Annual 2024-2025 Class Schedule
**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**
Click on a course title to view the description.
Course # | Course Title | Fall | Winter | Spring |
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CREATIVE WRITING COURSES | ||||
English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Tucker MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader. | ||||
English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Sears WF 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader. | ||||
English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Tucker TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader. | ||||
English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Barcelona WF 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader. | ||||
English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Taveras WF 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader. | ||||
English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Okafor TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Curdy TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Barcelona WF 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Curdy TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Okafor TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Curdy TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Curdy MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Webster TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | Barcelona TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Seliy MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Kokernot MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Sears MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Bouldrey TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Scanlon TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Donohue TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Sears MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Seliy MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Seliy MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 207 | Reading and Writing Fiction | Scanlon TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 207 Reading and Writing FictionCourse Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Scanlon MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Bouldrey TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Webster MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Scanlon TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Bresland TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Bresland TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Bresland TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative NonfictionCourse Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites:
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English 306 | Advanced Poetry Writing | Trethewey W 3-5:50 | ||
English 306 Advanced Poetry WritingCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 307 | Advanced Creative Writing: Anecdotes and Yarns: Getting Voice to the Page | Bouldrey TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing: Anecdotes and Yarns: Getting Voice to the PageCourse Description: “Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.” —E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Where does writing come from? By looking at examples of literature that were initially meant to be spoken aloud, we will explore how they were placed, elegantly and not, onto the page. How does this happen? The bardic boom, the pulpit pitch, the mad futurist with a megaphone—so many of the great works of literature were first delivered orally, then spelled out and called literature. Speeches, psalms, slams, rants, anecdotes, manifestos, declarations, sermons, lectures, yarns, ballads, brags, jeremiads, prayers, incendiary instructions for the coming revolution—we’ll investigate as many as we can of these in the readings, considering, as writers, how we can get performative narratives of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the stage to the page. We will discuss, too, the instructive aspect of art and literature, the difference between voice and style, and how oral culture differs from written culture, with a serious take on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. We will consider formal prosody, rhetoric, and poetic forms, and original and amusing methods inventive writers come up with to interpret the sound of speech. Readings may include sermons by John Donne, Toni Morrison, and Herman Melville; prayers and suras from Adam Zagejewski and the Koran, Brags from Beowulf, Beastie Boys, Sharon Olds, and Shmuel HaNagid, anecdotes from Ivan Turgenev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Olga Tokarczuk, murder ballads from Cole Porter and Dolly Parton, speeches and declarations from Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass, and jeremiads by Jamaica Kincaid, Valerie Solanis, and Joy Williams. While writing your own fictions (not necessarily from the oral tradition), we will discuss the instructive aspect of art and literature, the difference between style and voice, how delivery by great orators can change the meaning of the material, and how the speech on the page has its own specific power that makes it, in its way, a second, separate work of literature. Teaching Method Reading, lecture, discussion, workshop. Evaluation:
Course Requirements:
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English 309 | Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Spoken Word and the Radiophonic Imagination | Bresland TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 309 Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Spoken Word and the Radiophonic ImaginationCourse Description: Students write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering spoken word with evocative sonic textures, tones, instrumentation and silence. This course places equal emphasis on literary quality, vocal performance and production value. We act as writers, performers, producers as we listen deeply into contemporary radio practice. We also encourage one another to experiment, to try weird ideas, to take risks. We will investigate what it means to write for the ear (as opposed to the page or screen), and we will learn to connect with the listener. In the process of producing multiple audio works, we will acquire numerous audio production skills. We will write frequently, speak frequently and in varied styles. We will use field mics and studio mics as we harness our unique voices and the voices of others. We will also compute a fair bit as we learn to use audio editing software to produce polished, multilayered soundscapes. By winter’s end, we will be more practiced writers, more accomplished multimedia performers and producers, possess a greater number of technological skills and a greater range of artistic expression. | ||||
English 392 | Situation of Writing | Bouldrey MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 392 Situation of WritingCourse Description: The situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class, we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of creative writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas about shaping the literary traditions of the United States starting with Melville, and moving quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by shaping it or walking away from it—Roxane Gay, Adrienne Rich, Richard Baldwin, and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with a service learning assignment and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Our class will be enhanced by the annual Return Engagement series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern’s Writing Program. My intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, and will evolve into a learning experience that is both pragmatically useful and philosophically illuminating. My hope is that this class will help us to become more conscious of our motives and processes as writers; that it will allow us to more lucidly defend creative writing as an art form and a vital contribution to society; and that it will acquaint us with the productions of literary culture, including their changing technological platforms and their relationship to social structures. This course is part of the Hewlett Diversity Initiative, and as part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities. | ||||
English 393-1 | Theory and Practice of Poetry | Abani MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 393-1 Theory and Practice of PoetryCourse Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 393-2 | Theory and Practice of Poetry | Webster MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 393-2 Theory and Practice of PoetryCourse Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 393-3 | Theory and Practice of Poetry | Curdy MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 393-3 Theory and Practice of PoetryCourse Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 394-1 | Theory and Practice of Fiction | Martinez MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 394-1 Theory and Practice of FictionTeaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 394-2 | Theory and Practice of Fiction | Seliy MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 394-2 Theory and Practice of FictionTeaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 394-3 | Theory and Practice of Fiction | Bouldrey MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 394-3 Theory and Practice of FictionTeaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 395-1 | Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction | Scanlon MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 395-1 Theory and Practice of Creative NonfictionTeaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 395-2 | Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction | Hernández MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 395-2 Theory and Practice of Creative NonfictionTeaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 395-3 | Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction | Bresland MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 395-3 Theory and Practice of Creative NonfictionTeaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
200-LEVEL LITERATURE COURSES | ||||
English 200 | Literary Histories: Epic Failures and Epic Successes (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) | West TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 200 Literary Histories: Epic Failures and Epic Successes (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)Course Description: In the era of Snapchat and TikTok, epic has entered the urban dictionary. As the genre of what Milton called “heroic song,” though, epic predates even the invention of writing, and is perhaps the oldest form of poetic production. What has allowed such epic success? The persistence of epic through cultural and linguistic change is one of the form’s central themes: how can words heroically uttered and deeds heroically dared be passed on from one lifetime to those that follow? How are they transformed? What does it mean to take up as one’s own something that has been passed down from a culture no longer present? Such questions become even more pressing in moments when one culture encounters another and in its new context must confront what to retain, what to adopt, and what to invent. In this course we will consider how epic narrative projects, recalls, and reworks its history as tradition. Benefitting from several recent translations of epic poems by women, we will consider the role of gender in epic. Finally, we will look at contemporary epics that push back against the histories that have often been associated with the genre and find new themes in the form. Texts: Homer, Iliad (transl. Wilson); Vergil, Aeneid (transl. Bartsch); Beowulf (transl. Headley); Milton, Paradise Lost; Atwood, The Penelopiad; Wolcott, Omeros; as well as selections from other epic poems Objectives: Students will become acquainted with the principal formal features of the genre of epic through the study of a number of representative works in the genre. In addition they will be introduced to some theories of epic, both current and historical. They will learn something of the genre’s history of self-reflection, cultural contexts within which epic appears, and some of the cultural uses to which epic has been set. They will consider how epic differs from two other long narrative forms, novel and romance. Using these materials, they will sharpen critical argumentation skills orally and in writing. | ||||
English 200 | Literary Histories: All the Single Ladies: Spinsters, Wives and Madwomen from 1800 to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830) | Winter TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 200 Literary Histories: All the Single Ladies: Spinsters, Wives and Madwomen from 1800 to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830)Course Description: Following Beyoncé’s iconic call to action, this course takes a look at a number of “single ladies” - and a few who managed to “put a ring on it” - in literature, film and TV from the last two hundred years. Together, we will investigate archetypal figures of femininity, from the spinster to the madwoman to today’s “girlboss.” How do our literary and popular media construct and deconstruct these categories at different moments in history? Pairing feminist theory with primary texts, we’ll ask: how does marriage function to resolve class tensions? How does it construct and enforce constructions of race and gender? And how, according to these texts, can women find social, emotional and financial independence? Texts may include selections from Jane Eyre, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, A Room of One’s Own, Conversations with Friends, Sex and the City, and The Bachelor. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion, short lectures Evaluation Method: Participation, analytical essays and a final project Texts including ISBNs: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (ISBN 9780141441146), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole (ISBN 0140439021), A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf ( ISBN 0156787334), Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (ISBN 0156787334), Bridget Jones's Diary dir. Sharon Maguire (2001), selections from Sex and the City created by Darren Star (1998-2004) and The Bachelor created by Mike Fleiss (2002-2024) Texts will be available at: Required novels at Norris Bookstore. Other excerpts provided via Canvas. | ||||
English 200 | Literary Histories: Snakey Women Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) | Vieytez MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 200 Literary Histories: Snakey Women Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)Course Description: In 2016, Taylor Swift’s highly publicized feud with Kanye West and the Kardashians peaked with the release of Kanye’s song, “Famous,” which features a derogatory reference to the pop artist. In response to Taylor’s outrage, Kim Kardashian released a recorded phone call between Taylor and Kanye in which she seemed to approve the controversial lyric, and called Taylor a “snake.” This suggestion of Taylor’s deceit spread quickly through public opinion, and #TaylorSwiftisaSnake went viral across social media platforms. What does it mean to call a woman a snake? What does such a comparison seek to express about someone’s intentions, or even their ethics? And what happens when women accused of sn(e)akiness lean into rather than away from the comparison? We will consider these questions in a winding investigation of snakey women through the ages and across a variety of narrative forms. From the bond between Eve and a serpent in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace to the bond between dragon-rider Rhaenyra Targaryen and her dragon (HBO series, “House of the Dragon”), from Melusine, a medieval folkloric figure cursed with the body of a serpent from the waist down, to Medusa, the monstrous snake-haired woman of Greek mythology, this class will examine how premodern and modern representations of serpentine femininity treat issues of gender and power. Texts may include: Excerpts from the Old Testament; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Melusine; the HBO series “Game of Thrones”; and “House of the Dragon”; as well as selections from medieval illuminated manuscripts and social media. | ||||
English 200 | Literary Histories: American Nightmare: Race Science from the 18th Century to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830) | Bergh MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 200 Literary Histories: American Nightmare: Race Science from the 18th Century to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830)Course Description: Is the American dream only a white dream, even a fantasy? Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning 2017 horror film Get Out, in which a white liberal family systematically transplants the brains of their aging family members into the bodies of Black people, satirizes the postracial fantasy of colorblindness. White wealth and flourishing (and eternal youth) are based on a horrifying techno-fix: the exploitation and extraction of Black life, the production of a living nightmare. Peele’s film raises unsettling questions about the American conception of race—questions with deep histories—which this class aims to explore: How has race been mobilized as a structure of white supremacist social control? What has racialization meant for those being racialized? Centralizing the work of Black and Indigenous thinkers, our goal will be to interrogate what race has meant in American culture over time. We will read a selection of excerpts and short texts from the 18th and 19th centuries to learn about the development of “race science” as a logic underpinning violently imposed social hierarchies. In tandem with this material, we will analyze Peele’s film and two contemporary novels with historical roots: Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), the story of a young Black man in a “reform school” in 1960s Florida, and Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (2024), which traces the experience of two Indigenous boys at the Carlisle Indian School, an institution designed to destroy Native culture. In doing so, we will aim to investigate the question: What are our contemporary inheritances of these histories? | ||||
English 200 | Literary Histories: Songs and Sonnets (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) | Phillips TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 200 Literary Histories: Songs and Sonnets (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)Course Description: Beginning with the sonnet craze in the late sixteenth century and ending with twenty-first-century reinventions and deconstructions of the sonnet, this course will explore questions of literary history by taking up the relationship between poetry and popular culture, investigating the ways in which poets draw on the latest trends in popular and literary culture and in turn the ways in which that culture incorporates and transforms poetry—on the stage, in music, and on the screen. Thinking of literary history as a set of conversations in verse across the centuries, we will consider how poets borrow from and respond to one another, experimenting with traditional forms and familiar themes to make the old new. In order to recognize and interpret this experimentation, we will first study those traditional forms, learning to read and interpret poetry. While we will be reading a range of poems in modern editions, we will be situating them in their social, historical, literary and material contexts, analyzing the ways in which these contexts shape our interpretation. Readings may include poetry by Shakespeare, Agbagi, Donne, Hughes, Sidney, Keats, McKay, Rosetti, Yeats, and Eliot. Teaching Method(s): Discussion. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; two papers, short assignments, and discussion board posts. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 6th edition, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (ISBN: 978-0393679021, approximate cost: $80 new, 45-50 used, $25 rental); students may also use The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, (ISBN: 978-0393979206), approximate cost: ~$10 used. Text will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. | ||||
English 200 | Literary Histories: Literature and Energy Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) | Narayan MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 200 Literary Histories: Literature and Energy Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)Course Description: This course explores the way literary writers have imagined “energy” in all its manifestations from the life force that moves human and animal bodies and the motive power derived from fossil fuels to human attributes like efficiency and productivity. We will consider how classical thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus, early Modern ones like Cavendish and Shakespeare, and modern ones ranging from Charles Dickens to productivity vloggers on Youtube use “energy” as a metaphor to name a variety of dynamics, including those of race, gender, class, empire, nature, and god. Reading literary texts alongside a social history of science, we’ll ask: how does the science of energy make its way through literature into our imaginations about work? Through what literary maneuvers and historical conditions have we come to imagine work and productivity as ultimately good? What political horizons emerge when we argue that writing about energy negotiates the complex acts of doing work, forcing work, shirking work, and refusing to work? Teaching Method: Discussion. | ||||
English 210-1 | British Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) | Thompson TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section | ||
English 210-1 British Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)Course Description: This class surveys major texts in the development of English literature from the epic Beowulf (c. 750 – 950) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1788). A central goal of the class is to develop tools for approaching literary texts as creative expressions as well as challenging reflections on society, power, knowledge, and difference. The millennium-long sweep of English 210 will help us approach literature not as escapist leisure but as social thought expressed in new representational modes. We will pay special attention to the role of transoceanic travel, exploitation, and mercantile capitalist trade in the development of English literary forms. At a time of unprecedented encounters with other peoples and places, how did English literary forms represent—and contest—these new realities? Required Texts
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English 213 | Introduction to Fiction (Historical Breadth Post 1830) | Law and Wisecup MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 213 Introduction to Fiction (Historical Breadth Post 1830)Course Description: A human “monster,” stitched together out of disparate body parts. An urban community of Indigenous peoples, all with different experiences and stories. A borderland, bisected by checkpoints and border crossings. This course examines works of fiction that engage with—and embody--questions of pieces, fragments, and wholes in order to question what makes a human, a family, and a community. Along the way, we’ll encounter contested frontiers, stories that are at once simple and tangled, and characters who feel monstrous and yet somehow whole. Teaching Method: Two lectures per week; one required discussion-section per week.
