survey of African American literature from the Jazz-age to the present.
Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5110. Queer Renaissance. (3 Credits)
This seminar will explore the intersections between early modern studies and queer theory, focusing on three key issues: the charged relations between queer theory and other critical frameworks such as psychoanalysis, feminism, and poststructuraHsm; the ongoing role of historicism in shaping major debates and conversations in the field; and the place of aesthetics, genre, and form in early modern and contemporary treatments of eroticism. Writers to be discussed will likely include Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Marlowe, Nashe, Crashaw, and Philips, alongside Foucault, Sedgwick, Butier, Lacan, Bataille, Edelman, and others .
ENGL 5111. Race, Religion, and Monstrosity in Medieval Literature. (3 Credits)
The medieval taste for the exotic has introduced many audiences to a range of monstrous beings, from ferocious giants and dog-headed men to the peace-loving sciapod. Medieval studies of monstrosity have often been linked solely to theorize the different human "races" found there. Yet the medieval language of monstrosity was not always limited to travel narrative, nor to the pejorative, for it was used to describe heroes, saints, even the Christian deity in far more familiar contexts than many would imagine. In this course we will examine the discourse of monstrosity as a complex critical lens through which premodern writers asked important questions of race, religion, civic virtue, and human morality. We will read from Pliny, Augustine, the Beowulf Manuscript, medieval romance, and Mandeville's account.
Attributes: ENG1, ENGD, ENHD, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 5112. Medieval Time Travel. (3 Credits)
This graduate course asks how theories of time can help us approach medieval literature in unexpected and exciting new ways.
Attributes: ENG1, MVSG.
ENGL 5115. Graduate Internship Seminar. (3 Credits)
Seminar designed for graduate students engaged in a professionally relevant internship during the semester that the seminar is offered.
ENGL 5116. African American Fiction. (3 Credits)
A study of twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 5117. Language, Voice, and Sound in 19th-Century Literature. (3 Credits)
Attempts to record sound have a long history. The first machines to synthesize voice date from 1769. By the time Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, English-language poets, especially in Britain, had begun treating literary text as a medium of sound recording. The result was a fundamental change in the conception of literature. This course will ask when and how English poetry became aware of itself not simply as utterance or even as rhythmic utterance, but as sounding utterance. It will ask what subsequent effects this awareness had not only on poetry but on fiction and essay. And it will ask how the realization of sound in the text affected the literary representation of auditory experience. We will read a wide range of British poets, including Wordsworth, Shelley, Hemans, Poe, Lear, the Brownings, the Rosettis, Tennyson, and Hardy; some essays and short fiction by Fuller, Dickens, and James; and various essays by critics today who, in growing numbers, are seeking to link literary criticism with sound studies.
Attribute: ENG2.
ENGL 5118. Writing That Heals: Storytelling Lab. (3 Credits)
How do we heal and recover from illnesses and other bodily and mental challenges? We usually think that this question needs to be answered by science, but this course will consider the interdisciplinary field of narrative medicine and the connections it draws between scientific and humanistic practices of treatment. Narrative medicine holds that stories and storytelling are foundational to healing. Together, we will explore this premise by doing two things. First, we’ll read works about the methods of narrative medicine, as well as relevant stories of illness and healing from the 18th century to the present. Second, we’ll write our own stories to experiment with the connections between narration and healing. Additional activities will include workshopping the stories of our peers and working together as a “lab” or collaborative group of researchers on a collective storytelling project. The goal of this course is both to learn about new approaches to humanistic inquiry and to experience how writing can be a creative process of play that feeds into all areas of life, academic and otherwise. Texts may include Rita Charon’s “Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness,” Hans Sloane’s “Voyage to Jamaica,” Mary Prince’s “History of Mary Prince,” Saidiya Hartman’s “Lose Your Mother,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” Kimiko Hahn’s “Unbearable Heart,” and Danez Smith’s “Homie.”.
Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5119. Early Caribbean Literatures. (3 Credits)
The Caribbean has been called everything from a crossroads to a crucible of modernity. What is the history of the Caribbean, and what is the Caribbean's place in the world? In this course, we will answer these questions by analyzing a wide range of writings about and from the early Caribbean. We will also think about how writers described—or struggled to describe—such developments as the genocide of indigenous peoples, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, and late 18th-century revolutions. We will focus in particular on the emergence of new literary forms and modes of expression, including American travel narratives and natural histories, colonial georgics, and slave or freedom narratives. Authors may include Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, James Grainger, John Bartram, John Stedman, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince.
Attributes: ENG2, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5120. Im/possible Worlds: Race, Social Difference, Speculative Fiction, and American Writers of Color. (3 Credits)
This course will focus on speculative fiction (penned by North American writers of color)—potentially including popular genres such as graphic narrative and young adult novels—that have often been dismissed as lowbrow or uncultured. We will reconsider them in light of their aesthetic complexity, political texture, racial and social differences, and popular constructs such as aliens, magical objects, vampires, and associated motifs and figures. Course selections may include Gene Luen Yang’s "American Born Chinese," Nidhi Chanani’s "Pashmina," Nnedi Okorafor’s "Binti," Cherie Dimaline’s "The Marrow Thieves," and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s "Certain Dark Things."
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5121. Medieval Paleography. (3 Credits)
Reading handwritten sources—records, chronicles, treatises, Bibles, works of literature, and many other genres and types—is fundamental for primary source research, especially in premodern periods, and for understanding the basis for many secondary works. In this course, we will develop our ability to decipher and understand handwritten sources by considering the history of medieval handwriting. Weekly exercises will ask students to transcribe (not translate!) medieval sources from a range of genres, in Latin and European vernaculars. No prior knowledge of Latin or medieval vernaculars is required or assumed. We will consider the purposes, preparation, transmission, and preservation of the materials contained in each type of source, with an emphasis on the use of these sources in our scholarship and the tools important for their study.
Attributes: ENG1, ENHD.
ENGL 5122. Camp, Art, and Kitsch: Questions in Postmodern Aesthetics. (3 Credits)
In this class, students will employ literary and theoretical perspectives to define and critique problems in contemporary aesthetics and cultural difference. We will draw on historical works on the aesthetic, including those by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the primary focus of the course will be on “camp” and “kitsch,” which are important and vital aesthetic categories but remain fiendishly difficult to define. This class will work to historicize these slippery terms and then employ them to critique postmodern Latinx literature and art. One of the objectives of the course is to think of cultural difference (for example, Latinx) as being composed of a history and an aesthetic, rather than one that is based on an “identity.” Camp and kitsch, I argue, are a way out of the impasse of identity politics and offer a resistance that comes from irreverence and subversion.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5123. The Literature and Psychology of Disgust. (3 Credits)
Disgust is considered a primary emotion; that is, all cultures have similar expressions and experiences that characterize the presence of disgust. Interestingly, despite the universal experience of disgust, we don’t understand it very well. Recent work has revealed that disgust is a complex emotional state, ranging from basic food-based revulsion to morally based reactions. Concurrent with the increased attention given to disgust by researchers, there have been widespread depictions of disgust in many fields. Literature is full of disgust, and so are other media, like movies. You might even say that storytelling depends on it. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that humanists have studied “the aesthetics of disgust.” There’s good and interesting work on the subject of disgust in literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology—and we’ll be reading in those disciplines in our own effort to understand this fundamental but (perhaps because it’s so reflexive) mysterious emotion. The idea of emotion opens the door to psychology, and the interdisciplinary partnership at the heart of this course. Psychological research on disgust began with descriptions and experiments around the basic experience of the emotion. The nature of disgust has been covered in a wide range of traditions within psychology—basic experimental, social, psychodynamic, behavioral, clinical, developmental, psychometric, and evolutionary psychology, as well as experimental neuroscience. All have research investigating disgust. This collective line of inquiry shows that what was originally considered an emotion with a single aim—protection from ingesting harmful substances—evolved to reflect a highly complex emotional experience that covers death, animals/insects, sex, blood and exposed human or animal organs, contamination, and moral standard violations. We will approach each of these disgust domains and the individual differences in the experience of the emotion with the basic question of “What does it mean to feel disgusted?” In this interdisciplinary, team-taught course, we will use the imaginative and philosophical literature on disgust as a way to understand the emotion, and vice versa: We will use disgust, which we will explore with the tools afforded us by psychology, to understand literature and the human imagination that produces it. In implicating the work of one discipline with another, we will put them into dialogue as we seek to understand a complex and powerful human response.
Attribute: ENG3.
ENGL 5124. Early Modern Lyric And Analogues. (3 Credits)
The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of critical interest in early modern/Renaissance lyric. Many issues it raises are germane to the lyric poetry of other periods as well. We will focus on the challenges and controversies surrounding defining and describing lyric. Other likely questions include: What are the potentialities and problems of recent critical and interdisciplinary approaches, such as affect studies, space/place theory, the new formalisms, and materialist criticism? How, if at all, should close reading be recuperated? How does the new interest in the material text lead us to interpret the visual appearance of lyric poetry, other results of printing and publishing practices, and the poem as artifact or object? In what ways does lyric gender, and in what ways is it gendered? The course will provide a fruitful overview of the period between about 1500 and 1660 for those who have done little prior work on it and an opportunity to delve deeper for those who have. Although most of the readings will be drawn from that era, it will include some other texts and is also designed for those with other areas of expertise. Those primarily involved with lyric poetry written in other periods can focus intensively on earlier or later poetry in at least one class and, if they wish, write their seminar papers partly—if not entirely—on it. If any participants in the group are poets themselves, they will have opportunities to consider issues of craft and to submit poems in lieu of one of the shorter assignments. We will have a course conference, and one written assignment will address teaching.
Attributes: ENG2, ENHD.