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English 215 | Topics in Literature, Film and Media: The Genres of Classic Hollywood Cinema | Hodge and Stern MW 12:30-1:50, plus discussion section | ||
English 215 Topics in Literature, Film and Media: The Genres of Classic Hollywood CinemaCourse Description: Film noir! the musical! melodrama or the "woman's film"! the western! the screwball comedy! This course surveys the most powerful genres of Hollywood cinema's "classical" era, the period of studio production from the 1910s to about 1960. Focusing on the sound era this course introduces students to the study of Hollywood cinema as a mode of industrial cultural production at the dynamic intersection of art and mass culture. Our approach will be to study one film per week with an emphasis on formal analysis supplemented by readings from film theory and history. Films will likely include The Wizard of Oz (1939), Sullivan's Travels (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Singin' in the Rain (1952), among others. Readings may include writings by Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, Altman, Cavell, L. Williams, and others. Assignments will include short papers, a video editing exercise (no expertise required), and a final project. Teaching Methods: Lecture & discussion. Evaluation Methods: Short writing assignments. | ||||
English 215 | Topics in Literature, Film and Media: Speculative Fictions of Race and Empire | Gutierrez-Lowe TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 215 Topics in Literature, Film and Media: Speculative Fictions of Race and EmpireCourse Description: TV shows like The Mandalorian, House of the Dragon, and The Boys have sought to portray great empires: the Galactic Empire, Targaryen House, and Vought International. All-powerful, authoritarian kingdoms and state and/or corporate powers abound in the many genres of speculative fiction—from fantasy to space western, from superhero to dystopian. This class is an exploration of how empires are conceived and constructed and what role race plays in their creation. Working with both contemporary popular media and the literary works of writers of color, we’ll ask: How are empires built? How do they construct (and deconstruct) the meanings of race and gender? And how do they, to follow Luthen Rael from the Star War’s series Andor, breed rebellion? Texts and media may include selections from Helena María Viramontes’ The Moths, Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s Magical/ Realism, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Fernando A. Flores’ Tears of the Trufflepig, The Mandalorian, Andor, House of the Dragon, and The Boys. | ||||
English 220 | The Bible as Literature | Schwartz TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 220 The Bible as LiteratureCourse Description: This course is meant to familiarize you with the most influential text in Western culture from a literary perspective. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres in the Bible—primeval myth, epic, lyric poetry, prophecy, proto-novel; the representation of God as a literary character; and dominant images and themes. We will focus on those books that have had greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Jonah, selections from Jeremiah and Second Isaiah; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms and the Song of Solomon, along with the stories of Kings Saul and David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read selections from the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation. (We’re skipping Paul because he’s more a theologian than a literary writer.) Reading Requirement: The Bible, (either the Oxford Annotated Bible (ISBN 0190276088) or the Jerusalem Bible (ISBN 0525573194) are preferred).Recommended Reading:
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English 234 | Introduction to Shakespeare | Phillips MW 9:30-10:50, plus discussion section | ||
English 234 Introduction to ShakespeareCourse Description: This course will introduce students to a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and romances. During the quarter, we will be considering these plays in their Early Modern context—cultural, political, literary and theatrical. We will focus centrally on matters of performance and of text. How is our interpretation of a play shaped by Shakespeare’s various “texts”— his stories and their histories, the works of his contemporaries, the latest literary fashions, and the various versions of his plays that circulated among his audience? Similarly, how do the details of a given performance, or the presence of a particular audience, alter the experience of the play? To answer these questions, we will consider not only the theaters of Early Modern England, but also recent cinematic versions of the plays, and we will read only our modern edition of Shakespeare but also examining some pages from the plays as they originally circulated. Our readings may include Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and the Tempest. Teaching Method(s): Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section. Evaluation Method(s): Section attendance and participation, discussion board posts, a midterm, a scene performance and short papers Texts will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. The required textbook is The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, (two-volume set) ed. Stephen Greenblatt (ISBN 978-0-393-26402-9, approximate cost $90 new; $ 40 used, $39 digital; copies of the 1st and 2nd editions, as well as the one-volume 3rd edition may also be used). | ||||
English 266 | Introduction to African American Literature (Historical Breadth Post 1830) | Mann MW 12:30-1:50, plus discussion section | ||
English 266 Introduction to African American Literature (Historical Breadth Post 1830)Course Description: In this survey of African American literature, students will read across four centuries of literary and cultural production to understand the relationship between Black culture and freedom struggle. Students will engage topics in Black study—including questions of freedom, fugitivity, nationalism, and racial justice—as well as literary and cultural history to analyze and explain the development of Black letters in the U.S. Our course will move quickly through four periods in black literature and cultural production: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregation, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, and multiculturalism and the 21st century. Throughout, will read a range of sources including poetry and prose, and long- and short-form works to understand the ideas and imaginaries that inhere in Black literature. We will also listen to Black music, including, the Blues, jazz, and Hip Hop and view television and films that have been important entries in the cultural history of Black life. Readings will include:
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English 270-1 | American Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) | Grossman TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 270-1 American Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)Course Description: This is part one of a two-quarter survey that explores writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century. (Students are welcome to take one or both parts of English 270.) In the first quarter we’ll explore the history of North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850’s. We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature? Who counts as an American? Who shall be allowed to tell their stories, and on whose behalf? We embark on this literary journey at a moment of questioning the relations between the present and our “literary traditions”: various organizations are debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts); at the same time, people are calling for the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy. We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who told stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom. Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section. Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required. Some of the authors whose works we will read include: Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Powhatan. | ||||
English 275 | Topics in Asian American Literature | Huang MW 11-12:20, plus discussion section | ||
English 275 Topics in Asian American LiteratureCourse Description: Asian American, Asian-American, Asian/American: from Chinese Americans to Hmong Americans to mixed race Asian Americans, from fourth-generation Californians to cosmopolitan college students, from desert internment camps to New York City office buildings, what do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging. Teaching Method(s): Lecture, discussion, discussion section, writing assignments Evaluation Methods: Attendance, class participation, writing assignments, quizzes, readings, papers Texts include:
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English 277 | Introduction to Latinx Literature | Rodriguez Pliego MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 277 Introduction to Latinx LiteratureCourse Description: In the United States, we often talk about Latinx people using blurry labels. We discuss the Latino vote, the Hispanic population, and the Latinx community. This course explores the nuances of these labels through stories narrated by Latinx authors. As we follow characters through conflicts and inhabit their quotidian lives, we will navigate between the specificity of a story and the complexity of a Latinx identity. Class discussions will study emotional ties to language, feminist thought, Latinx Indigeneities, and queer storytelling. Our readings will alternate between short stories, poetry, non-fiction writing, and one novel. As we move between forms and genres, we will pay particular attention to what Latinx authors achieve by choosing to tell their story in a poem, a short story, an essay, or a novel, as well as what each of these forms asks of us as readers. A nine-week course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course follows an illustrative sample of Latinx authors from the 1980s to the present. It aims to provide students with a historical, political, and literary foundation for further exploration of Latinx literature. Teaching Method(s): Lecture and discussion-based course. Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final papers, personal essay, attendance and participation. Texts include: We the Animals by Justin Torres (9780547844190). Short stories, poetry and excerpts from Carmen Maria Machado, Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Javier Zamora, Helena Maria Viramontes, and others. Texts will be available at:
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English 280 | Topics in Multiethnic American Literature: Multiracial Identities (Historical Breadth Post 1830) | Comerford MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 280 Topics in Multiethnic American Literature: Multiracial Identities (Historical Breadth Post 1830)Texts May Include: The Woman of Colour (1808), Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909), Nella Larsen, Passing (1929), Justin Torres, We the Animals (2018), Kyle Lucia Wu, Win Me Something (2021), Samira Mehta, The Racism of People Who Love You (2024).