ENGL 5125. Hybrid Forms and Literary Liminality. (3 Credits)
With each development in printing and publishing technology, our understanding of what literature can be shifts. Much of what we study when we study literature is intricately tied to the economic means of production and distribution of that literature. Even as commercial and generic pressures influence what people write, experimental forms innovate at the fringes. In this course we will come to a deeper understanding of the ways in which hybrid forms, multimedia writing, and experimental texts have developed alongside the publishing industry in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider a wide range of authors such as Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Roland Barthes, Wanda Coleman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carolina Ebeid, Anne Carson, Kate Zambreno, and others. Students will work on two main projects: one will take a familiar scholarly form, the other will deliberately challenge the typical forms of scholarly production.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ, ENRW.
ENGL 5127. Queer Ladies. (3 Credits)
In this hybrid literature and workshop course, we focus on fiction written by and about queer ladies, which doesn't mean only or even primarily cisgender women. We will explore, and respond creatively, to nonbinary, gender-fluid, high femme, and cisgender queer writers and characters.
Attributes: CVW, CVWG, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5128. Four American Authors, 1850-1950. (3 Credits)
Before this course begins, students will help select four important American authors who primarily wrote between 1850 and 1950. The instructor will put forward a list for students to choose from, and students will be polled on their interests. By mid-summer the instructor will select the four for the course, primarily drawing on student interest but also taking into account historical range, the range of literary genres, race and gender diversity, and other factors. We will read major and characteristic works by each author, and also familiarize ourselves with the current critical conversation around each. Students will be evaluated using a labor-based grading system that requires active participation (including but not exclusively online); annotations and other responses to both primary and secondary texts, and a final project that may take a variety of forms, including (but not limited to) a critical essay or book review. The main requirement of the final project is that it must deal with at least two of the authors treated in the course.
Attribute: ENG3.
ENGL 5129. Disability Studies and Justice. (3 Credits)
In this seminar, we will engage with contemporary conversations in critical disability studies and disability justice movements. Drawing on disability literature and aesthetic forms, activist writing, and theoretical texts from around the world, the seminar will trace histories of discourse about body-mind norms and difference that center the perspectives of disabled people.
Attributes: ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5130. Poetry and Politics. (3 Credits)
Since roughly 1800, lyric poetry has been regarded as a “higher” literary genre defined primarily as experimental in form, personal in content, and apolitical. Political poetry, though it flourished at the same time, has generally been regarded as a “lesser” genre with limited formal and thematic interest. In this course, we will look at the sources of this conventional wisdom about poetry and politics and test its claims against a wide range of “lyric” and “political” poems by poets embodying a broad spectrum of differences—from the 19th century to the present.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5131. Theory of Mind and Literature. (3 Credits)
The term “theory of mind” originated in cognitive animal studies in the 1970s, alongside a range of related concepts that came to have a significant impact on literary studies—a phenomenon significant enough for the New York Times to ask in a 2010 headline, “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ save the humanities?” This course takes a longer view, starting with key early modern neurological and literary texts and moving selectively across time to contemporary literary and theoretical texts that consider and/or represent our changing understandings of what happens in our brains. As an organizing principle, the texts selected will as often as possible consider these questions in relation to comparative cognition in humans, other animals, and machines. Texts include: Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body,” Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Anne Finch’s “The Spleen,” Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” Amy Bonnafon’s “Horse,” Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” J.M. Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals,” and Ted Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science.”.
Attributes: ENG2, ENG3.
ENGL 5132. Early Environmental Humanities. (3 Credits)
In this class, we will explore the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, which brings together methods from literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines to address pressing questions involving our environment. In particular, we will focus on the question of ‘how we got here’: what historical factors, including ways of thinking about our relationship with nature, have contributed to the present-day climate crisis? The rise of colonialism, empire, industrialization, and capitalism in the 16th through 19th centuries will be of special interest, although we will also pay considerable attention to writers, artists, and others who dissented from the idea that the non-human world was primarily a natural resource from which to extract economic value. How can looking at early works of literature and art provide us with a long view of our current problems—and with possible solutions? How can we use our knowledge of old stories about Earth to create new ones that imagine a sustainable and equitable future? Because of its focus on the early modern era, this class will serve as an introduction to studying and writing about the past. At the same time, it will be centrally concerned with the question of how scholars of English and the humanities can contribute to widespread academic and societal debates happening today about environmental history, destruction, and justice. As such, assignments will allow you the opportunity to practice multiple forms of writing, including literary analyses, conference papers, syllabi, and proposals for public humanities and collaborative work.
Attributes: ENG2, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5133. Fiction and Other Forms. (3 Credits)
Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, film, architecture, and the internet on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Authors may include Sofia Samatar, Ali Smith, Gaston Bachelard, Toni Morrison, and Albert Murray.
Attributes: CVW, CVWG.
ENGL 5134. Queer Theory. (3 Credits)
This course provides a survey of the field(s) of intellectual inquiry known as “queer theory,” which arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s and continues to shape important conversations in the humanities and social sciences. We will begin by considering how queer theory emerged in tandem with a variety of academic, artistic, and activist contexts, such as the AIDS epidemic, lesbian and gay studies, women of color feminism, poststructuralism, and the New Queer Cinema. We will then spend the rest of the semester tracing the contours and limits of queer theory as it has divided and mutated over issues of rhetoric, race, class, disability, gender, religion, and temporality. Because queer theorists have often expressed their ideas in experimental modes of writing that challenge the conventions of scholarly, academic discourse, we will work and play with the styles and forms of their work as much as with the argumentative content.
Attributes: DISA, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5135. Paleography. (3 Credits)
This course offers an in-depth introduction to the history of handwriting and book production (“paleography” and “codicology”) in western and central Europe during the years 400 to 1500—a critical period for the creation of the book as we know it. Students will receive training in the handling and interpretation of rare materials from across the whole medieval period and will have the option to complete a manuscript description as their final project. Students will learn how to read and transcribe ancient and medieval writing (a set of skills that will transfer to later periods of handwriting); how to determine the place and date of production of a book based on its script, material, or decoration; and how to interpret the manuscript book as a primary source for the study of society, politics, and culture. Trips to special collections and visits from period experts are a feature of the course. No prior knowledge of Latin or another medieval language is required or assumed, and specialists of any historical period are welcome.
Attributes: ENG1, ENHD.
ENGL 5141. African American Autobiography. (3 Credits)
This course explores how Black writers use their lived experiences to shape political discourses and to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. Considering slave narratives, memoirs, personal essays, and lyrics alongside conventional autobiographies, this class examines how and why Black writers have chosen to write their own stories as well as what is at stake in their autobiographical writings. Some writers may include William and Ellen Craft, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Claudia Rankine, Janet Mock, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5145. Geographies of the Book: Nation, Colony, Plantation. (3 Credits)
This theory and methods seminar will assess, explore, and develop connections among book history, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. Our semester will move from major historiographic accounts of books and printing that center on England and France to colonial and postcolonial studies that center on the U.S., India, and New Zealand before engaging bibliographic research into histories of printing in plantation zones, including Haiti and Jamaica. Along the way, we’ll consider how this history bears out against more theoretical accounts that nuance key concepts like nationalism, colonialism, diaspora, labor, and literacy. Course emphasis will skew toward the 18th and 19th centuries, but final projects may engage any historical period(s) and any geographic region(s). The seminar will support its members as they pursue their own original research in NY-area archives. No prior experience with rare books will be presumed.
Attributes: ENG2, ENGD, ENHD.
ENGL 5151. Master Class: Writing. (3 to 4 Credits)
ENGL 5177. Master Class: Writers as Shapers: The Short Story. (3 Credits)
A short story can be constructed in an unlimited number of ways and each week we will explore the formal possibilities that are available to us. We will study the choices we have as writers--of narrative point of view, character development, beginnings, dialogue, description, structure, pacing, plot and resolution. We will isolate and inspect strategies that published authors have used. Students will produce and workshop their own fiction from exercises. In the conversation between student writing and the studied literature we will hopefully arrive at a greater sense of writers as shapers, sculptors of the raw material of the story.
Attribute: CVWG.
ENGL 5180. Anthologizing Poetry in the Middle Ages. (3 Credits)
This course surveys important medieval poetry collections in several different languages in order to explore the shifting relationships between poetic expression, verse collection, and book production during the Middle Ages. How and why did medieval people collect poetry, and how should manuscript context guide our interpretation of individual works? Some tuition in Middle English will provided; translations will be available for literature in Old English, Latin, French, Welsh, and Occitan.
ENGL 5193. Master Class: Stuff of Fiction. (3 Credits)
“’The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist,” Virginia Woolf declared in an essay called “Modern Fiction”: “everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.” In this workshop we will explore the process of transforming imaginative musings and life experience into fiction, looking particularly at how memory and place can serve as points of departure. We'll examine how the details of everyday life can be transformed imaginatively into fiction through the use of character, setting, and dialogue. Along the way, we will stop to examine various aspects of craft such as theme, style, plot, and pacing in students' own writings as well as in selected readings.
Attributes: CVW, CVWG.
ENGL 5194. Master Class: Fiction and Other Art Forms. (3 Credits)
Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what we write and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, theater, film, and even cooking on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Bring your curiosity and your willingness to be changed as a writer by other ways of making art.
Attribute: CVW.
ENGL 5196. Master Class: Dragons, Daggers, and Dukes: Writing Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Romance/Mystery. (3 Credits)
Genre fiction is, by definition, writing that bows to limitation: Conventions shape the parameters of a story. Yet, in excellent genre fiction, the imaginary world is doubly creative despite constraints or conventions. In this class, we’ll tackle bestsellers—pop fiction that engages and enthralls readers. We will study and experiment before setting into a final manuscript in the genre of your choice.