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English 283 | Introduction to Literature and the Environment: Green Thought, Green Worlds (Historical Breadth, Pre AND Post 1830) | Shannon TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section | ||
English 283 Introduction to Literature and the Environment: Green Thought, Green Worlds (Historical Breadth, Pre AND Post 1830)Nature is one of humanity’s most elastic concepts. Sometimes it seems to offer a healing refuge, but sometimes it seems to threaten -- or even contradict -- human survival. Are we part of nature, or do we encounter it? Is human society as natural as the pack or pod, or a defense against “the laws of nature”? Both human and literary history have been defined by the stories we tell about the environment; our common future will be shaped the same way. What new forms of attention might address the destabilized ecologies on which we now know we depend? Tracking environmental writing from the ancient Greeks to the Anthropocene, this course offers a deep dive into the storied concept of “nature” and the rise of ecological thought and environmental literature. Philosophical reflection began by wondering whether something dystopian separates humanity from the rest of the cosmos. Longstanding ideas of a utopian “green world” have offered an escape from the greyness of everyday life and a corrective to the corruptions of the (so-called) “real world.” Meanwhile, industrial and technoscientific attempts to “master” the earth have scorched it instead, extinguishing countless species and toxifying land, water, air, and our bodies too – proving once and for all that we are a continuous part of the world. Classic literary concerns like close observation, perception, point-of-view, justice, ethics, belonging, and the wild or unknown frontier invariably draw on environmental content. And the way we represent the natural world, in turn, can be as consequential as scientific advances in the great project of preserving our planet. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion, plus required section meetings. Evaluation: Lecture attendance and discussion; attendance and contributions to section; two quizzes, one short paper, and an in-class final exam. Readings: Along with popular images and scholarly essays on nature and the Anthropocene, we’ll read a broad range of literary-environmental texts, including: short passages from origin myths, classical natural history, and pastoral verse; Shakespeare’s As You Like It and King Lear; Romantic poetry; journal selections from the 19th-century naturalists, Dorothy Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau; a novel from a nonhuman perspective (Virginia Woolf’s Flush); 20th-century conservationist and “environmental literature” (Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s landmark text in both literary and environmental history, Silent Spring); excerpts from science fiction; contemporary sound studies; the NOVA documentary, Sea Change: The Gulf of Maine; and the film, WALL-E. | ||||
English 285 | Topics in Literature and Culture: Introduction to Literary Theory | Wolff MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 285 Topics in Literature and Culture: Introduction to Literary TheoryCourse Description: This course is about learning how to read closely, that is, how to “do” a deeply informed comparative close reading. Tailored to the time constraints of the quarter, it introduces students to a series of episodes in the recent history of the study of literature and culture: the influential heroes of these episodes are engaged intellectuals who have together helped to inform how we read today. Pairing a handful of shorter primary texts with field-defining theorists and readers of the past and present, students will not only build fluency in the vocabulary of “literary theory,” they will emerge as more worldly, technically savvy, and theoretically sophisticated readers themselves. In this course, we are not interested in theory for its own sake, but in the ways the thing we call “theory” — like literature — is not only shaped by, but helps to shape the world around us. Teaching Method: Brief lectures and engaged discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; short writing assignments; one presentation; and a final project. Authors may include: Germaine de Staël, William Hazlitt, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavio Paz, Franz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Paolo Freire, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Rey Chow, Barbara Johnson, and Lauren Berlant. All texts for the course will be available on Canvas. | ||||
English 288 | Topics in Literature and Ethics | Schwartz TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 288 Topics in Literature and EthicsCourse Description: What is the right thing to do? This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. Biblical ideas of justice, utilitarianism, rights theory, and more justice theories will be explored. We will read literature alongside these theories, following how such ideas of justice shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived. Class participation is required. Texts:
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300-LEVEL LITERATURE COURSES | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Murder on the Bestseller List | Syvertsen MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Murder on the Bestseller List | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Time-travelling Heroes of the Multiverse!: History and Cultural Difference in Modern Fiction | Godfrey MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Time-travelling Heroes of the Multiverse!: History and Cultural Difference in Modern FictionCourse Description: Since H.G. Wells’s unnamed time-traveler first rocketed forward to the distant future, time travel has been a favorite thought exercise for writers, day-dreamers, and artists. What does it mean to fantasize about the future and to reimagine the past? How does time travel undercut or complicate commonplace linear narratives, progress narratives, or coming of age stories? In this course, we’ll investigate the genre as a way into thinking about the fundamentals of literary analysis and methodology. We’ll combine readings of literary classics like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Marghanita Laski’s forgotten The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) with selections by modern sci-fi writers like M. John Harrison and N. K. Jemisin. We’ll also consider mixed-media additions to the canon, including the anime The Girl who Leapt Through Time (2006) and the movies Interstellar (2014) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Together, we will confront questions about cultural difference and blur the boundaries between “past,” “present,” and “future.” Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises. Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts, short analytical paper, final project. Texts Include: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-Longue; Virginia Woolf, Orlando (ISBN 0156031515); N.K. Jemisin, “Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows”; the Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once. | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Austen and Other Genres | Thompson TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Austen and Other GenresCourse Description: As a critical methods seminar for English majors and minors, English 300 will enhance your interpretive, analytic, and argumentative skills. To that end, this class explores new ways to read Jane Austen in both her historical context and our contemporary moment. Whether you’re a stranger to Austen or a devoted Janeite, this class will give you surprising insights into her connections to the social, domestic, and aesthetic movements of her time. We will pair three Austen texts with three earlier novels: Pride and Prejudice and Mary Hays’s radical feminist novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799); Emma and Daniel Defoe’s criminal autobiography Moll Flanders (1722); Northanger Abbey and the mass-popular Gothic novel A Sicilian Romance (1790) by Ann Radcliffe. We’ll accompany each pairing with critical texts in contemporary feminism and queer studies; narratology; and genre studies (on the Gothic). The class will conclude by looking at some contemporary TV or film renderings of Austen (e.g., Bridgerton, Clueless, or Pride and Prejudice). Attendance at first class meeting is mandatory. Required texts:
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English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: “Crazy Rich Asians”: From Type to Stereotype | Xu TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: “Crazy Rich Asians”: From Type to StereotypeCourse Description: It is difficult to imagine an Asian figure in American culture without first recalling a stereotype of it: the yellow peril, the model minority, the inscrutable Orient, and, more recently, the crazy rich. This course will think about how we read literature and film by focusing on these figures and how they’re represented. How do we understand the historical transformation of the representation of Asians in American culture past and present? How can focusing on “types” and “stereotypes” assist us in thinking about how we read and interpret literature and film more generally? How do we explain and grapple with the seeming inevitability of types and stereotypes in cultural representations? The main literary texts we will be reading are Maxine Hong Kinston’s classic novel Woman Warrior, Peter Hessler’s nonfiction River Town, and Yiyun Li’s short stories collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. We will also analyze the 2018 romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon M. Chu. | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Fans and Fictions: Adaptation as Critique in Literature and Film | Comerford TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Fans and Fictions: Adaptation as Critique in Literature and FilmCourse Description: Though we often think of fan fiction as an advent of our contemporary moment, fan fiction extends at least as far back as the eighteenth century. Fans and fictions have increasingly shaped the way we encounter literature, animating works from the past with different agendas, desires, and needs that speak to the contemporary moment. This course explores texts and the adaptations they inspire. We will think about how adaptations not only comment on and critique earlier texts, but also how they might inspire us to encounter the original text in new ways. How might we regard adaptations as standalone works, with lives and afterlives of their own? From modern reworkings of Shakespeare to critical retellings of Austen, adaptations ask us to consider how familiar stories might be leveraged to address different audiences. We will also explore some related concerns around fan fiction including fandoms and fan culture, the death of the author, and approaching work created by problematic authors. Texts May Include: William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1594) and Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J. M. Coetzee, Foe (1986), Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jo Baker, Longbourn (2013), and Fire Island (2022), Jane Austen, Emma (1815) and Clueless (1995), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) and Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (1992), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Howard’s End and Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005), Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl (2013). | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Representing the Nonhuman | Shannon TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Representing the NonhumanCourse Description: How do we “capture” nonhuman phenomena within literary forms and genres that are designed (mainly) by humans? As an introduction to critical methods in textual studies, our seminar will think about how representation works across species and how it can grasp the relationship between animate creatures and their elemental surroundings. These habitats will range from literal fields, forests, skies, and oceans to the wily conceptual terrain of “Nature” itself. By focusing on human representations of animals and the nonhuman more broadly, this seminar delves into the question of how literary re-presentations of the natural world work – this is both a practical and a philosophical question. To address it, we’ll analyze the raw materials and core resources of the written word: close observation and description; perspective, point-of-view, and matters of voice; anthropomorphizing and/or animalizing imagery; and the mind-bendingly disparate frameworks of narrative, human, evolutionary, and planetary time. In return, our readings will also trouble assumptions about how exclusively “human” we humans ever really are when we write. Our syllabus will include classics of nature writing and environmental literature, even as we push the boundaries of what is “literary” in the first place. With various contextualizing materials (from Aesop’s fables to poetry to legal verdicts) provided by the instructor, our main texts will be selected from the following major works: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Michel de Montaigne’s Essays; sections of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” and “Wild Apples”; Octavia Hill’s “Open Spaces”; Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography; Rachel Carson’s “The Road of the Hawks” and Under the Sea-Wind; J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip; Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto and Staying with the Trouble; Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature; Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus; and Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. | ||||
English 310 | Studies in Literary Genres: The English Country House and Far Beyond (Pre 1830/Identities, Communities & Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Thompson TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 310 Studies in Literary Genres: The English Country House and Far Beyond (Pre 1830/Identities, Communities & Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: If you’ve watched Saltburn or the Netflix series Bridgerton, you know that the English estate has undergone some cultural revision. No longer the opulent backdrop of period drama, the country house is the site of reckonings with the history of England’s overseas empire, traffic in captive people, and flagrantly unequal distribution of wealth and power. In this class, we will trace the ongoing force of English literary refigurations of landed property initially tied to the largesse and power of the lord of the manor. We’ll first explore the early modern country house poem, where the landed estate serves as a locus of pastoral abundance and naturalized social, architectural, and ecological order. But as we will discover, cracks appear in this vision. Moving forward, we encounter the idealized country house contested from the vantage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels whose narrators and protagonists include servants, colonial subjects, and witnesses to family decadence financed by slavery. We’ll turn to twentieth-century texts that claim the decaying country house as source of ghostly national nostalgia. Our final unit will engage public revision (in print, monuments, and activism) of the estate as “English Heritage.” We will watch at least one episode of Bridgerton (Season 1, 2020) and the film Saltburn (2023) to assess recent popular re-representations of the landed estate. Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on three short essays and one group presentation. Old major requirements: ICSP, pre-1830. New major requirements: GSE, pre-1830. Texts May Include: Country house poems may include: Aemelia Lanyer, “A Description of Cookham” (1611); Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616); Thomas Carew, “To Saxham” (1640); Robert Herrick, “A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton” (1648); Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House” (1651); Abraham Cowley, “On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House” (1668); John Dryden, “To My Honoured Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton in the County of Huntingdon, Esquire” (1699); Anne Finch, “Upon My Lord Winchilsea’s Converting the Mount in His Garden to a Terrace” (c. 1703); Mary Leapor, “Crumble-Hall” (1751); John Agard, “Upon Revisiting Mansfield Park” (2006). Novels and short stories may include: Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (1762); Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847); Arthur Canon Doyle, “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” (1891); Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938); Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Isabel Colgate, The Shooting Party (1980); Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day (1989). | ||||
English 311 | Studies in Poetry: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Post 1830) | Froula MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 311 Studies in Poetry: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Post 1830)Course Description: “Make It New”: Ezra Pound borrows this slogan from an ancient Chinese emperor’s bath tub: “As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new.” But what is "it"? In our seminar we'll explore poetry as an art of words, voice, song, speech, story; of describing, expressing, transforming, translating, and revealing worlds visible and invisible; of hiddenness and discovery, paradox and mystery, epiphany and surprise, the everyday, the extraordinary, and the otherworldly. Reading selected poems and related prose texts on poetics by Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H. D., Williams, Bishop, Hughes, Brooks, and other poets both earlier and later, we'll see how particular poems emerge in creative dialogue with other poems across historical moments, locales, languages, cultural surrounds, and sensibilities. We'll practice close reading, analytic, and comparative skills to discuss, appreciate, and write about the formal and linguistic virtuosity by which poets create poems-as-worlds that enrich the resources of English poetry: verse lines and forms, sound patterns (meter, rhythm, music, tone), diction, rhetorical tropes, figurative language, personae, voices. We’ll visit our Special Collections Library to learn about print culture and to see first editions of some of the works we'll be studying. We’ll conclude with a Poetry Fest for which everyone will choose and read, recite, or perform a poem for the class. | ||||
English 312 | Studies in Drama: Men Dancing (Historical Breadth Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Manning W 9:30-11:50 | ||
English 312 Studies in Drama: Men Dancing (Historical Breadth Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: This course examines men dancing in diverse genres onstage and onscreen—blackface and Black minstrelsy, ballet and tap, modern and postmodern dance. The inquiry will focus on the intersection between gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality in theatrical performances from the early 19th through the early 21st century. Readings will be complemented by visual documentation and by visits from guest artists. | ||||