Attribute: CVWG.
ENGL 5201. Autobiography and Politics. (3 Credits)
When did writing one's life story become political? Following St. Augustine's "Confessions," most autobiographies until the 18th century (despite some notable exceptions) were narratives of religious conversion, and some element of redemption has remained a typical feature. But by the end of the 18th century, autobiography in English had begun to replace redemption with personal development and religion with politics. These two trends were closely intertwined, as we will see in a series of readings that begins with Olaudah Esquiano and William Wordsworth, whose accounts engage respectively with slavery and the French Revolution. Subsequent readings will investigate the mutuality of public and private life in works by John Stuart Mill, Henry James, Jane Addams, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.
Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5203. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. (3 Credits)
Postcolonial study has been a productive scholarly approach for decades. The accuracy of the term, “postcolonial,” with reference to premodern literature, has been an ongoing subject of debate. According to accepted, critical definitions, postcolonial literatures are products of colonizing communities and previously colonized cultures, rising in the wake of periods of industrial colonization; moreover, postcolonial study has been linked to modern European communities which formed global empires. These expectations and others have made the “postcolonial” Middle Ages appear controversial. In spite of these controversies, productive understanding of premodern culture has emerged from research under the postcolonial lens, encouraging the study of diverse premodern cultures, displaced or subjugated voices within the medieval period, the production and performance of identity, and the ways in which communities define, remember, and perpetuate themselves. This course is global in its scope, and will focus on medieval texts produced in Africa, Asia, England, France, and the Levant under changing premodern regimes, and will explore the varied literary responses to colonization, diaspora, and displacement that occurred long before the Age of Empire.
Attributes: ENG1, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ, MVSG, MVST.
ENGL 5208. The English Language 1154-1776. (3 Credits)
This course will deal with the linguistics and sociolinguistics of Middle English and Early Modern English. The beginning date, 1154, is the year of the last entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the year Henry II, the first Angevin king, ascended to the throne. It is as good a date as any to mark the demise of Old English and the beginning of the Middle English period. 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence, marks another turning point, when Early Modern English began to become the English(es) of the present day. This course, which will examine the ways in which the language developed from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries. Topics will include dialects and standardizations, lexicon, grammar, and syntax, phonological change (The Great Vowel Shift), stress and prosody, paleography and codicology of Middle English manuscripts, and early printing, all with an aim to better understand and appreciating the literature of these periods.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 5210. Intro Old Norse Lang & Lit. (3 Credits)
The course will begin with an introduction to Old Norse language, using E.V. Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse, and as students become comfortable with the language, we will read a selection of representative works from a variety of genres: historical prose, saga prose, and hagiography, as well as eddic poetry (wisdom, myth, legend) and the encomiastic poetry of the skalds. Readings will be partly in Old Norse, partly in translation. We will attempt to situate the texts in their medieval cultural context (analogues in English, French, German, and Latin literature), and we will spend some time on Old Norse palaeography and codicology so that students can better appreciate their material context. There is no prior required coursework for the course and no prior knowledge is assumed, but students should be aware that the course will involve language study.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 5211. Introduction to Old English Language and Literature. (3 Credits)
This course is an introduction to Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language and literature. Old English was the language of England from the 7th to the 12th centuries, the language in which Beowulf was composed. We will read a representative selection of Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry in the original language, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, works by King Alfred and Bede, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, and The Dream of the Rood. Students will be introduced to Anglo-Saxon palaeography so that they can read the texts from medieval manuscripts as well as from printed editions.
Attributes: ENG1, ENHD, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 5212. Asian Diasporic Literature. (3 Credits)
This course will introduce students to major works of contemporary Asian American literature. Possible authors include John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chang-rae Lee, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilyn Chin, and many others.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5213. Studies in Old English Literature. (3 Credits)
This course immerses students with a basic knowledge of Old English language and literature in an in-depth study of one of the major Old English codices, its texts, and critical contexts: Vercelli, Junius, Exeter, or the Beowulf (Nowell) Codex.
Attributes: ENG1, ENHD, MVLA, MVLI, MVSG, MVST.
ENGL 5215. Dissent, Devotion, and Drama in Medieval England: East Anglia. (3 Credits)
England's flat eastern edge, a day’s trip from the Low Countries, was a center for the period’s most troubling heresy, Lollardy; for its most remarkable female visionaries, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich; and for a school of theater quite different from York's northern three-day civic pageants. In this study of regional culture we will look at the development of lay rather than monastic forms of spirituality; at the related rise of mercantilism in this wealthy cloth-producing region; at the possible evolution of an anti-hierarchical position of resistance; at the interest in particular saints like St. Anne and Mary Magdalene; and at the role of women in theology and theater. Besides portions of Margery Kempe’s Book and Julian’s Showings, we will read some of the following plays: Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Digby Mary Magdalene, and the Mary play, and we will discuss the records of Lollard belief found in trial records.
Attribute: ENG1.
ENGL 5216. Three Medieval Embodiments. (3 Credits)
In this course, we will explore three models of human embodiment (theological, medical, and musical) available to the high and late English Middle Ages; we will examine how writers, doctors, artists, and musicians gave expression to those models; we will locate and interrogate the places they overlap, interweave, and fall apart; and we will challenge ourselves to imagine how they constituted alternative modes of embodied experience in the world. To reach these goals, we will cast a wide net and study diverse primary sources drawn from philosophy, medicine, theology, drama, poetry, music, and visual art alongside secondary sources in historical phenomenology, cultural studies, and performance theory. Major authors/texts include: Bernardus Silvestris (Cosmographia), Chaucer, Second Shephard's Play, Aristotle (De anima), The Trotula, Boethius (Consolatiophilosophiae and De institutione musica). All readings in English or Middle English.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME.
ENGL 5225. Jane Austen in Context. (3 Credits)
In this course we will read all of Jane Austen’s major novels. There are three central goals. The first one is simply to enjoy Austen’s writing (as unsophisticated as that may sound). The second is to consider the historical contexts (political, social and economic) that helped shape her prose. And the third is to survey and analyze some of the recent trends in Austen scholarship, which will, ideally, aid you in developing your own critical skills.
Attributes: ENBE, ENBL, ENG2.
ENGL 5226. Langland's Piers Plowman and the Poetry of Social Justice in the Late Medieval England. (3 Credits)
William Langland's dream-vision poem, Piers Plowman, composed, like Chaucer's works, in late fourteenth-century London, treats many of the things Chaucer skirts or omits. Langland's accounts of social unrest, some forms of religious argument and conflict, policy and practices regarding poverty, and his critique of social structures and experimentation with alternatives gives us a different Middle Ages from Chaucer's more court-centered writing. This course will put reading Piers Plowman, arguably the greatest single medieval English poem, at its center, while paying due attention to its context in other texts and in the poem's surrounding world.
Attribute: ENG1.
ENGL 5230. Richard Rolle and His Influence. (3 Credits)
A study of the early fourteenth century writer Richard Rolle and his influences.
Attribute: MVSG.
ENGL 5252. Exhibiting Latinidad: Curation/Display/Intervention. (3 Credits)
Museums have played critical roles in defining Latinidad for mass publics in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, curators and their exhibits can assume great power over our understandings of authenticity, cultural authority, and the historical “truth” about Latinx cultures. By retracing exhibition histories from classic shows like Cuba-USA and the Decade Show to the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA initiative, we will confront the different material, textual, and visual dilemmas provoked by museums. We will also ponder alternative exhibition practices for Latinidad’s representation and remembrance in the future.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5261. Malory: Cultures of the C15. (3 Credits)
Malory's vast Morte Darthur and the wide multilingual reading that went into it is both object of study and the gateway into the troubled fifteenth century in this course.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 5264. Chaucer. (3 Credits)
This course is an introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry as well as to trends in medieval literary criticism. By reading Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales" and selections from his mid-length and shorter poems, we will touch on some of the concerns that have animated Chaucer studies: Chaucer’s representation of the social world, religion, gender, and the self. Any analysis of Chaucer’s writing implicitly or explicitly raises a question about the most responsible approach to texts that are now over 600 years old. Indeed, this question has remained constant since the beginning of Chaucer studies. We will, therefore, be very interested in what it has meant and what it means now to read Chaucer historically. Discussion will also be animated by our exploration of Chaucer’s continued dialogue with his sources. No prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval history is assumed; however, most of the primary readings will be offered in Chaucer’s highly accessible dialect of Middle English; study of this dialect will help us situate Chaucer’s status as a poet in a triglossic society. Because Chaucer is so commonly associated with a medievalist’s teaching expectations on the job market, we will also explore aspects of syllabus and undergraduate teaching design.
Attribute: ENG1.
ENGL 5300. Occitania: Language and Power. (3 Credits)
This course introduces students to the cultural world of a medieval “south”: Occitania. Texts in Old Occitan include documentary writing, historical narrative, and the poetry of the troubadours. Topics include urban/rural communities, gender and power, the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath and the beginning of vernacular book production.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME.
ENGL 5301. Romanticism and Ecocriticism. (3 Credits)
In the work of Raymond Williams, Jonathan Bate, and others, the field of British Romanticism made important contributions to an early ecocriticism. This course will consider how this work participated in the growth of an interdisciplinary body of environmentalist studies that includes Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, Timothy Morton, Monique Allewaert, and Anne-Lise Francois. Our historical questions will focus on how the period’s writers developed an acute attention to their natural environments in the midst of a “second scientific revolution,” the enclosure acts, urbanization and industrialization, the rise of a global tourism industry, and imperial expansion. Authors, artists, and tourists alike employed the popular aesthetic traditions of the sublime, the beautiful, and picturesque in viewing their surroundings. We will concentrate on authors such as Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Clare. We will also spend some time on visual media, including book illustrations, and on the experiments of Constable and Turner on clouds and sunsets (respectively) in the light of new scientific understandings of the atmosphere.
Attributes: ENG2, ENHD.
ENGL 5311. Modern Irish Literature. (3 Credits)
This course aims to strike a balance between two goals. On the one hand, we will attempt to deepen our understanding and catch up with recent critical developments relating to the most canonical figures in the Irish literary tradition, such as Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats. On the other hand, we will seek to expand our understanding of the Irish canon and its range by looking beyond the texts that have been most studied in English departments to include works by women (Elizabeth Bowen, Maud Gonne, Edna O’Brien, Eavan Boland), those who compose in the Irish language (Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill, Máirtín Ó Cadhain), writers from the North (Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian), and contemporary writers (Eimear McBride, Ursula Rani Sarma).
Attributes: ENBE, ENG3.
ENGL 5315. Periodization: Early Modern and Other Literatures. (3 Credits)
We will engage with the debates about periodization currently central to literary studies and many other disciplines. Though our principal focus will be early modern England, students will have the opportunity to do some readings and perhaps write their seminar papers on the literatures of other periods.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 5331. Early Modern Skepticisms. (3 Credits)
Graduate course on the discourses of skepticism during the early modern period.
ENGL 5345. Theatrical Enterprise in Early Modern England. (3 Credits)
This course will offer a survey of English theatrical enterprise form the 1590's to the 1640's. The playing companies will serve as an organizing principle for study of dramatists including Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 5541. Climate Change and Literature. (3 Credits)
What does it mean to be a scholar of literature in a time of climate crisis? This is the question that we will take up in this course. Just as rising temperatures and sea levels around the world are forcing human beings to rethink their everyday behaviors, so have the theoretical insights of scholars working on climate change forced the rest of us to reevaluate key concepts. What meaning do standard literary periods have when we should be thinking on geological scales of time? Now that human beings have proven themselves capable of transforming the planet on a global scale, can we continue to rely on narrow models of human agency? If works of literature and art have made us desire green expanses of lawn, machines powered by fossil fuels, and other environmentally destructive commodities, can we still read and view these works with pleasure? While this course will be centered on texts coming out of Europe and the Americas during the long 18th century (authors will include Milton, Bartram, Austen, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and others), it also will range broadly among writings by scholars from multiple disciplines and backgrounds seeking to understand the place of the humanities in our currently unsettled state (Chakrabarty, Kolbert, Heise, Ghosh, Kimmerer, Tsing, and others). In fact, a primary goal of the course is to use the 18th century as a test case for reconceiving traditional modes of study and connecting them to issues of present-day concern. As such, while the course will include familiar assignments, including a research-based paper, it also will include experimental ones that allow us to explore different ways of doing literary studies today.
Attributes: ENAE, ENBE, ENG2, ENGT.
ENGL 5542. Early Black Atlantic Archives. (3 Credits)
Building on Paul Gilroy's concept of the black Atlantic, this course will examine the literature and art of the early black Atlantic world. Specifically, it will look at the aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual productions of members of the African diaspora from the long 18th century. These productions included poetry, autobiographies, slave narratives, essays, letters, portraits, and novels, which we will analyze to see how they shaped 18th-century conceptions of slavery, colonialism, resistance, freedom, justice, human rights, and selfhood. At the same time, we will think—at a meta-critical level—about the scholarship and archival work that led to the recovery of this body of literature and art. As many scholars have pointed out, dynamics of erasure and silencing have had a profound influence on what types of black expression have been preserved, and one of the main challenges of doing work on the early black Atlantic world involves countering these dynamics. As such, in addition to reading about archives, we will practice engaging creatively with them for new insights into black thought and life. Early black Atlantic readings will include works by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany. Critical readings will include works by Saidiya Hartman, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Nicole Aljoe, Pablo Gómez, Britt Russert, and David Kazanjian.
Attributes: ENAE, ENBE, ENG2, ENGD, ENGT.
ENGL 5600. Special Topics in Rhetorical Theory & Criticism: Rhetoric, Race, and Identity. (3 Credits)
Using a rhetorical lens, this course explores the ontological and epistemological history of race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories as they have been invented alongside capitalism. We will begin with overarching theories, studying scholars like Silvia Federici on gender and sexuality; Silvia Wynter and Cedric Robinson on race and the invention of political-economic man; and Glen Coulthard and Walter Mignolo on settle colonialism. This focused genealogy provides insights for how theorists, critics, and activists might produce alternative political-economic, ecological, and humanist relations. Consequently, we will explore a range of contemporary scholarship that takes up these theories to produce more socially just modes of being in the world. There will be a stress on Black studies scholarship as an extended case study of such future-oriented production, but this work will intersect with feminist, queer, and settler-colonial scholarship. This course will serve as an introduction to rhetorical theory, but no previous experience studying rhetoric is required. This course will count toward the in-process Certificate in Rhetoric and Writing for degree and non-degree students, but will also be of interest to students with diverse interests, including rhetoric and writing, capitalism, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and more.
Attributes: ENGD, ENRJ, ENRW, PSJH, PSNM, PSRR.
ENGL 5603. Romantic Works/Audiences. (3 Credits)
This course will focus on the life and work of Mary Shelley (1797-1851). We will begin by considering the profound influence of her parents' writing on her work (her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father was William Godwin), and then move on to consider a range of her works, including History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), Frankenstein (1818), Maurice (1820), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835). We will also read both classic and recent critical works on Mary Shelley, as we explore how her writing engaged with a wide array of political, scientific, literary, and biographical contexts.
Attribute: ENG2.
ENGL 5616. Romanticism and Private Life. (3 Credits)
This course considers the literary responss of a range of Romantic-era writers to two significant pressures on privacy in early nineteenth-century Britain. First, renewed agitation for parliamentary reform in the post-war era prompted intensified governmental repression of political dissent, including what John Barrell has described as the "politicization of private space." Second, the early nineteenth century witnessed the definitve emergence of "modern celbrity culture," as Tom Mole and others have recently defined it. Our writers include Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, John Keats and John Clare.
Attributes: ENBL, ENG2.
ENGL 5622. 18th-Century Travel. (3 Credits)
This course is concerned with European travel and the use of travel tropes in 17th- and 18-century literature and other discourses and the ways the experience of travel from this period referred to as an "Age of Discovery" informs the travel metaphors—the "discoveries"—of the period sometimes to as the "Age of Reason." A central question of the course will be: How is the cultural relativism born of the recounting of the experience of travel reflected in the language and the literary works of the 18th century?.
Attribute: ENG2.
ENGL 5634. Modernists/Victorians. (3 Credits)
In this course, students examine landmarks of Victorian literature and transatlantic English modernism, exploring breaks and continuities between Victorian and modernist writers. Covering major texts from the 1840s to the 1940s, the course will also consider theoretical arguments about the status of the "classic" in literary history, and specifically as these define the fields of Victorian studies, modernism, modernity, and the classifications of "English" and "American" literature.
Attributes: COLI, ENAL, ENBL, ENG3.
ENGL 5650. Special Topics in Writing Studies. (3 Credits)
This course will survey selected issues in writing studies, with an emphasis on intersectionality. Possible topics including public writing, community writing, theories in writing program administration, WAC/WID, all with attention to the needs of increasingly diverse university settings. May be repeated when topics vary but not more than 2 courses (6 credits) may be applied to the certificate.
Attributes: ENGD, ENRJ, ENRW, PPWD, PPWF.
ENGL 5660. Research Methods in Rhetoric & Writing Studies. (3 Credits)
This seminar will introduce key research paradigms and methodologies in rhetoric and writing, including ethnography, rhetorical field methods, archival research, textual analysis, case studies, qualitative research, discourse studies, and more.
Attribute: ENRW.
ENGL 5670. History of Rhetoric. (3 Credits)
This seminar will provide a foundational introduction to the history of rhetoric, tracing classical rhetorical traditions via contemporary rhetorical theories with an emphasis on major thinkers, texts, and movements from antiquity onward.
Attributes: ENG1, ENG2, ENRW.
ENGL 5680. The Writing & Rhetoric of Scholarly Genres. (3 Credits)
This course in writing and rhetorical studies focuses on theories and practices of writing for academic and professional purposes. Drawing on scholarly research into topics such as rhetorical genre studies, advanced academic literacies, graduate writing and acculturation, and discipline-specific writing and publishing practices, as well as on practical guides for successful academic writing, this course is designed to help students expand knowledge of key topics in writing and rhetorical studies while also coming to better understand forms, genres, and values of publishable peer-reviewed writing in their fields. The course explores scholarship on academic discourse and provides a framework for writing in a range of published genres, including the book review and the scholarly research article.
Attribute: ENRW.
ENGL 5690. Seminar in Professional & Technical Writing Pedagogy. (3 Credits)
This seminar will introduce students to key pedagogical theories and methods in professional and technical writing, preparing them to teach courses in this area.
Attribute: ENRW.
ENGL 5700. Playwriting Workshop. (3 Credits)
ENGL 5707. High Modernism: 1922. (3 Credits)
An exploration of five major works published in modernism's anus mirabilis and the literary climate that fostered these seminal texts. The defining novel and poem of the twentieth century--Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, respectively--both appeared in 1922, along with Woolf's first important novel, Jacob's Room, Lawrence's story collection, England, My England, and Yeat's anthology volume Later Poerns, including such works as "A Prayer for My Daughter" and "The Second Coming."
Attributes: ENBL, ENG3.