English 312 | Studies in Drama: Staging America (Post 1830) | Davis, N. TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 312 Studies in Drama: Staging America (Post 1830)Course Description: This class examines U.S. playwriting as not only an august and expansive tradition but also, for the last 100 years, a crucial medium by which production teams, public audiences, and private readers have co-participated in critical self-reflection on what “America” means to them/us. After a three-week unit devoted to plays and writers that hugely influenced the trajectory of U.S. drama (O’Neill, Bonner, Odets, Miller, Hansberry, Baraka, Kennedy), the bulk of the course privileges artists and texts that sustained but also stretched that legacy from the 1980s onward. These writers (Wilson, Kushner, Parks, Hwang, Baker, et al.) often take America as their explicit subject, in emblematic microcosm or as grand-scale macrocosm, in ways this course will unpack with curiosity and nuance. At the same time, we will sharpen our attention to the structures, semantics, styles, and stagecraft that make these plays such compelling objects of literary analysis as well as cultural-historical contemplation. Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Writing exercises (papers, practice exercises, annotations, etc.), possible group activities or presentations. Texts include:
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English 312 | Studies in Drama: Race in Motion (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Manning W 9:30-11:50 | ||
English 312 Studies in Drama: Race in Motion (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: How are bodies racialized on the US stage? How does performance make and unmake the meanings of bodies in motion? This seminar deploys readings and examples from dance studies to explore these questions from the years between the two world wars to the present. Artists studied include Michio Ito, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, José Limón, Eiko and Koma, Jawole Zollar, Bill T. Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, and Rosy Simas. | ||||
English 313 | Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century British Novel (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Law TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century British Novel (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Evaluation Method: Early 4-pp. paper (15%); final 6-7 pp. paper (35%); two seminar presentations (15% each), and quality of contribution to seminar discussion (10%). Texts Include: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Penguin 2006, ISBN 9780141441146; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Broadview, 9781551117515); Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford 9780199564095). | ||||
English 313 | Studies in Fiction: Love Triangles, Gender, and Desire (Post 1830) | Comerford TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Love Triangles, Gender, and Desire (Post 1830)Course Description: Fierce rivalries. Raging jealousies. Misplaced desires. Unequal affections. Love triangles have long been one of the most popular tropes in fiction. In this course, we will explore how triangulated love affairs mediate channels of desire. While love triangles may seem immediately legible as a conventional structure of the heterosexual marriage plot, things are not necessarily what they seem. From cases of mistaken identity to specters of missed opportunities, what happens when desire gets oriented, misdirected, or redirected in different ways? If love triangles seem to position the third person as antagonist, then what happens when the third person instead becomes a vector through which the other two characters may express their mutual desire? We will consider the queer undertones (or, in some cases, overtones) of triangulated relations and the ways in which love triangles often open up alternative narrative trajectories that make us consider what might have been or what could be. By attending to love triangles (and the occasional rectangle or pentagon), we will consider the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and race. Possible texts include Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1602), Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Bronte Wuthering Heights (1847), Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), du Maurier, Rebecca (1938). Possible films and shows include She’s the Man (2006), Past Lives (2023), and selected episodes of Bridgerton (2020). | ||||
English 323-1 | Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre 1830) | Phillips TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 323-1 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre 1830)Course Description: As we follow along the road to Canterbury, we not only hear a compendium of stories-both pious and irreverent-but we also meet a collection of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society: a noble knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a virtuous priest, a dainty nun and a domineering wife, who compete with one other, trading insults as well as tales. Over the course of the quarter, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience. Against and alongside this literary context, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, further shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales: How is a romance different, for example, when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife? We will be reading Chaucer's poem in the original Middle English. At the end of the quarter, we will give an in-class performance of one of the tales Teaching Method: Discussion and some lectures. Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $25) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions). | ||||
English 324 | Studies in Medieval Literature: Pagan and Christian in Medieval Literature (Pre 1830) | Newman MWF 10-10:50 | ||
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Pagan and Christian in Medieval Literature (Pre 1830)Course Description: Medieval culture was overwhelmingly Christian, but it was heir to several pre-Christian religions. Germanic paganism brought monsters, defiant heroism, and expectation of a coming “twilight of the gods,” while Celtic paganism supplied magical objects and mysterious Otherworld visitors. Contrary to popular belief, the Church did not suppress the use of pagan sources, but medieval writers transformed the materials they inherited, producing sophisticated texts that present a Christian point of view layered above tantalizing and elusive pagan subtexts. In this class we’ll look at (1) the Old English world of Beowulf with an apocalyptic novel based on it, Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife; (2) three tales about magical shape-shifting characters: Marie de France’s Yonec, The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and (3) the romance of the Holy Grail—a Celtic magical cauldron that evolved into a prized Christian relic. The class may also include film adaptations such as the comedy classic, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and David Lowery’s imaginative retelling of The Green Knight (2021). Texts:
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English 324 | Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre 1830) | Phillips MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre 1830)Course Description: What are the Seven Deadly Sins, how did they come into being, and how do can we make sense of the role they continue to play the 21st century popular imagination? What is the nature of moral and ethical transgression: is sin a disposition, a thought, an action, or an external force? And how does one make amends for such transgression? Over the course of the quarter, we will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the shifting representations of sin, secrets and confession that pervade late medieval literature. Analyzing the texts of preachers and poets alike, we will investigate the ways in which medieval writers adapted their depictions of sin to address the major social and political issues of their day, highlighting certain sins while hiding others as the moment required. Along with sin, we will examine the practice of confession in its historical and literary contexts, discovering how priests, poets, and playwrights exploited and transformed this pastoral tool for narrative and social ends. While giving students with a background in confessional practice and the discourse of Seven Deadly Sins, this course will also provide an introduction to some of the major works of the late Middle Ages: Dante’s Purgatory, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Everyman. We will also explore how David Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en reworks these medieval concepts for a contemporary audience. Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lecture Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation are required; discussion board posts; two papers, short assignments and an oral presentation. Textbooks will be available at: Norris Center Book Store. [Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. II: Purgatory. ISBN 978-0140444421 (approximate cost: $16); other readings will be available on Canvas] | ||||
English 324 | Studies in Medieval Literature: Queering Medieval Romance (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Newman MWF 11-11:50 | ||
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Queering Medieval Romance (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)Course Description: Medieval romance famously celebrated “courtly love”—the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite—or perhaps because of—the Church’s misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender identities. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women identify as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by male affection. In Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, two girls (one passing as male) fall in love and marry, while in the life of the transgender saint Marina, a woman who becomes a monk is accused of fathering a child. In Silence, a 13th-century French romance, the “silenced” hero/ine is born female but raised male; as a knight, he is charged with homosexuality after rejecting the queen’s advances. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we’ll turn to ambiguous desires, reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Amis and Amiloun, and selections from The Romance of the Rose. We’ll end with Chaucer’s “other masterpiece,” the magnificent Troilus and Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the ambiguous, bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation. Texts May Include:
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English 331 | Renaissance Poetry: John Milton's Work in Context (Pre 1830) | Schwartz TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 331 Renaissance Poetry: John Milton's Work in Context (Pre 1830)Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time. “There are three reasons for Milton’s remaining a controversial figure: he gave such eloquent answers to questions that still divide mankind; he made his own character an issue in the public causes for which he fought; and as a poet he did not detach himself from his imaginative creation.” James Holly Hanford Texts will include either: The Complete Poetry and Major Prose of John Milton, ed John Rumrich, Stephen Fallon and William Kerrigan (Modern Library) 0679642536 OR Paradise Lost, ed Gordon Teskey 0393617084 | ||||
English 338 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Brave New Worlds (Pre 1830) | West TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 338 Studies in Renaissance Literature: Brave New Worlds (Pre 1830)Course Description: More than once between 1500 and 1700, people in early modern England learned of a new world—the Americas after the voyages of Columbus in 1492 and of Ralegh in 1585, the moons of Earth and of Jupiter observed through the telescopes of Harriot and Galileo by telescope in 1609, the intimate worlds of microscopy explored by Hooke in 1665. As their worlds widened, deepened, and multiplied, English writers and thinkers invented new worlds of their own: fairy realms, enchanted islands, kingdoms of darkness, lunar landscapes, perfect polities and nightmare ones, imagined worlds that could critique of their own or propose and explore things that seemed impossible in it. Despite being avowed as fictions, usually, these speculative worlds claimed value, seriousness, and even kinds of truth through the extravagance of their fantasies, while also asserting their pleasurableness and recreativity. In this class we will explore some of these worlds of imagination and how and why early modern writers crafted them, including Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, as well as related works on exploration and science by Columbus, Cortes, Galileo, and others. | ||||
English 338 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Queering the Crown: Marlowe, Shakespeare, and their Afterlives (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Masten TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 338 Studies in Renaissance Literature: Queering the Crown: Marlowe, Shakespeare, and their Afterlives (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: How can we think about the transhistorical nature of queerness in English culture? Moving from the Renaissance to the present, the course follows the literary careers of two influential tragedies -- Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s adaptation and rewriting of it in Richard II -- to think about the representation of queer kingship over time. Together we’ll analyze theatrical revolutionary Bertolt Brecht’s landmark early twentieth-century adaptation of Marlowe’s play and its “alienation effect,” twentieth-century productions and films of Marlowe tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman’s), and twenty-first century rewritings, including a companion play that incorporates figures in/against queer culture from Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk, and Julie Andrews to Margaret Thatcher (Tom Stuart’s play After Edward). We’ll conclude with the recent gay rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings will delve into the history of sexuality, queer readership and book history, and theories of dramatic adaptation and performance. Teaching method: Discussion and mini-lecture. | ||||
English 339 | Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Shannon TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 339 Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)The course will explore Shakespeare’s troubled sense that humankind, alone among all creaturely kinds, does not quite “belong” to nature. We’ll assess how his understanding of “Nature” and our relation to it changes over time and how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean “green worlds” first arose to describe the retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. In Shakespearean comedy, a removal to the green world (getting ourselves “back to Nature”) counteracts one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up in a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human social order defined and established, and from what threatening “laws of nature” is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare’s premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure – to both hard weather and our own worst instincts? This inquiry into Shakespeare’s environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the longer philosophical history of wondering what it means to be human. Teaching Method: lecture and discussion Evaluation Method: sustained and substantive class participation, occasional assignments, and two short papers. Texts may include: Readings will center on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. The recommended editions are from the affordable Pelican series: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ISBN: 978014312858; As You Like It, ISBN: 9780143130239; King Lear, ISBN: 9780143128557; and The Winter’s Tale, ISBN: 9780143131748. Contextual readings in early modern genres, pastoral poetry, natural history, theology, and political thought will be supplied by the instructor, as will twentieth- and twenty-first-century materials re-examining humanity’s place in – or agency over – Nature. | ||||
English 339 | Studies in Shakespeare: Hamlet: That is the Question (Pre 1830) | Masten MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 339 Studies in Shakespeare: Hamlet: That is the Question (Pre 1830)Teaching Method: Seminar with some mini-lectures. Evaluation Method: Thorough preparation and participation in our discussions; essays. Texts include: Shakespeare, Hamlet (Arden edition, ed. Thompson and Taylor, ISBN 9781472518385, this edition only); Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (ISBN 9780802126214); critical, theoretical, and historical articles. | ||||
English 340 | Studies in 18th-Century Literature: Marriage Plots Before Jane Austen (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Thompson TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 340 Studies in 18th-Century Literature: Marriage Plots Before Jane Austen (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Before Jane Austen means that we will not be reading Austen! Prepare yourself for novels you will like just as much, or even better. Required Texts:
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English 344 | 18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Soni MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)Texts include:
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English 353 | Studies in Romantic Literature: Romanticism & Revolution (Pre 1830) | Soni MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 353 Studies in Romantic Literature: Romanticism & Revolution (Pre 1830)Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Class participation (20%), midterm paper 6-8pp (20%), final paper 7-9pp (20%), midterm and final exam (20% each). Texts Include: Burke, Enquiry; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution; Rousseau, Second Discourse; Wollstonecraft, Vindication; Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience; Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Blake, America and Europe; Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads; Wordsworth, Prelude; Shelley, Prometheus Unbound; Shelley, Mask of Anarchy; Shelley, Ode to the West Wind; Shelley, Triumph of Life; Shelley, Hellas; Shelley, Defence of Poetry; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. | ||||
English 357 | 19th Century British Fiction: Decadent, Degenerate and Gothic: Aesthetic Hedonism in Victorian Literature and Modern Culture (Post 1830) | Godfrey MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 357 19th Century British Fiction: Decadent, Degenerate and Gothic: Aesthetic Hedonism in Victorian Literature and Modern Culture (Post 1830)Course Description: It’s hard to imagine modern alternative culture—the queer aesthetics of the goth 1980s, the drugged-up industrial 1990s, or even Matty Healy of The 1975’s swaggering claim that his style is “black and expensive”—without its roots in the fashionable decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. In 1891, four years before his trial for sodomy and indecency, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked the Victorian public with its seductive exploration of queer sensuality, decadence, indulgence, and drug use. What is it about Wilde’s rallying cry of “art for art’s sake” that was so transgressive? As a survey of nineteenth-century decadent and aesthetic literature, this course unpacks the seedier, darker side of the stiffly corseted Victorians and their cultural afterlives. We will explore key canonical works by authors including Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and recover important aesthetic fantasies by lesser-known writers. Over the course of this class, students will build a foundational understanding of aesthetic theory and learn to interrogate texts through queer and postcolonial frameworks. In addition to reading key Victorian texts, students will unpack Romantic precedents and the ways that these distinctly nineteenth-century preoccupations with decay, degeneracy, and transgression influenced and shaped counterculture through the present day. Teaching Methods: seminar discussion, short lectures. Evaluation Methods: Participation, presentation on a selection from the decadent magazine The Yellow Book, one analytical essay, final project. Texts Include: Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Suicide Club” (1878); Vernon Lee, “Oke of Okehurst” (1881); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); selected episodes of What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and Interview with the Vampire (2022); selections from alternative music criticism, fashion magazines, and zines from the 1990s-present. Texts will be available at: The Picture of Dorian Gray (ISBN 978-0393696875) at Norris, all others on Canvas. | ||||
English 365 | Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Sexualities (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay) | Mwangi MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Sexualities (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay)Course Description: This course responds to shifts in paradigms of gender and sexuality in writing from the global south. Should we use western terms (e.g., "gay" and "lesbian") to describe sexual practices in the global south? What are the main theoretical issues in postcolonial studies, and how would the positions change if we factored in gender and sexuality? How are sex relations used as an allegory of the national condition? How does sexuality intersect with other postcolonial concerns (e.g., environmental crises). What are the attitudes toward inter-species sex among postcolonial writers? How best do we integrate activist positions in postcolonial concerns? Authors to be discussed include Jessica Hagedorn, Witi Ihimaera, H. Nigel Thomas, Nawal el Saadawi, Chris Abani, K. Sello Duiker, Suniti Namjoshi, and Lawrence Scott. We will consider postcolonial theoretical statements by a wide range of thinkers (e.g., Keguro Macharia, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Gopinath, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe etc.). Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, debates, role play, one-on-one meetings, and small-group discussions. Evaluation Method: A 6-page paper, Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Texts May Include:
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English 365 | Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Noir (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay) | Johnson TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Noir (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay)Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method(s): 1 short and 1 longer interpretive essays; active participation in class discussion; 1 group research presentation. Possible Texts include: Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four; Didier Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam; Sonallah Ibrahim, That Smell; Donia Maher/Ganzeer, The Apartment in Bab al-Louk; Adania Shibli, Minor Detail. Texts will be available at: bookshop.org. | ||||
English 365 | Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Inhuman Conditions (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay) | Nadiminti TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Inhuman Conditions (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay)Reading List:
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English 366 | Studies in African American Literature: The Metropolis and Contemporary African American Culture (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) | Wilson TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: The Metropolis and Contemporary African American Culture (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)Course Description: Throughout the twentieth century, the terms “urban” and “black America” became so intimately connected that they are often used as synonyms. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production. Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the “push and pull” factors that prompted the Great Migration and the social forces that have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones; artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music may include hip hop artists from Public Enemy to Common. Critics may include W.E.B. DuBois, St. Clare Drake, Raymond Williams, Mike Davis, and Mary Pattillo. Teaching Methods: Lecture. Evaluation Methods: 2 essays; in-class Final Examination. Texts include:
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English 366 | Studies in African American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) | Spigner TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)Considering the buzz word “mindfulness,” this undergraduate course explores the extended tradition of spiritual, contemplative, and ancient practices influencing Black letters since the 19th century. Alluding clear and consistent definition, “mindfulness” is an umbrella term that includes contemplative practices, embodiment, transcendentalism, and many other lines of spiritual and secular strategies for survival and more. This course will consider how stillness, concentration, and focus on interiority provide alternative and complementary strategies for Black survival and thriving. We will read works by Johnson and Toomer, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Paule Marshall, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Zora Neale Hurston. Additionally, we will consider the theory and criticism of Howard Thurman, Kevin Quashie, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others along with Buddhist, Vedic, and West African religious texts and studies to consider the many sides of a Black mindfulness literary tradition. We will contemplate the theory and praxis of meditation, transcendence, tantra, Dharma, ritual, and possession. Additionally, we will create and execute our own mindfulness exercises and consider how they may or may not support various politics of Blackness in our current moment. This course will require active and enthusiastic participation by everyone in the class. There will be four response papers/discussion board writing assignments, group presentations, and ongoing experimentation with mindfulness, and a final project that will engage writing as well as other media. Journaling is highly recommended for this course, as well. | ||||
English 366 | Studies in African American Literature: Black Joy (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) | Mann TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Joy (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)Course Description: In this class, students will analyze Black literature and popular culture to understand the cultural work of joy, especially in the face of antiblackness. Reading across a range of texts, including poetry, short and long fiction, film, music, and food, students will analyze how joy emerges alongside a other social feelings—despair, rage, and hope to name a few. In addition, we will take up questions that have formed the core of Black study in the 20th century including 1) How do Black people “theorize” in their everyday life and cultural production (Christian 1987); 2) What cultural forms emerge to respond to and undermine antiblackness (Carpio 2008; Scott 2022); 3) What role does literature play in the relation of Black feeling and the creation of Black life worlds (Hurston 1928; Lorde 1978; Quashie 2022; Nash 2024). Throughout, we will be especially attentive to how gender and sexuality work in tandem with race to contribute to the emotional lifeworlds of Black people. Evaluation Method: Two short papers and one final project. Texts May Include: Tee Franklin, Bingo Love; Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor. | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Empire War Worldliness (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Froula MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Empire War Worldliness (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Reading Joyce's Ulysses (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation) | Froula TTh 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Reading Joyce's Ulysses (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation) | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Women Writing Worldliness (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Froula TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Women Writing Worldliness (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | ||||
English 371 | American Novel: Big Books: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Post 1830) | Grossman TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 371 American Novel: Big Books: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Post 1830)One can find only a few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, more ambitious books than Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, the book is long, and part of our work will be to consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading a big book. But Moby-Dick is also big in another sense: it has proven to be a hugely influential and profoundly consequential novel. Indeed, one cannot really understand U.S. literary, cultural, and political history if one has not come to terms with its story and the issues it engages. Our work will be, like Captain Ahab, to take on Melville’s Leviathan better to understand the worlds the novel has helped to shape—including, by no means incidentally, our own. Teaching Method: Mostly Discussion. Possible student oral presentations. Evaluation method: It is essential to keep up with the reading and there may be occasional quizzes to gauge compliance. Possible short writing assignments. Two longer papers (8-10 pages each). Texts: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (first published in 1851), and a range of reviews and critical essays, including film adaptations. Everyone MUST purchase and read ONLY THIS Norton Critical third edition of the novel, edited by Hershel Parker; ISBN: 978-0-393-28500-0. | ||||
English 374 | Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Woven Being: Literature and Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Wisecup MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 374 Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Woven Being: Literature and Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)Anchored by four visual artists collaborating with the Block—Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe), Nora Lloyd (Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi)—the course places these artists’ work in conversation with literatures by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Susan Power, Simon Pokagon, and more. Students will gain skills in art historical and literary research practices, exhibition design, archival research, the transcription and interpretation of historical materials, and more. Substantial class time will be spent at the Block engaging with the exhibit and with featured artists. Teaching Method: seminar discussions, hands-on workshops, classes in the Block Museum, conversations with artists and guest speakers. Required Texts
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English 375 | Studies in Asian American Literature: Interracial Encounters (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) | Huang MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 375 Studies in Asian American Literature: Interracial Encounters (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)Course Description: The United States is set to become a majority minority country by 2045. What are the many promises—and what are the many pitfalls—of interracial encounters, and what do they reveal about the country writ large? How do minority writers understand and narrate each other? This class brings contemporary African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literature into relation with a focus on interracial dynamics. By examining complex topics from Black/Asian conflict during the 1992 LA Riots to the shared border migrations of indigenous and Latinx subjects, we will develop an analytical framework attuned to how American racial identity has been differentially and unevenly constructed through history, culture, and politics. A central goal of the course is decentering whiteness as the primary locus of literary analysis, to allow for more nuanced interpretations of topics such as U.S. imperialism, mixed race identity, activism, labor history, and immigration. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of multiethnic American literature by considering a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and film. Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method(s): Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay. Texts include:
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English 375 | Studies in Asian American Literature: Techno-Orientalism (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity) | Huang MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 375 Studies in Asian American Literature: Techno-Orientalism (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity)Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method: Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay.
Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available on Canvas. | ||||
English 377 | Topics in Latinx Literature: Latinx and Indigenous Literatures of the U.S.-Mexico Border (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) | Rodriguez Pliego MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 377 Topics in Latinx Literature: Latinx and Indigenous Literatures of the U.S.-Mexico Border (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)Course Description: The U.S.-Mexico border was first envisioned in writing when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) imagined the course that a new dividing line would run: from the Gulf of Mexico through the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande until the town called “Paso,” west toward the Gila River and onto the Pacific Ocean. This line would mark not only land and water but also racial and ethnic formations. Indigenous nations saw their territories split in half by a border that considered their homelands wilderness. Mexicans who found themselves north of the imagined line had to grapple with a new vocabulary to define themselves as they lost their lands to settlers. Those who ended up south of the border attempted to reconcile their recent independence from Spain with the loss of half of the country as they, too, tried to piece together a narrative for their new identity. This course will walk students through the text and maps of the 1848 treaty and the literary works that continue to process its aftershocks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Some of the authors we will read include Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, and Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. We will learn about the discourse of Manifest Destiny, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary literature from Latinx, Indigenous and Mexican writers who continue to tell the stories about their ancestral lands, their migration journeys, and their encounters with a line that became both border and borderlands. Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based. Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final paper, creative mapping project, attendance and participation. Texts include: Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (9781908276421). Short stories, poetry and excerpts from Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ofelia Zepeda, Cristina Henríquez, Tommy Orange, and others. Texts will be available at: Signs Preceding the End of the World will be at the Northwestern bookstore and all other materials will be uploaded to Canvas. | ||||
English 377 | Topics in Latinx Literature: Chicanx and Mexican Feminisms in Art and Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Rodriguez Pliego TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 377 Topics in Latinx Literature: Chicanx and Mexican Feminisms in Art and Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based. Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final paper, personal essay, attendance and participation. Texts include: Short stories, visual art, poetry and essays from Cherie Moraga, Amparo Dávila, Leonora Carrington, Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Guadalupe Nettel, and Wendy Trevino. Texts will be available at: | ||||
English 378 | Studies in American Literature: The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s (Post 1830) | Savage TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 378 Studies in American Literature: The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s (Post 1830)Course Description: In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. “ During the cultural crisis of Modernism, when a variety of intellectual revolutions and the unprecedented carnage of the Great War suggested that Western civilization was either a sham or doomed, writers and other artists created new literary forms. Their aesthetic innovation often depicted art and love (or sex) as parallel (or contradictory) ways to create meaning the wasteland of Modernity. In this class, we will read and discuss canonical, lesser-known, and popular texts of ‘20s in order to explore how these revolutionary writers saw love and art in their own time and, maybe, in the future. Teaching Method: Lecture & Discussion. Evaluation Method: Participation in class discussion; short one-page responses to each text; plus a variety of options for critical papers, ranging from several short argumentative essays to one long research paper. Texts include: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, Boyle’s Plagued by the Nightingale and The First Lover and Other Stories, Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Dos Passo’s Manhattan Transfer, as well as Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. | ||||