ENGL 5708. Meditation, Contemplation, and the Spiritual Senses. (3 Credits)
The late Middle Ages saw an astonishing proliferation of texts, practices, and styles of devotion seeking to draw human beings closer to God through the body. New emphasis on Christ’s humanity and Aristotelian natural philosophy prompted the rediscovery of the five corporeal senses and their cognitive processes in devotional literature. In this course, we will examine the languages, knowledges, desires, and anxieties surrounding the senses in a diverse corpus of texts, probing them for their theological import as much as for their literary design. Major authors: Aristotle, Augustine, Origen, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Richard Rolle, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Meditationes Vitae Christi.
Attributes: ENG1, ENHD.
ENGL 5717. Transatlantic Women Modernists. (3 Credits)
This class looks at gender and modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. We will read a generous selection of women modernists, canonical and noncanonical, representing high modernism and "bad modernism" (to use Mao and Walkowitz's term), fiction, film, and poetry from the first half of the 20th century. Our transatlantic focus offers a special opportunity to examine multicultural and cosmopolitan modernisms: many women writers in this period were travelers and immigrants. We will also analyze the complex and often fraught relationships among feminist criticism, feminist theory, and theories of modernism both in the early 20th century and today. Authors include: Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf.
Attributes: ENBL, ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.
ENGL 5718. Modern Language Politics. (3 Credits)
Early twentieth century literature and theory was preoccupied with the relationship between language and politics, from the acknowledgment of minority and non-standard linguistic forms, to questions over the relationship between violence and language (whether or not, to paraphrase Adorno, one can write poetry after Auschwitz), to the idea of literary form itself enacting a kind of political resistance. In this course, we will analyze some of the competing philosophies about language circulating during this period and interrogate how modernist writers responded and contributed to these discussions.
Attributes: ENBL, ENG2, ENG3.
ENGL 5747. Late Modernism. (3 Credits)
Focusing on works produced between the 1930s-60s, this seminar will explore how writing in various genres during the latter part of the modernist period responded to ideas and formal techniques that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Interrogating works that often do not neatly fit into received notions of high modernismn will enable us to interrogate critical questions of reinvention, disillusionment, lateness and periodicity.
Attributes: ENAL, ENBL, ENG3.
ENGL 5749. Twentieth-Century Studies: Decolonization and World Literature. (3 Credits)
Introductory graduate course in the study of selected twentieth-century figures from comparative cultural, literary, and theoretical perspectives. The course will examine the changing contours of literary theory, literary studies, and the status of literature itself in the twentieth century, in light of contending imperatives of decolonization and globalization. The course will focus on three pairings of writers: Joseph Conrad and W. E. B. Du Bois; Jean Rhys and C. L. R. James; Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Amiltav Ghosh. Select works from these writers will be studied in conjunction with critical selections from Fanon, Glissant, Pheng Cheah, and others.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5758. 20th Century American Autobiography. (3 Credits)
This course will focus on self-representations in print (essays, memoirs, autobiography), multimedia (graphic memoir, documentary, photography) and everyday life (Facebook, selfies, etc.)
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 5775. Master Class Luminous Details. (3 Credits)
We take for granted that poetry relies on imagery. But how exactly do we engage with, and reflect on, the information and the 'facts' of the material world? Using exercises, experiments, and readings from contemporary poetry, we will write new work, and revise it, with a focus on transformation and the 'luminous detail'.
Attribute: CVWG.
ENGL 5777. Master Class: Literary Magazine Workshop. (3 Credits)
The aim of this class is to give students the experience and skills necessary to create a literary magazine in alignment with the most recent and rapid changes in literaray consumption. Students iwll curate, edit and write for CURA, the print an donline literary magazine of the Creative Writing program. Instruction will also focus on marketing, publicity and event production protocols and practices crucial for successful literary publishing. Working collaboratively, students will endeavor to expand the boundaries of the literary magazine by examining the best powers of print and online venues in order to achieve the maximum impact of both.
ENGL 5778. Flawless/Freedom/Formations: Writing on Race, Gender and Popular Culture. (3 Credits)
This is a class about creative non-fiction writing as cultural reportage. In this class we will read a survey of cultural reportage—primarily reviews, profiles, editorials, opinion pieces—for textual, cultural, and aesthetic analysis to think about the ways that race—and intersectionally, gender and sexuality—operates thematically and politically in that writing. Our study of this writing will impact the main focus of this class: It is a writing workshop, in which each student will present her or his work for critique. Writing assignments will be expected of each student and possibly lead to the production of a class-produced blog or magazine at the end of the semester.
Attributes: CVWG, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5788. Memory, Trauma, Narrative. (3 Credits)
Drawing on memory studies, psychoanalysis, and narratology, this interdisciplinary course explores issues of narrative representation in literature and film. Recognizing that memory is the result of the interplay between past and present in the lives of individuals and of groups, the course examines the impact of trauma on narrative expression.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGT.
ENGL 5791. Poetry of Witness: Masterclass. (3 Credits)
Poets have always sought to address social, personal, and political challenges--upheaval, trauma, and change. But how exactly do we practice writing poetry as witnesses of our own time and of our own lives in context? In this course, we will read and write poetry that seeks to bear witness in a wide range of forms and to an array of social/personal contexts.
Attribute: CVWG.
ENGL 5801. Anatomy of a Bestseller. (3 Credits)
This class will deconstruct bestsellers in different genres, looking at the process from proposal, editing, finished manuscript and on to covers, marketing and promotion. Students will also develop their bestseller project over the semester.
ENGL 5832. Slavery in American Fiction. (3 Credits)
The course focuses upon depictions of slavery in American fiction during the years before the Civil War. We will read a selection of novels by blacks and whites, men and women, all concerned with the intensifying debates over "the peculiar institution." We will focus on the turbulent and troubled decade of the 1850s; our exploration this time of increasing sectional tension through fiction will spotlight the birth of the African American novel and its dialogic engagement with the burgeoning literature of race in the United States. Authors include Melville, Stowe, Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, among others.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5838. African American Print Culture. (3 Credits)
How does the study of African American literature change when seen from the perspective of print culture? And how does the study of print culture change when focused on African American archives? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African Americans participated in a rapidly emergent print culture as authors, editors, printers, readers, teachers, and librarians, among other roles. At the same time, African Americans frequently furnished the subject matter for this print culture, in ways they did not always control. This seminar will explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. It will draw on a range of primary materials related to African Americans, and seminar participants will combine these investigations with readings of recent work bridging critical race studies and material culture. Together we will ask how the methodologies of print culture might help us reconsider familiar notions of authorship and identity, and how African American materials might transfigure conceptual standbys of print culture studies such as circulation and publics.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5839. Literary Darwinism. (3 Credits)
This course will explore the diverse impact of Darwin’s big idea on American literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had a seismic impact on the natural science of his day, a practice then closely intertwined with religion. The vibrations spread through the social sciences – resulting in what we now call social Darwinism – and literature registered the tremors. Through the readings of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and their contemporaries, we will consider the myriad effects of Darwinism on the American worldview.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG3.
ENGL 5841. Early American Media. (3 Credits)
An introduction to early American literature by way of the transatlantic dynamics of printing, reading, and circulating media before the rise of industrial publishing in the late nineteenth century.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG2.
ENGL 5843. Early Women Novelists. (3 Credits)
In this course we will read a selection of early novels by English women authors, including at least some of the following: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, and the anonymously authored The Woman of Colour. Our goal is to develop rigorous, historically sensitive, close readings of each novel, in part by focusing on the representation of gender, class and race. The last category is especially important. Several of the novels above feature Black characters and address the slave trade, slavery and/or British colonialism. Given our own moment in history, I believe it is imperative to foreground discussions of race and antiracism, and I will organize my pedagogy accordingly.
Attribute: ENG2.
ENGL 5844. American Bestseller 1870-1940. (3 Credits)
Since novels both register and shape public attitudes towards the world, a study of best selling novels suggests insight into how changes in literary tastes relate to broader social changes (e.g., political events, technological developments, changing demographics, and education policies). What affected changes in public taste after the Civil war, and how may we see those changes represented in books people most avidly read? Bestsellers presumably share important characteristics that can explain their broad appeal to reading public- and the goal of this course is to try to understand those characteristics and that appeal. Authors may include Edward Bellamy, Pearl Buck, Thomas Dixon, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, Zane Grey, Edith Wharton, Owen Wister, and Richard Wright.
Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 5845. Early American Novel. (3 Credits)
This course will sketch the tradition of the American novel from its beginnings through the Civil War. Authors will range from traditional canonical standards such as Hawthorne and Melville to more recent additions to the tradition like Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG2, ENGD, ENHD.
ENGL 5849. Pre-1900 American Literature. (3 Credits)
An introduction to recent Americanist literary scholarship, comparing and contrasting methodologies that have been brought to bear on three or four important works of U.S. literature published before 1900.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG2, ENG3.
ENGL 5861. Gender in American Literature. (3 Credits)
An interdisciplinary study of the social and cultural forces that shape gender difference and sexuality in American literature from 1830 to 1930.
ENGL 5863. Three American Authors: Alcott, Chesnutt, and Twain. (3 Credits)
In this course we will read works by three important American authors: Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), who produced works of children's fiction, sensational Gothic stories, and realist novels; Mark Twain (1835–1910), who wrote humor, realism, and social satire; and Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), whose characteristic genres included dialect stories, social realism, and the essay. We will also familiarize ourselves with the current critical conversation about each of these writers.
Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5905. Modern Poetry. (3 Credits)
This course will explore how writers in the first half of the 20th century responded to modernity through experiments with poetic form. Taking seriously the notion that form is political, modernist poets reimagined the ways language could mean through formal experimentation and interaction with other disciplines and media. By combining close reading (a technique we derive from the modernists) with cultural analysis, we will interrogate the impact of historical events and aesthetic movements on modernist writing, as well as the ways poetic forms actively contributed to the constitution of the modern world.
Attributes: ENAL, ENBL, ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 5919. 20th Century American Novel: A Violent Survey. (3 Credits)
Combining the sweep of a literature survey class and the thematic core of a seminar, this course will move through the twentieth century novel in the United States examining different modes of violence. We will include war novels in the United States examining different modes of violence. We will include war novels along with novels of manners. Beginning with James and Wharton and their dissection of social violence, we will move through the realists (London; Dreiser), the Depression and labor struggles (Steinbeck), WW2 (Mailer; Vidal) and the postwar period (Salinger; Bowles) as it leads intot the postmodern novel. Possible authors also include: Ellison, Vonnegut, Pynchon.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 5920. James Hardy Conrad. (3 Credits)
ENGL 5930. Neuro-Literature in Historical Perspective. (3 Credits)
Our current literary interest in neurology has a history. This course will look at the relatively recent history of the move from philosophical approaches associated with Cognitive Theory to biological brain research (fMRI scans of brains reading Jane Austen). And it will look at a longer history in which early modern brain research influenced literary representations of the self. In each of these historical moments, 17th and 18th-century writers have played curious and important roles, and so authors including Milton, Marvell, Swift, Finch, Addison, Pope, Sterne, Austen, and the Scriblerians, will be considered.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 5940. Novel, She Wrote. (3 Credits)
Novel, She Wrote: Black Female Writers and Their First Novels - "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then," Toni Morrison declares, "you must write it." The impulse for black female authors to write novels and the diverse manifestations of that impulse will be of primary concern in this course. What compelled black female authors in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century to write their first novels? How are themes of sexuality, motherhood, beauty, respectability, and intra- and interracial conflict represented in their texts? In what ways do their novels complement, build upon, and refer back to each other and other works? These are a few of the questions we will tackle as we read through the literature. Texts will include Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha (1953); Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970);Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970); Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1982); Edwidge; Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); A.J. Verdelle's The Good Negress (1995); Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998); and Ayana Mathis's The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012).
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 5959. Writing/Life: A Workshop. (3 Credits)
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction,” Katherine Anne Porter famously said. In this workshop we will explore the complicated and sometimes gossamer lines between fiction and memoir. Students will write and critique works of fiction and nonfiction, exploring the contingencies of form, the changing shape of memory, the specific demands of genre, and the choices writers make as they work. We will read such authors as Ann Patchett, Dave Eggers, Joan Didion, David Sedaris, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, and Mary Gordon, as well as selected critical essays. Students will come away from this seminar with 40 pages of good writing and a new understanding of how and why they want to write.
Attribute: CVWG.
ENGL 5960. Memoir and Personal Essay. (3 Credits)
This class will function as a writing workshop where we will spend at least half of class time critiquing your works in progress. Since the techniques of memoir are indistinguishable from the techniques of fiction, we will concentrate on dialogue, exposition, scene, character, managing narrative time (past, present, future) and, most of all, the development of a persona. The course will include trends in autobiographical theory as well as analysis of major texts by writers such as Didion, Hampl, Orwell and Sedaris.
ENGL 5965. Master Class: Writing for the Big Screen. (3 Credits)
This course offers an introduction to the fundamentals of screenwriting: scenes, acts, narrative structure, character development, genres, and dialogue, through intensive study of major, award-winning Hollywood films, classics in their genre. Students will read and analyze five outstanding screenplays, and watch films made from them. The final requirement for this course is a completed first act (20-30) of a feature film, as well as weekly assignments.
ENGL 5985. Introduction to Early Modern Studies. (3 Credits)
An introduction to the major debates, conversations, and approaches in early modern studies, with a focus on what it means to define and contribute to a field, how canons are formed, and what constitutes evidence for a literary-critical argument. Students will be exposed to , and gain practice in , a variety of methodological strategies and techniques: close reading and rhetorical analysis, archival research, theoretical and interdisciplinary work, and textual editing, among others.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 5989. Major Early Modern Texts and the Dynamics of Space and Place. (3 Credits)
Major Early Modern Texts and the Dynamic of Space and Place. Who "owns" the forest in As You Like It or the island in The Tempest-- and how and why does ownership take different forms in such terrains? In what ways do space and place within a poem differ if it is read in print, or circulated in manuscript or sung? How do stanzas and similar poetic practices inflect concepts of space and place? How is that process accomplished by culturally specific paradigms and practices--the gendering of certain spaces, the development of nationalism, the reading of NeoPlatonic texts, and so on.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 5992. Art of Literary Nonfiction. (3 Credits)
You will be introduced to the techniques of non-fiction writing by closely reading a wide variety of authors and by putting the lessons gained therein to practice in your own non-fiction pieces. The course will focus upon the basic techniques of non-fiction writing - which, in a phrase, amounts to telling a story about the verifiable world. This course will introduce you to a number of different non-fiction genres, including the profile, the personal essay, the informative or "reported" piece, the social commentary, and the review. There will be lectures on the genre, short exercises, and in-class writing, but the main emphasis will be on work-shopping student writing. We will broaden the notion of "research" to include interviews and non-traditional fact-gathering methods as well as the standard approaches. We will discuss and practice the notion of shaping and restructuring linear "reality" in order to sustain reader interest while maintaining allegiance to fact. There will be three medium-length writing assignments of approximately 5-7 thousand words each plus short assignments.
ENGL 5998. Master's Capstone. (3 Credits)
Required course for M.A. students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
ENGL 5999. Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing. (3 Credits)
This course introduces students to central histories, issues, and debates in writing and rhetorical studies. By highlighting key theoretical and terminological developments, this course lays the way for informed self-reflective practice based in awareness of the most current scholarly work in rhetoric and composition, thereby helping participants start to define their own identities as teachers of first-year composition as well as literature and other courses.
Attribute: ENRW.
ENGL 6004. Practicum in Writing Pedagogy. (3 Credits)
This course builds on the foundation developed in ENGL 5999 by delving into research-supported best practices for preparing students for diverse writing contexts. Readings and discussions will highlight writing and teaching strategies that support students' critical thinking and writing skills, covering topics related to primary and secondary research, information literacy, discourse and disciplinary communities, rhetorical and audience analysis, multimodal composition, effective response and assessment strategies, cognitive scaffolding and assignment design, and more.
Attribute: ENRW.
ENGL 6101. Rereading Close Reading:Hist Perspectives,Contemporary Challenges/Shakespeare's Poetry,Spenser,Don. (3 Credits)
We will evaluate both the history of close reading and the renewed interest—and renewed antagonism—revisionist versions of it are sparking today. What was, is, and will be “close reading” in literary studies? In engaging with the early history of this methodology (I.A. Richards, the New Critics, British analogues etc), we will consider how the climate in the academy and the country at large encouraged these approaches and how they interacted with and reacted against alternative methodologies. We will then explorer and evaluate the many attempts to develop a type of close reading appropriate to our own critical moment—and the reactions against them by critics like Moretti; we will, for example, discuss the relationship of those attempts to the digital humanities and the implications or close reading for debates about the workings of lyric. The authors on whom we will focus are Shakespeare (mainly the nondramatic poems, though we will also discuss at least one play), Donne, and Spenser. Students will, however, have the option of writing their final paper on another poet from the early modern period – or from a different period.
Attributes: CEED, CENS, ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 6103. News and Plays: 1660-1779. (3 Credits)
An examination of the relation between theatre and news media in the long eighteenth century.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 6104. Crip, Queer, and Critical Race Theory. (3 Credits)
This seminar will examine cutting-edge work in critical race, crip and queer theories and their intersections in order to prepare you to both intervene in these discourses and effectively engage with them in your analysis of literary texts. We will consider critical embodiment in works drawn from a range of historical periods and genres. Likely writers to be considered include José Esteban Muñoz, Eli Clare, Indra Sinha, Mel Chen, Ellen and William Craft, Robert McRuer, Roderick Ferguson, Jasbir Puar, and Alison Kafer. Fulfills: American 2 and Theory requirements.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3, ENGD, ENGT.
ENGL 6105. Post-1945 US Literature and Culture. (3 Credits)
This course will explore American writing, mainly prose, during the Cold War and after, while also considering trends in critical approaches to this period.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 6106. Medieval Communities and Modern Thought. (3 Credits)
This interdisciplinary course will consider the roles played by modern images and ideas of the medieval past in the formulation of modern ideas of community, nation, subjectivity, and habitus. Course readings will include modern theoretical texts, modern popular texts, and medieval source material (mostly in translation).
Attributes: ENG1, ENME.
ENGL 6107. Early Modern Lyric. (3 Credits)
What is lyric poetry? In this course, we will explore the transhistorical and transcultural challenges of defining and analyzing lyric compositions. What cultural and critical work is done when poets, critics, anthropologists and so on affix a generic label? Why is lyric distinctively tricky—and intriguing—to identify? What are the implications of this mode for cutting-edge questions about subjectivity, gender, affect, and the material text, as well as for more longstanding but recently contested concerns about the workings of genre and the relationship of poetry and song? Our reading will focus on early modern English poetry, including about eight of the major poets of the period (e.g., Wyatt, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and Phillips) and include some less-known work and lyrics from other periods and countries. We will deploy—and evaluate—a wide range of critical methods, including cultural critique, study of the material text, and the new formalisms. The course is tailored to students with a range of backgrounds and interests. We’ll also work together on techniques of “professionalizing”—e.g., beginning to publish, delivering conference papers successfully.
Attribute: ENG2.