English 381 | Literature and Medicine: Underlying Conditions: Race, Health, Medicine (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Huang MW 2-3:20 | ||
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Underlying Conditions: Race, Health, Medicine (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)Course Description: Race is socially constructed—but how is it medically constructed? This seminar surveys Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous American literary and cultural production to question how “healthy” bodies in the United States are constituted, and in turn, what these racialized processes reveal about the essential role of race in producing a body politic. Concomitantly, we will also read scholarship from ethnic studies that charts racialized comorbidities, pre-existing conditions, and environmental racism, as well as work that expands our understanding of race’s imbrications with medical paradigms such as eugenics, genetics, informed consent, reproductive rights, disability, mental illness, and, of course, pandemics. In addition to excavating the long histories and present problems surrounding medical racism, another goal of this course is tracking the medicalization of race itself. As such, we will challenge commonly held perceptions of bodies, pain, ability, and the constitution of equitable futures. We will also supplement our reading with guest lectures from medical professionals working at the intersection of race and medicine. Students will take away from the class a deeper grasp of the discourse surrounding race and medicine, as well as how to deploy this knowledge in their critical interpretations of cultural production. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do texts by writers of color challenge normative assessments of what constitutes health and wellness? How do we ethically consider race and medicine without resorting to postracial idealism? And to what extent can creative experiments generated in art and literature re-envision the medicalized terms under which race is understood? Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Methods: Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay. Texts include: Please verify before purchasing. Assigned primary texts will likely include pieces such as Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming, Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Oscar Cásares’s Brownsville, Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told, Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, I Am Legend, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Reservoir Dogs, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. | ||||
English 381 | Literature and Medicine: Literature of Plague and Pandemic (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) | Evans TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Literature of Plague and Pandemic (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)Course readings are divided into three units: medieval and early modern Europe, from Boccaccio to Daniel Dafoe; literature of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, including Tony Kushner and Sapphire; and a final unit on contemporary literature, featuring presentiments of and responses to COVID-19 from Ling Ma, Carmen María Machado, and Michael Cunningham. Assignments will include collective annotations on Canvas, podcast episodes (produced in small groups), Canvas Discussions, and a final essay or creative project. *As well as other crises—political, financial, moral, ethical, educational, racial, economic, and so on—but there are only ten weeks in the quarter. **The primary sources for this course were almost all composed in English; those originally composed in another language have been translated so widely as to occupy space in the Anglophone canon despite their origins in another linguistic tradition.Texts:
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English 381 | Literature & Medicine: Disability Studies (Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Chaskin TTh 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 381 Literature & Medicine: Disability Studies (Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | ||||
English 382 | Literature and Law: Ideas of Justice (Pre 1830) | Schwartz TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 382 Literature and Law: Ideas of Justice (Pre 1830)Course Description: This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The focus will be the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Shakespeare, and a modern work by Melville will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But we will also heed how literature itself offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived. Texts Include:
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English 383 | Special Topics in Theory: Black Feminist Theory (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) | Bey TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 383 Special Topics in Theory: Black Feminist Theory (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)Course Description: This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. Rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black “women’s”—theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond “cis” and “trans,” but more specifically we will be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity, of our social world. | ||||
English 384 | Studies in Literature and the Environment: Climate Change Literature (Post 1830) | Dimick MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 384 Studies in Literature and the Environment: Climate Change Literature (Post 1830)Course Description: This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers’ visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can’t grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include both award-winning texts and relatively unknown books, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers’ voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse. | ||||
English 384 | Studies in Literature and the Environment: Voices of Environmental Justice (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) | Dimick MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 384 Studies in Literature and the Environment: Voices of Environmental Justice (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) | ||||
English 385 | Studies in Literature and Culture: Romantic Obsession, Colonial Possession: Romancing 19th and 20th-Century Colonial Literature (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnational & Textual Circulation) | Godfrey MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Romantic Obsession, Colonial Possession: Romancing 19th and 20th-Century Colonial Literature (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnational & Textual Circulation)Course Description: Pocahontas and John Smith are making goofy, animated eyes at each other as British colonials push further into the New England interior. Outlander’s Claire and Jamie steal passionate moments during the fight for Scottish independence. And when he died, David Ochterlony—British Resident to the Mughal Court in the early 1800s—left behind thirteen Indian wives. This course asks: how and why are the tropes of possessive romance so often refigured in the colonial context? What can tracing these affects, fetishes, and motifs allow us to uncover about the emotional resonances of imperialist discourse and resistance? After grounding ourselves in classic tales of romantic obsession, we will map these romantic forms onto larger concepts of empire. Edward Said described the Orientalist impulse as “fatally tend[ing] toward the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.” To trace these fatal, obsessive drives to possess, we will move from classic novels like Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and George Orwell’s Burmese Days to shorter texts such as Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star and V.S. Naipaul’s “In a Free State.” Films include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. This course will also include readings in postcolonial and affect theory. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, group exercises. Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts, short analytical paper, final project. Texts include: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1973); Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977); Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993); Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). | ||||
English 385 | Studies in Literature and Culture: Mobsters, Desperados, and Samurai: Outlaws across Genres and Cultures (Post 1830) | Syvertsen MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Mobsters, Desperados, and Samurai: Outlaws across Genres and Cultures (Post 1830)Course Description: As iconic anime such as “Cowboy Beebop” and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan’s classic album “Liquid Swords” demonstrate, the outcast samurai, the desperado, and the mobster have been adapted and (re)purposed across national boundaries and divisions of genre. Japanese artists are experimenting with Western gunslingers at the same time as American rappers are imagining themselves as the Ronin of Staten Island. What explains the persistent and global appeal of these rebellious figures? And how are they transformed as they move from one cultural context to another? Looking at a broad range of film, anime, manga, music, and literature from the 20th and 21st centuries, this course pays specific attention to the way outlaws associated with a particular culture or genre are adapted beyond their original formulations to express new social realities. From the samurai in Paris to the highwaymen of Neo-Tokyo, we will attempt to understand how and why these icons of outlaw culture have been able to captivate audiences all over the planet. Teaching Method: Seminar style, discussion-based; small group exercises. Evaluation Method: Participation, two short analytical papers, final project. Texts to include: “Cowboy Beebop” (selected episodes); GZA’s “Liquid Swords”; “Sukiyaki Western Django” (Dir. Takashi Miike); “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” (dir. Jim Jarmusch); “A Fistful of Dollars” (dir. Sergio Leone); “Cruel Gun Story” (dir. Takumi Furukawa); “City of God” (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund); “Le Samouraï” (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville); “Yojimbo” (dir. Akira Kurosawa). Texts will be made available through a combination of course reserves or Canvas. In the occasion a text is unavailable via the library, students may be required to purchase a temporary streaming subscription. | ||||
English 385 | Studies in Literature and Culture: Material Girls: Excess, Gender, and Commercialism in Pop Culture (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Godfrey MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Material Girls: Excess, Gender, and Commercialism in Pop Culture (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: As cultural critic Ariana Grande once said, “I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it!” Some hundred years before, Karl Marx warned about consumerism and alienation: “Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” Taking the iconic makeover scene as its guiding trope, this course considers the preoccupation with gender, sex, and the performance of femininity that lies at the heart of modern consumer culture. How are racial and gender boundaries constructed and enforced through consumerism? Can one truly purchase empowerment? Are there, in fact, some ways in which consumerism offers key avenues for self-fashioning, and the subversion of heteronormative gender performance? While this course begins in 1725 with Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and a brief survey of antecedents, the majority of texts are literature, film, and pop culture ephemera from the 1990s through today. Texts include Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Bong Joon-ho’s best picture winning Parasite, and Greta Gerwig’s latest satire Barbie. Students will engage with Marxism, feminism, gender theory, and sociological thought to construct a modern pop canon of consumption. According to interest, students will also be expected to track a vlogger/influencer of their choice in a pop culture journal. Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises. Evaluation Methods: Participation, pop culture journals, final project. Texts Include: Agnes Varda, Cleo from 5-7 (1961), Amy Heckerling, Clueless (1995), Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005), Sakaya Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016), Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019), Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers (2019), Channing Godfrey People, Miss Juneteenth (2020), and Greta Gerwig, Barbie (2023). Texts will be available at: Prep (ISBN 9780812972351) and Convenience Store Woman (ISBN 9780802129628) at Norris, all others on Canvas. | ||||
English 385 | Studies in Literature and Culture: Romantic Comedies Old and New (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Wolff MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Romantic Comedies Old and New (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: Does the popular genre of the romantic comedy continually renegotiate the social contract? Or do its “happy endings” continually impose the safety of closure on love’s wayward digressions? This course maps the literary and cinematic DNA of the contemporary “rom com,” from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the screwball comedies of 1930s Classical Hollywood to the 1990s blockbusters and the Netflix revolution. Along the way we may ask: What do the comedic conventions of Western classical drama, the medieval genre of “romance,” or the political aesthetics of Romanticism have to do with the romantic comedy as it exists today? The anarchic space of the “comedy” genre is often understood to house a subversive potential, using absurdism or satire to scramble power dynamics or to question social norms governing gender, sexuality, race, and family. One standout question for us will be: Does the romantic comedy threaten to tame the comedy genre’s subversive potential? Or does it promise to release its chaotic energies in ever renewed ways? Why do some literary forms and characters seem endlessly adaptable for different social subjects; and how does a screen actor’s “star text” or public image help direct the genre’s history? Students will regularly be asked to watch two movies in a single week. Evaluations are based on participation and preparation; writing several short papers, film analyses, & response posts; presentation on an episode, scene, or clip from a recent TV show that helps us understood the genre and its history; and a final exam. Required Texts (available for purchase & buyback at Bookends & Beginnings):
Note: All films and other readings will be available in “Reserves” on our Canvas site. Course Objectives:
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English 385 | Studies in Literature and Culture: Swindlers, Charlatans and Cheats: Literature of the Scam (Post 1830) | Syvertsen MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Swindlers, Charlatans and Cheats: Literature of the Scam (Post 1830)Course Description: Scams. Frauds. Cheats. Conspirators. Con-artists. Stories of fake heiresses, fraudulent corporations, pyramid schemes, and tech industry hucksters have captured audiences and sparked widespread fascination with deception in the modern world. However, the history of scamming and literature about scammers stretches far beyond the present day, with roots in classic works like Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (as well as the characters of Wicked!), and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. What explains this centuries long fascination with "the con"? This course will examine a range of literature, film, and TV shows that explore scams and scammers, tracing the cultural obsession with these stories. We will analyze both historic and contemporary views on scamming, interrogating what these tales reveal about human nature, power, and society. From the traditional cons of the past to the more complex digital and financial frauds of today we'll examine how these scams challenge our notions of trust and authenticity. Ultimately, we’ll question what our ongoing obsession with these figures says about the modern world, and why we seem so drawn to stories of manipulation, illusion, and moral ambiguity. Teaching Method: Discussion-based seminar. Evaluation Method: Mid-term presentation and final essay. Texts include: Herman Melville, The Confidence Man. Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore. | ||||
English 385 | Topics in Literature and Culture: Monsters: Real and Imagined (Post 1830) | Syvertsen MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 385 Topics in Literature and Culture: Monsters: Real and Imagined (Post 1830)Course Description: Whether fathoms beneath the ocean's surface or in the shadowy spots under our beds, supernatural beasts lurk just outside the range of our perceptions—until they emerge from concealment in order to wreak havoc! What drives our morbid fascination with these creatures? Drawing on insights from literary scholars who have explored the role of monsters in our cultural imaginary, this course aims to explore how monstrous depictions reflect the fears, desires, prohibitions, and prescriptions of the societies that create them. From the elusive “Grendel” in Beowulf to the colossal creatures of kaiju films like Godzilla, we will examine a diverse range of texts and films that have sent shivers down the spines of audiences across cultures for generations. As we explore these haunting and mysterious works, we will delve into questions such as: How have historical fears and anxieties been represented? Whom do we classify as "monstrous" and why? How do these representations either mirror or challenge prevailing cultural norms? And since real monsters don’t exist, what are we actually afraid of? Teaching Method: Seminar style, discussion based; small group exercises. Evaluation Method: Participation, two short analytical papers, final exam. Course Materials: Paperback editions of the novels (and one narrative poem) will be available for purchase at Norris or any other major book retailer. All other media will be made available through NU Library Course Reserves. The novels are as follows: Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (ISBN: 978-0393320978); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (ISBN: 978-0143131847); Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling (ISBN: 978-0446696166). | ||||