ENGL 6108. The Dynamics of Space and Place: Early Modern and Other English Texts. (3 Credits)
Who "owns" the forest in "As You Like It" or the island in "The Tempest" or the spaceship in Vonnegut's "Slaughter-House Five"—and how and why does ownership take different forms in such terrains? How do concepts of space and place interact with cultural issues (e.g., gender, subjectivity, etc.) and formal issues, such as the workings of stanzas and genres? We'll discuss these and many other questions primarily in relation to early modern writings (in the sense of ones composed between about 1500–1660) but with several opportunities to engage with texts from other periods as well. While our primary focus will be academic careers, the course will also offer preparation for some other possible careers and will include the option of a creative project. We will also expand and deepen our expertise in teaching and oral presentations at conferences and elsewhere. (We'll have a course mini-conference.)
Attribute: ENG2.
ENGL 6201. Race and Affect Theory. (3 Credits)
This seminar will stage a dialog between the field of race and ethnic studies on the one hand and that of affect theory on the other.
Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENBL, ENG3, ENGD, ENGT.
ENGL 6212. Medieval to Early Modern Drama. (3 Credits)
When we think of early drama, we usually think of the cycle plays, the great civic, multi-part, day-long productions from English towns: York primarily, but traditionally also Chester, Towneley, and N-Town in East Anglia. But scholarship in the last ten years has forced us to rethink that model in ways that investigate the context of these plays. The text we have from Chester is not really medieval but 16th-century, performed after substantial religious change had occurred, and marked by different local religious positions, hence a site of civic conflict. The Towneley plays, it seems, were not a performed cycle at all, but probably a collection of plays from different places, assembled for private reading, perhaps as an attempt to preserve some elements of an old dramatic religious tradition when that religion had fallen out of favor. These are two examples of the way the course will examine the cultural context of late medieval/early modern English drama. A third example: the most profound way in which this drama differs from later commercial drama is in the shift away from community theatre which occurred in London with the construction of the Theatre in 1572. We will explore the economic issues around the emergence of commercial theatre. Before the Theatre was built, who paid for plays? where were they staged? was there a performing community? In addition to excerpts from the cycle plays we will read some moral plays like Manynd and Everyman, some Tudor drama by John Heywood and Henry Medwall, and will finish up with Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG1, ENG2, ENME.
ENGL 6215. Medieval British Historical Writing. (3 Credits)
History-writing was fundamental to medieval and early-modern literary sensibilities, but in its relation to truth, genre, and identity, medieval history differs dramatically from contemporary understandings of the discipline of history. This course will introduce students to the major historiographical thinkers and practitioners of the Middle Ages in Britain and include selections from Gildas, Nennius, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and several French-language romances. Our interdisciplinary discussions will focus on the literary practices of medieval history.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME.
ENGL 6216. Late Medieval Autobiography: T. Hoccleve, O. Bokenham, M. Kempe. (3 Credits)
Margery Kempe's Book is often called the first female autobiography in English, but the writing of her fifteenth-century contemporaries Thomas Hoccleve, and London scribe and bureaucrat, and Osbern Bokenham, and East Anglian friar, also offes a personal voice. We will explore the social and theological context of each author as we read their work in Middle English.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG1, ENG2.
ENGL 6224. French of England: Texts and Literacies in a Multilingual Culture. (3 Credits)
French of England helps prepare graduates in medieval disciplines deploy the newly important multilingual paradigms for the study of medieval English and related cultures. It looks at the rich and still under-researched francophone corpus (c. 1000 literary texts and large bodies of documentary records) composed and/or circulating in medieval England and related regions from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. French was a major regional and transitional language in England, used in literature, governance, administration, culture, trade, and the professions. Taking francophone literary and documentary culture into account changes are paradigms for English medieval literary history and prompts new thought about the relations between literature, literacy, and language. Aiming to move as rapidly as possible from the pains of language-learning to the pleasure of reading text, the course combines a weekly linguistic practicum with a literary seminar and runs from 4pm to 7pm on Tuesdays. Previous experience of Old French is not required; basic reading or speaking of modern French is useful; experience with other languages is also sometimes enough of a help. This course will also explore early French uses of late old English. If in doubt about whether your language experiences will be helpful, please email woganbrowne@fordham.edu.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 6231. Late Medieval Women. (3 Credits)
The course will study women as produces and consumers of literature, that is as writers and readers. Instead of examining women as subjects of literary representation, we will use non-literary disciplines--social history, bibliography, iconography--to recover elements of women's lives in order to understand their involvement with reading. Like much current medieval scholarship, the class will employ cultural perspectives in which literature, history, and visual materials illuminate each other.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME, HGOH, MVSG.
ENGL 6235. Medieval Travel Narrative. (3 Credits)
Some of the most engaging questions about the Middle Ages have to do with the narratives of cultures in contact. Join me and other scholars who work on the medieval travel genre, finding in its discourses productive sites for exploration of premodern race, gender, religion, and more. This course will focus on a range of traditions, including crusade romances, such as "Richard, Coeur de Lion" in light of contemporary chronicler, Roger of Howden’s, "Chronica." Pilgrim and merchant narratives, from Egeria to Margery Kempe, and Mandeville to Marco Polo, will provide a contrast to romance and chronicle modes. We will also study the accounts by European missionaries who left extensive records of their interactions with Mongols. This course is designed to contextualize travel within the medieval world as we read and discuss those narratives as they relate to cultural projects of salvation, conquest, and conversion.
Attributes: ENG1, ENGD, ENME, MVSG.
ENGL 6236. Romanticism and Peace. (3 Credits)
"Peace is not an absence of war," wrote Spinoza, "it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." Proceeding from Spinoza's notion that peace is an active principle rather than a void between times of military conflict, and drawing upon the interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies, in this course we will study literary and philosophical engagements with peace in a period often thought synonymous with continual war. To view the Romantic era soley through the lens of war runs the risk of overlooking the reaching after peace that also marks the period (reflected in the vast array of treaties produced at this time, from the Peace of Paris (1783) to the London Straits Convention (1841). Attempts to theorize, to imagine, and to bring about peace were crucial forces in Romantic-era culture. Many familiar works, such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Joanna Baillie's plays, Jane Austen's novels, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic reflections on domestic tranquility, Thomas DeQuincey's escape into opium, Olaudah Equiano's modeling of the skills of a virtuosic negotiator, and Keat's famous odes are illuminated afresh when read in the context of a culture preoccupied not only with conflict but with conflict resolution.
Attributes: ENBL, ENG2.
ENGL 6237. The French of England II. (3 Credits)
Studies the rich, under-researched corpus (c. 1000 texts) in the Frenches of medieval England; includes projects of translation/editing (for acquiring techniques of presenting and interpreting medieval texts). FOE I not necessarily required.
Attributes: ENG1, ENME.
ENGL 6506. The Joseph Johnson Circle. (3 Credits)
This survey course takes shape around the British bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson, whose five-decade career stretched from the Seven Years’ War to the dawn of the Regency. Johnson published over four thousand titles during this time, in fields ranging from reform politics to children’s literature, from zoology to Baptist dissent, and from lyric poetry to visionary manifestos. His authors included Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sydney Owenson, William Cowper, Maria Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, William Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, and hundreds more. Attending to what has been referred to as the “Johnson Circle,” we will trace broad orbits in British writing across the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with topics including aesthetics, religious debate, the American and French Revolutions, women’s rights, war, slavery, popular societies, science, and education. In this regard, this course will function as a broad survey of British writing from 1760 to 1820. Along the way, in studying the radiating influence of the imprint “J. Johnson, London,” we will also pay attention to the field of Book History and how it has energized and expanded eighteenth-century and Romantic-era studies.
Attributes: ENBE, ENBL, ENG2.
ENGL 6552. Film/Theory/Literature: Horror and Madness. (3 Credits)
Confronting the expansive theoretical, literary, and cinematic representations of fear, horror, terror, abjection and madness, we will delve into works of David Cronenberg, George Romero, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Cynthia Freeland, Julia Kristeva, Toni Morrison (among others). Warning: Several films are not for the squeamish. Please be aware that we will need a few hours each week (outside of official class time) for watching the films.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 6641. Reading and Teaching the Nineteenth - Century Novel. (3 Credits)
In this course we will consider the nineteenth-century novel from the interfused perspectives of readers and teachers. Our remit will be the British novel across a relatively broad span of decades: Maria Edgeworth’sCastle Rackrent (1800), Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871/2). After reading and discussing each novel we will then turn to consider the various ways that it might be taught in the college classroom. And for each novel, both our readings and our conversations about pedagogical approaches will be informed by critical articles on the works themselves and on broader issues in nineteenth-century studies. This seminar is open to all graduate students, but because the structure of the course will require an unusual amount of active student participation, please keep in mind that silent spectatorship will not be possible.
ENGL 6751. The New Formalism and Early Modern Literature. (3 Credits)
In the past decade formalism, the F-word of the professsion for over twenty years, has attracted many critics in its revisionist version often termed "the new formalism." What are the potentialities--and problems-- of this approach? How should we resolve debates about the working of the new formalism, such as whether it is necessarily historical? How does it interact and/or conflict with other methodologies, such as gender studies and materialism? We will approach these questions by reading a wide range of early modern texts in the principal genres, the list being planned to avoid major overlap with other early modern courses at Fordham in the past year or two. Thus the course aims to serve the needs of a range of students: those interested in a broad overview of early modern texts, and of those wanted to engage with formalist approaches and/or connect those approaches with other types of criticism. Like all my graduate courses, it will also include attention to professionalizing, such as discussions of giving papers effectively and of teaching.
Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.