English 386 | Studies in Literature & Film: The Horror Film (Post 1830) | Hodge TTh 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: The Horror Film (Post 1830)Course Description: This course surveys the modern American horror film from Psycho in 1960 to the present. Likely films to be studied include Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Alien, Jennifer's Body, It Follows, Get Out, Midsommar, and others. The course will focus on one major feature-length film per week proceeding chronologically. We will analyze films textually; and we will also focus on acquiring critical vocabularies for discussing horror cinema. Major themes and questions will include not only the question of why it's fun (or not) to be scared but also what social and philosophical themes the genre of horror opens up in surprising and provocative ways (from gender, violence, and technology to childhood, evil, and race). To catalyze discussion we will read a variety of secondary sources by authors from a range of disciplines. Teaching Methods: Discussion and short lecture. Evaluation Method: Essays. Required Texts: None. | ||||
English 386 | Studies in Literature and Film: Women on the Verge: Obsession and Melodrama, 1900-1965 (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Stern MW 11-12:20 | ||
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Women on the Verge: Obsession and Melodrama, 1900-1965 (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Course Description: Women’s fiction and films of the classical Hollywood era, 1929-1950, feature heroines on the brink of madness, suicide, and death. Melodrama, a dramatic form that flourished in the nineteenth century and featured making virtue and evil visible, structures many of the works in our course. We will explore how and why female artistic production from the beginning of modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heyday of the “woman’s picture,” 1933-1950 featured women on the brink, rejecting the 19th-century “marriage plot,” for a different set of endings. We will discuss the significance of “the New Woman,” the last throes of the “cult of domesticity” and the work of arguably classic Hollywood’s greatest actress, Bette Davis, whose films took up those historical issues. Mode of evaluation will be two take-home close reading exams (2 pages total) and a final project on a Davis film not on the syllabus. Works may include The Awakening, Ethan Fromme, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Plum Bun, Quicksand, and The Street. Films may include Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, In This Our Life, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? | ||||
English 386 | Studies in Literature & Film: Adapting Women’s Stories for Modern Screens (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) | Davis, N. MW 9:30-10:50 | ||
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Adapting Women’s Stories for Modern Screens (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Writing exercises (papers, practice exercises, annotations, etc.), possible group presentations. Texts include: If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin (9780307275936); The Lost Daughter, Elena Ferrante (9781609457693); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson (9780452261136); Nomadland, Jessica Bruder (9780393356311); Passing, Nella Larsen (9780142437278); Poor Things, (Alasdair Gray); Valencia, Michelle Tea (9781580052382); Women Talking, Miriam Toews (9781635574340). | ||||
English 386 | Studies in Literature & Film: Besties and Frenemies: Representations of Female Friendship in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment/Identities, Communities & Social Practices) | Godfrey MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Besties and Frenemies: Representations of Female Friendship in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment/Identities, Communities & Social Practices)Teaching Methods: seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises. Evaluation Methods: Participation, presentation, short analytical paper, final project. Texts Include: Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy (1926); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929); Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding (1962); Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire (1993); David Mirkin, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997); Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (2020); selected episodes from Insecure (2016-2021) and Yellowjackets (2021). Texts will be available at: Passing (ISBN 9780593437841) and The Vanishing Half (ISBN 9780525536963) at Norris, all others on Canvas. | ||||
English 397 | Research Seminar: Indigenous Archives, Experimental Forms (Post 1830) | Wisecup TTh 2-3:20 | ||
English 397 Research Seminar: Indigenous Archives, Experimental Forms (Post 1830)Course Description: How do Indigenous writers use archives as a site of experimentation with artistic forms and media, from personal narrative to collage to performance to installation art? Indigenous writers have taken on the power and histories of archives—from national libraries like the Library of Congress to small, local historical societies to anthropological repositories—and made experimental literatures that challenge these institutions of power and memory. Examples include Pequot William Apess’s 19th century texts assembled out of extracts from newspapers and testimonies from other Pequots to the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s intervention in legal documents at the level of the page in Whereas to Deborah Miranda’s (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California) assemblage of personal and institutional histories in her memoir Bad Indians. This seminar pairs Indigenous literatures with archival theory and practice. We will develop our own archival practices by learning how to work with materials in Northwestern’s Special Collections, how to identify and interpret archival materials, how to develop a research question in conversation with archival research and theoretical readings, and how to develop a sustained argument with strong evidence. Teaching Method: seminar discussions, hands-on workshops, classes in Special Collections Required Texts:
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English 397 | Research Seminar: Cultures of Play | Soni MW 12:30-1:50 | ||
English 397 Research Seminar: Cultures of PlayCourse Description: From video games and board games to game shows and sports, games saturate our culture and shape who we are. Some scholars have even argued that games are replacing novels and film as the dominant form of cultural expression. Others view games as a frivolous and unproductive activity, not worthy of serious study. In this seminar, we will explore some of the fundamental questions about the relationship between games and human culture. Why do people play games? What kinds of meanings, cultural values and political agendas do games encode? Do games function differently than other cultural objects, such as films, novels or works of art? What might it mean to think of all culture and works of art as arising from a “play impulse”? And if this is the case, why do we trivialize game-playing? Is the ubiquity of games in our lives a specifically modern phenomenon? Is the advent of the digital age producing a gamification of everyday life? To investigate these questions, we will read a wide range of critical writing about the importance of play and games in human culture, by philosophers, novelists, literary critics, social scientists, historians and game designers. The class will give you an opportunity to develop a 12-15 page research paper that studies one particular game or aspect of game culture in-depth. In the process, you will learn how to frame a significant research question; articulate a research proposal; navigate scholarly databases and archives; evaluate sources; and, produce an annotated bibliography.
Texts include:
Texts will be available at: Norris University Bookstore | ||||
English 397 | Research Seminar: Divas of Classical Hollywood | Stern MW 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 397 Research Seminar: Divas of Classical Hollywood | ||||
English 397 | Research Seminar: Nineteenth-century U.S. Poetry and the History of the Book | Grossman TTh 11-12:20 | ||
English 397 Research Seminar: Nineteenth-century U.S. Poetry and the History of the BookAlongside this independent work, we will spend class meetings reading selectively from the vast archive of U.S. nineteenth-century poetry—an archive much more varied, in terms of both form and content, than the two poets who have most frequently come to represent it: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. In so doing, our classroom discussions will practice the same methodologies that each class member is undertaking with regard to a single book of poetry. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: No exams. As in all English 397 Research Seminars, the primary work of the course is the guided completion of a 15-page research paper, following the steps embedded in the syllabus. Readings will likely include these books and/or poets: William Cullen Bryant; Thomas Cole; Richard Henry Dana; Emily Dickinson; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Margaret Fuller; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Forest Leaves (c. 1848); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline (1847); Henry David Thoreau; Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855); William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798). | ||||
English 398-1 | Honors Seminar | Grossman Th 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 398-1 Honors SeminarCourse Description: Part of a two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration. | ||||
English 398-2 | Honors Seminar | Grossman Th 3:30-4:50 | ||
English 398-2 Honors SeminarCourse Description: Part of a two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration. | ||||
GRADUATE COURSES | ||||
English 403 | Writers Studies in Literature: PLOT IS LIFE: Autofiction, the Campus Novel, and Narrative Engines | Martinez T 2-4:50 | ||
English 403 Writers Studies in Literature: PLOT IS LIFE: Autofiction, the Campus Novel, and Narrative EnginesCourse Description: Plot is easy to define and difficult to execute. We know that narratives require some form of animating force, and we know that this force hinges on a series of causally-linked events, sometimes. Not always. In this seminar we’ll work through two disparate novel genres---autofiction and the campus novel---to tease out what makes for compelling story-telling energy: a political or cultural or personal crisis, a disconnect between public and private behavior, subgenres and their expectations (there’s a hilarious epistolary novel in our list, but there are also striking examples of science fiction, horror, the fantastical, and the crime novel), hunger, desire, hypocrisy, satire (academic and otherwise), setting, ticking clocks and timetables, and our direct lived experience. The latter is crucial: we find our most interesting plots in life. We’ll also be sure to connect these elements beyond the novel and into each of our genres: we’ll discover how these same narrative engines animate poetry and creative nonfiction. Our reading list will include Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lisa Tuttle's My Death, Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, and Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk. We’ll work through a considerable deal of material together, and we’ll help each other find ways to explore the possibilities of that material. But I’ll also ask each of you to bring in a short published piece that you love that we’ll all read; it should be a piece in your primary genre---a short story or a poem or an essay---that you feel best exploits one of the topics discussed. Every week, we will all (1) read a novel, (2) respond, (3), read the short piece chosen by one of our classmates. In addition, one of us will be responsible for a presentation on the chosen short piece. Teaching Methods: Discussion, critical and creative responses, presentations. Evaluation Methods: Discussion, critical and creative responses, presentations. Texts include: Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lisa Tuttle's My Death, Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, and Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk. Texts will be available at: campus bookstore & library reserves. | ||||
English 403 | Writers Studies in Literature | Hernández Th 2-4:50 | ||
English 403 Writers Studies in LiteratureCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 410 | Introduction to Graduate Study | Mwangi F 10-12:50 | ||
English 410 Introduction to Graduate StudyCourse Description: This seminar explores the various approaches to literary analysis in the 21st-century academy, including the pitfalls to avoid when using certain theories and methods of reading. Examining the history of English as a discipline and the emergence of different methods of analysis, we will discuss both established and emergent critical approaches and assess their applicability in the reading of a particular set of texts and in engaging different audiences. Of particular interest to us is the future of humanistic knowledge, research and writing practices in the neo-liberal academy. How do creative writing, literary theory, and literary research inform one another? In what ways can we be innovative and “marketable” in the neo-liberal realities of our times while remaining true to the core values of humanistic education? In a world that is inundated with theoretical approaches, how do we choose a methodology that best suits our goals? How can we enfold activism in our research and maintain academic standards? The main aim of the course is to equip ourselves with skills to handle different types of texts—activist, theoretical, creative etc. —in the classroom, during research, and in public-facing engagements. At the end of the course, the student should be able to analyze a primary literary text (or a set of texts) using the most appropriate theory and methodology and in a way that the analysis would have resonance beyond the narrow confines of the academy. Teaching Methods: Class discussions, library visits, guest lectures. Evaluation Methods: Weekly self-evaluation, presentations, 13-page essay. Texts include:
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English 411 | Studies in Poetry: The Poetics of Dissolution | Wilson Th 2-4:50 | ||
English 411 Studies in Poetry: The Poetics of DissolutionCourse Description: Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon’s polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations puts additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where the moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration may include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey, Douglas Kearney, and Harriet Mullen; sound alchemists King Tubby, Alice Coltrane, and MF Doom; and visual artists Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, and Bethany Collins. Theoretical texts may include work by Emily Apter Barthes, Baudrillard, Fred Moten, and Saussure, as well as ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists. Teaching Methods: Seminar Evaluation methods: Research essay. Texts include:
Texts will be available at: TBA | ||||
English 422 | Studies in Medieval Literature: Global Middle Ages | Newman T 2-4:50 | ||
English 422 Studies in Medieval Literature: Global Middle AgesCourse Description: The term “Middle Ages”—the period “in the middle” between classical antiquity and the Renaissance—derives from European history, and it’s problematic even there. But the global turn in medieval studies enables us to go beyond the field’s traditional focus on Europe alone to explore its ties with the rest of the known world. In this course we’ll do that in two ways. Our first unit will deal with romance, gender, and the aesthetics of eroticism. Court ladies feature as foundational romance authors in two island nations, England and Japan, at opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass. After reading the Lais of Marie de France (12th century) and selections from the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11th century), we’ll complicate our study with two transgender romances: Heldris of Cornwall’s Silence and a Japanese tale translated by Rosette Willig as The Changelings. In our second unit, dealing with travel and ethnography, we’ll consider two Islamic and two European works: The Book of Ibn Fadlan (921-22), The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck (1253-55), The Travels of Ibn Battutah (1325-54), and The Book of John Mandeville (ca. 1356). Critical readings will include literary essays on the French and Japanese texts, as well as excerpts from Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages; Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel; and Shirin Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Texts:
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English 431 | Studies in 16th-Century Literature: Queering the Crown: Marlowe and Shakespeare, Pre-texts and Afterlives | Masten W 2-4:50 | ||
English 431 Studies in 16th-Century Literature: Queering the Crown: Marlowe and Shakespeare, Pre-texts and AfterlivesCourse Description: This course will simultaneously engage a set of methods within/around literary/performance studies and interrogate the transhistoricity of queerness. It follows the long representational career of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (c. 1592): from Holinshed’s Tudor-era chronicle history and other “pre-texts” through Shakespeare’s adaptation/revision/rewriting in Richard II, to the emergence of the theatrical-alienation effect in Bertolt Brecht’s early twentieth-century translation/adaptation Leben Eduards des Zweiten, twentieth-century productions and films tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen in repertory as both kings) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman and “New Queer Cinema”), to contemporary re-writings -- Tom Stuart’s play After Edward; a German opera that weaves together antisemitism and homophobia; the recent rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings in the history of sexuality, queer theory, “source” study, history of the book, adaptation theory, theory of tragedy, critical race studies and casting, and performance studies. | ||||
English 431 | Studies in 16th-Century Literature: Early Modern Horror | Evans M 2-4:50 | ||
English 431 Studies in 16th-Century Literature: Early Modern HorrorCourse Description: This seminar will bring together literary texts from the English Renaissance, ancient and Renaissance theories of spectatorship and catharsis, and academic criticism and theory on contemporary horror fiction and film. Juxtaposing theoretical texts ranging from Aristotle to Carol Clover, we will consider the ways in which early modern narratives and theatrical productions anticipate horror fiction and film of the 20th and 21st centuries. Across three main units—on revenge tragedy, witches, and monsters—we will consider what psychological, cultural, and civic functions are served by the publication and performance of horror. Methodologically, we will consider the validity and value of a diachronic approach that juxtaposes Renaissance and contemporary texts without relying on direct and documentable examples of authorial influence. The following books will be available for purchase at Norris; other assigned reading will be available for download on Canvas. You may substitute alternate editions of texts—including facsimiles available through EEBO or online editions available through NU Library—so long as you’re willing to contend with different sets of explanatory notes, page numbers, and so on.