ENGL 6767. Marriage and Nation in 19 Century British Literature. (3 Credits)
This course will explore literary and cultural conceptualizations of British marriage in the nineteenth century—the period traditionally seen as an age of nationalism and one in which Parliament passed or attempted to pass an unprecedented number of reforms of the marriage law. We will examine how marriage plots written after the Union with Ireland Act (1800) envision the mutually constitutive relationship between British identity and British marriage, as well as how they address crises of national self-definition and uphold—or question—the sense of national uniqueness and superiority that the institution of marriage was meant to reinforce.
ENGL 6769. Finnegans Wake. (3 Credits)
One of the most intriguing and entertaining literary works ever crafted, James Joyce’s "Finnegans Wake" sends us on seriously hilarious trips around the world, through human (especially Irish) history, and into the sleeping mind. Joyce’s “book of the night,” a comic masterpiece, constructs not one thing, but "two thinks at a time," multiple meanings that uproariously cross national, linguistic, sexual, historical—just about all kinds of—boundaries. A resurrection of dead ends that generates new beginnings (finn-again), this “collideorscape” asks readers to "wipe their glosses with what they know,” and revolutionizes all kinds of creative energies and theoretical discourses. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. Nearly always, though, things emerge that charm, surprise, and delight.
Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.
ENGL 6779. Brecht: Aesthetics and Politic. (3 Credits)
Bertolt Brecht was arguably the most important theater theorist of the twenthieth century, and his theory of the function of art under capitalism transformed thinking about the relationship between culture and politics and continues to resonate today. This course will examine Brecht's theater and theory in several contexts: first, in the context of modernist theater theory and practice, and third, via the legacy of his theories in late twenthieth- and twenty-first-century art and philosophy. Philosophical readings will include Marx, Adorno, and Horkheimer, Benjamin, Lukacs, Arendt, Barthes, Jameson, and Ranciere; theatrical readings will include, in addition to a substantial number of Brecht's own plays, considerations of German Expressionism; non-European, especially Chinese, theater, modernist cabaret, and postwar avant-garde and postdramatic theater. Discussions will address, among other things, the relationship between theater and politics, the role of mass culture, methodological issues in materialist criticism, theories of spectatorship, and the fate of political art after modernism.
ENGL 6800. God and Mammon in British America. (3 Credits)
Did the English explore, conquer, and settle North America in the name of true religion or the earthly pursuit of gain? How was the one aim shaped by the other, and how have these mutual concerns shaped colonial American writing? Taking Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a conceptual point of departure, this course will explore the cultural history of spiritual and material wealth in colonial New England, the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the West Indies. We will examine both the central texts of dissenting Protestantism from the perspective of the colonial economics and social class and the central texts of colonial economics and economic self making from the perspective of theology, morality, and the transformation of religious culture in British America over the course of nearly two centuries.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG2.
ENGL 6888. Reading the Indian Ocean World. (3 Credits)
A new configuration of study has emerged in the last decade or so known as Indian Ocean Studies. It employs a robust interdisciplinarity to study the cultural flows and encounters over time of the peoples and traffic of the Indian Ocean and the formations of its vast littoral. This includes exchanges in trade, commerce, and war between the East African littoral and Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and the South East Asian archipelago including China. The migration of populations, the slave trades and slavery, establishment of overseas or expatriate settlements, the emergence of lingua franca, (such as Kiswahili), maritime life, and the spread of technology and creation of empires and colonies are studied in their interrelation. This course will focus on the archives, the literature, writing (including histories) and expressive practices (including film, music and performance) that this confluence of peoples has created in over more than two (actually seven) millennia. Starting with the earliest extant documents from Antiquity, to the contemporary scholarly and creative work of writers such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Barlan Pyamootoo, Monique Agénor, Kuo Pao Kun, Isabel Hofmyer, Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nuruddin Farah and Yvette Christianse, we will spend the semester “reading” the Indian Ocean world.
ENGL 6905. Concepts of Culture. (3 Credits)
What do we talk about when we talk about "culture"? This class will explore this keyword in and around literary studies along two parallel tracks. First, we will explore the historical development of different concepts of culture over the last two centuries or so. Second, we will explore a range of theoretical perspectives from the past three decades that fit loosely under the rubric of Cultural Studies. Both tracks will necessitate broadly interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. We will explore, for instance, a relatively literary manifestation of the concept in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, but also how the concept of culture figures in the early history of the human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Similarly, since work in the contemporary field of Cultural Studies only rarely limits its objects of study to the literary; we will sample theoretical developments in the study of popular music, film and television, etc.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3, ENGT.
ENGL 6914. Home, Exile and Diaspora in Asian American Literature. (3 Credits)
This course will introduce students to major works of contemporary Asian American Literature. Possible authors include John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chang-rae Lee, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilyn Chin, and many others.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 6921. Modern Language Politics. (3 Credits)
Early twentieth century literature and theory was preoccupied with the relationship between language and politics, from the acknowledgement of minority and non-standard linguistic forms, to questions over the relationship between violence and language (whether or not, to paraphrase Adorno, one can write poetry after Auschwitz), to the idea of literary form itself enacting a kind of political resistance. In this course, we will analyze some of the competing philosophies about language circulating during this period and interrogate how modernist writers responded and contributed to these discussions. Likely authors include James Dawes, Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, Americo Paredes, Zitkala-Sa, and Jean Toomer.
Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.
ENGL 7001. Early Modern Lyric Poetry. (3 Credits)
The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of critical interest in early modern/Renaissance lyric. Many methodological issues it raises are germane to the lyric poetry of other periods as well. The questions we will explore include, among others: What are the potentialities and problems of the new formalism? How if at all should close reading be recuperated? How does the new interest in the material text lead us to interpret the visual appearance of lyric poetry, other results of printing and publishing practices, and the poem as artifact or object? In what ways does lyric gender, and in what ways is it gendered? How does space/place theory, more often deployed in relation to drama and prose fiction, illuminate the workings of the lyric? Whereas the primary focus of this seminar is the period between about 1500 and 1660, it is also designed for those with other interest and areas of expertise. If any participants in the group are poets themselves, they will have opportunities to engage with issues of craft and to submit poems in lieu of one of the shorter assignments. And those primarily interested in lyric poetry written in other periods can focus on those texts in at least two classes and if they wish write their seminar papers partly or entirely on it.
ENGL 7007. Displacing the Renaissance: Travel, Race, and Colonialism. (3 Credits)
Investigates how literature of the English Renaissance takes part in developing discourses of race and colonialism in the period. Authors to be studied include Ascham, Nashe, Spenser, Marlow, Shakespeare, and Massinger, among others.
Attributes: ENAL, ENBE, ENG2, ENG3, ENGD, ENGT.
ENGL 7744. Paracolonial Studies: After Postcolonial Theory. (3 Credits)
This course will examine recent developments in (and beyond) postcolonial theory. While the primary focus will be on 20th and 21st- century theory and literature, the course will consider texts and cultural documents from earlier periods to explore how postcolonial studies belong to a wider reshaping of literary histories. The course will be organized around the study of a select few contemporary writers (Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are likely choices). Works by these writers will be read alongside postcolonial theorists (e.g., Homi Bhabha, Ania Loomba, Walter Mignolo, Gayatri Spivak, Gauri Viswanathan) and in conjunction with earlier works both canonical (e.g., Collins, De Quincey, Defoe, Dryden, and Shakespeare) and less canonical (e.g., Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir's Hikayat Abdullah, and documents from the Dutch and English East India Company records).
ENGL 7829. Fict Pub Sph: Am Lit 1776-1900. (3 Credits)
Using concepts of the public sphere drawn from critical theory, feminism, and political philosophy, this course will examine the development in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture of the gendered distinctions between public and private, domesticity and the market, reason and sentimentality. Several historical problems will structure our theoretical, critical, and literary readings, including: the development of the doctrine of separate spheres, or domestic ideology; the effect of counter-publics, or alternative models of the public sphere, based in social movements such as temperance, feminism, and abolitionism; the political meanings of emotions, especially the key sentimental concept of sympathy; and shifting notions of how the practices of reading and writing literature were supposed to prepare citizens - especially boys and men - for participation in politics and civil society.
Attributes: ENAE, ENG2, ENG3.
ENGL 8935. Dissertation Writing Seminar. (0 Credits)
Designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication.
ENGL 8936. Issues in Scholarship and Academia. (0 Credits)
This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, will provide a forum in which to discuss the issues that shape the pursuit of a career professing literature as well as the pursuit of a career outside of the academy. Each semster's combination of guest-presentations and brief, selected readings will vary according to particpants' desires, but typical topics might include the following: General Education and the English Department; Journal Editing and the Intellectual Life; Humanities Education and Globalism; and The Ph.D. in English and the World Outside. Selected readings might include excerpts from Louis Menand, "The Marketplace of Ideas"(2010); Stanley Fish, "Save the World on Your Own Time "(2008); Frank Donoghue, "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities"; and Katherine N. Hayles' "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary."
ENGL 8997. Master's With Writing Concentration Capstone. (0 Credits)
The MA with Writing Concentration (MA w/WC) degree students who have completed 6 of their 10 courses toward their degree requirements will complete a substantial writing project of approximately 30 pages of poetry or 40 pages of fiction or nonfiction under the direction of a creative writing faculty member as their exit requirement.
ENGL 8998. English Graduate Internship. (1 to 3 Credits)
Will be processed through graduate internship.
ENGL 8999. Independent Study. (0 to 4 Credits)
Independent Study.
ENGL 9999. Dissertation Direction. (1 Credit)
Doctoral students who have had their dissertation proposals accepted must register for this each semester up to and including the one in which they defend. The one exception is for students defending in the summer semester before their summer graduation deadline, the registration may be for ENGL 0910 Maintenance.
ENGL MTNC. Maintenance-English. (0 Credits)