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English 441 | Studies in 18th-Century Literature: Novel Utopias: Critique and Normativity in 18th Century Realism | Soni W 2-4:50 | ||
English 441 Studies in 18th-Century Literature: Novel Utopias: Critique and Normativity in 18th Century RealismCourse Description: The utopian tradition plays a significant role in the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century. Novels often include embedded utopias within them, so much so that these might be considered a “chronotope” of the early novel. On the face of it, this is paradoxical. Utopias portray visions of idealized societies, while novels operate in the mode of a critical realism scrutinizing the present. In this class, we will try to understand the place of utopian thinking in eighteenth-century novels. Are utopianism and realism at odds in the early novel? Does the critical potential of realism need the normative guidance of utopian thought to be effective? Why do embedded utopias become more scarce in later novels, and how is realism able to get along without them? This class will read an array of early novels with embedded utopias. (Possibilities include: Cervantes, Don Quixote; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (book 4); Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Rousseau, Julie; Goethe, Wilhelm Meister; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.) We will also read a selection of early utopias such as More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis. Alongside these texts, we will read contemporary critical writing about utopias (Bloch, Jameson), realism (Watt, Lukacs, Jameson) and the crisis of ends-oriented thinking in eighteenth century ethics and politics (Horkheimer, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Pfau). Our aim will be to arrive at an account of the function of the “embedded utopia” chronotope in early novels. | ||||
English 461 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Translation Problems: Coloniality, Resistance, Solidarity | Johnson T 2-4:50 | ||
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Translation Problems: Coloniality, Resistance, SolidarityCourse Description: This course aims to give students grounding in postcolonial and decolonial translation studies by focusing on some of the problems embedded in its history and practice: translation’s employment in the contexts of war, displacement, and empire; its role in national canon formation and transnational literary circulation amid the hegemonic force of Anglicization; and the importance of translation problems —mistranslation, pseudo-translation, “bad translation,” and untranslatability—to projects that we might organize under the sign of “solidarity.” We try to account for translation's politics and ethics, that is. We will do so by focusing on important examples of translation theory as well as by using case studies drawn from the history of Arabic-English and Arabic-French translation from the 19th to the 21st century (using work from Algerian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian authors) and by class visits—funding pending—from working translators. Readings will be provided in English. No knowledge of a foreign language is required, but students with reading knowledge of Arabic or French are particularly welcome. We will work collaboratively and creatively with all of our competencies to further the course goals. | ||||
English 461 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Digital Aesthetics | Hodge Th 2-4:50 | ||
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Digital AestheticsCourse Description: This seminar introduces students in the arts-based humanities to the study of digital aesthetics across the arts, including literature, visual art, moving images, and music. It will examine a range of aesthetic forms responsive to the popular emergence of the computer and the internet, including computer-generated prints, video games, electronic music, hypertext, print fiction, and projects inflected by vernacular digital forms such as memes. Moving historically, roughly decade by decade from the 1960s to the present, the main task of the class will be to consider the difference digital computational technologies make in the creation of aesthetic forms and the experience of them. For instance, what new forms and modes of experience become possible with computers? What exactly makes something "digital"? And how can we tell (or not) -- and does it matter at all -- if something was made with the aid of automated processes? And finally, how do the answers to these questions change as we move from one computational era to another, e.g. from the mainframe and hobbyist eras to the domestic reception of popular electronics and computers in the 1980s to the emergence of the World Wide Web and social media and smartphones in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s up to and possibly beyond our historical present. The seminar will also emphasize the formal analysis of a range of both experimental and popular works across media, taking care to measure the aesthetic and historical meanings of the digital in the changing imagination of computers as central to society. Finally, students will encounter and write about forms native to their chosen discipline (literature, visual art, the moving image, music) but also about newer forms that do not fit easily into discipline-specific histories. Possible texts and objects of aesthetic analysis include computer-generated prints in the collection of Northwestern's Block Museum, the Detroit Techno and Chicago House electronic music scenes, fiction by William Gibson and Patricia Lockwood, net.art by Mendi + Keith Obadike and Ricardo Dominguez, films by Ridley Scott and the Wachowskis, glitch art by JoDi, Takeshi Murata, Jon Satrom, Rosa Menkman, and others, a group session devoted to video game play, meme aesthetics, and a class devoted to experimenting with artificial intelligence. Assignments will likely include a short presentation, a short formal analysis paper, and a final paper or project on digital aesthetics on an approved topic of the student's choosing. | ||||
English 465 | Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Lit and US Empire | Nadiminti T 2-4:50 | ||
English 465 Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Lit and US EmpireCourse Description: After asserting its “manifest destiny” in the nineteenth century, the United States became an unprecedented global power in the twentieth century, especially after World War II. In 1941, the publisher Henry Luce went so far as to coin the phrase “the American century” to describe the new role of the emerging superpower in world affairs. For some, the US became the “indispensable nation,” “world leader,” and an exceptional international figure. For many others, such as the people of the Philippines or Vietnam or Iraq, it became a cruel and coercive imperial force. This course studies how the historical fact of US empire influenced literature and expressive culture. We will examine how both domestic and international writers most impacted by imperial violence—ranging Filipino migrant laborers, Afghan diaspora in the US, Middle Eastern and North African civilians caught in the dragnet of detention—contest the language of empire that the U.S. uses to ceaselessly redefine itself. This graduate course asks. how has the geography of United States empire shaped and informed the evolution of US empire studies and postcolonial studies in the contemporary moment? In what ways might the intersection between postcolonial studies, ethnic American studies, Pacific studies, Middle Eastern and North African studies, and US empire yield new categories of analyses that have been broached by scholars like Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Eqbal Ahmad, and Amy Kaplan in the 1990s? What purchase do they have on contemporary academic as well as aesthetic developments in the post-9/11 era? Throughout the term, students will be introduced to and learn to grapple with theoretical and historical concepts like sovereignty, Cold War liberalism, counterinsurgency, extralegal internment, extraterritoriality, and neoliberal multiculturalism. We will read monographs almost every week by theorists starting with Said, Kaplan, Junaid Rana, Erica Edwards, Stuart Schrader, Anjuli Raza Kolb, and Darryl Li, We will also work through theorists like Eqbal Ahmad, Jasbir Puar, Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Jodi Melamed, Nadia Abu Al-Hadj, and many others to think through complex vocabularies of law, literature, and human rights in understanding the undertheorized intersection between postcolonial studies and US empire. | ||||
English 471 | Studies in American Literature: Women on the Verge | Stern W 2-4:50 | ||
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Women on the VergeCourse Description: Women’s fiction and films of the classical Hollywood era, 1929-1950, feature heroines on the brink of madness, suicide, and death. Melodrama, a dramatic form that flourished in the nineteenth century and featured making virtue and evil visible, structures many of the works in our course. We will explore how and why female artistic production from the beginning of modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heyday of the “woman’s picture,” 1933-1950 featured women on the brink, rejecting the 19th -century “marriage plot,” for a different set of endings. We will discuss the significance of “the New Woman,” the last throes of the “cult of domesticity” and the work of arguably classic Hollywood’s greatest actress, Bette Davis, whose films took up those historical issues. Mode of Evaluation: Two take-home close reading exams (2 pages total) and a final project on a Davis film not on the syllabus. Works may include The Awakening, Ethan Fromme, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Plum Bun, Quicksand, and The Street. Films may include Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, In This Our Life, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? We will read selected theoretical works from object relations psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, star theory, genre theory, and Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint. | ||||
English 471 | Studies in American Literature: Sovereignties across the Americas | Rodriguez Pliego Th 2-4:50 | ||
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Sovereignties across the AmericasCourse Description: The terms “sovereignties” and “Americas” in the title of this course stand at the crossroads of old and new dialogues about their meanings. This course considers Indigenous and Native American notions of sovereignty that imagine nationhood outside of the nation-state framework. It reads these theorizations of sovereignty and nationhood alongside Latin American and Latinx anti-imperial writing. We will consider José Martí’s late nineteenth-century articulation of “Our America” alongside the rise of the Guna word “Abiayala” and its use by Indigenous activists from Latin America, and “Turtle Island” as the name that Native American creation stories give to our continent. Our discussions will trace connections between the storytelling traditions of Native American, Indigenous, and Latinx authors across the hemisphere. We will study the narrative forms that authors take up as they construct or critique nationhood: essays, short stories, novels and poetry. We will also examine how authors break down these forms by taking up communal authorship, orality, visual media, and multilingualism as narrative strategies that provide aesthetic and ideological challenges to canonical articulation of nation-state sovereignties. Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based seminar. Evaluation Method(s): Conference abstract, paper, presentations, and participation in discussions. Texts include: Assigned texts will likely include essays by Emil’ Keme, José Martí, Gerald Vizenor, Shari M. Huhndorf, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Walter Mignolo. Primary materials will include works by Leslie Marmon Silko, Luz Jiménez, Tommy Orange, Yuri Herrera, and Natalie Díaz, as well as excerpts from Popol Vuh and Florentine Codex Texts will be available at: All materials will be uploaded to Canvas. | ||||
English 471 | Studies in American Literature: The Black Novel | Mann Th 2-4:50 | ||
English 471 Studies in American Literature: The Black NovelCourse Description: In this course students will assess how the novel has figured in the development of Black literature and life over the long 20th Century. Through our engagement with this form, student’s will examine how long-form narrative fiction has captured the historical and social realities of Black life since the turn of the 21st century and how it has called for different worlds through innovative technique and style. We will read topically from the end of the 19th century through to the 21st century and will consider how the novel has evolved as a form that takes in multiple genres. In addition to fiction, students will also read theories of narrative written by black and non-black authors to better understand how narrative works. Some conceptual questions for consideration include: What historical, stylistic, aesthetic qualities produce the novel? How do Black American novels innovate formally, stylistically, and narratively? How do such innovations (or, on the contrary, adherence to tradition) help us understand literature and culture’s work in the project of Black freedom? Texts Include:
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English 481 | Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: The Environmental Humanities | Dimick W 2-4:50 | ||
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: The Environmental HumanitiesCourse Description:This graduate seminar explores core concepts, questions, and methodologies within the environmental humanities. Rather than reading literature and literary scholarship in isolation, we will trace their entanglements in environmental history, anthropology, philosophy, geography, and other adjacent disciplines. What, we will ask, are the unique affordances of literary study when confronting environmental questions and challenges? What are the risks and rewards of conducting interdisciplinary environmental research? The syllabus will be tailored to support the particular interests and pursuits of students in the course, but topics may include climate writing, environmental justice literature, environmental racism, global and local scales, militarized and nuclear environments, and queer ecologies. Collectively, the readings will ensure familiarity with classic texts in the environmental humanities and introduce students to the cutting edges of this wide-ranging field. Teaching Method: Discussion-based seminar. Evaluation Method: Conference abstract, paper, presentations, and participation in discussions. Texts include: Assigned texts will likely include scholarship by Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Rob Nixon, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Anna Tsing, and Kyle Powys Whyte. Primary materials will include works by Rachel Carson, Jamaica Kincaid, Imbolo Mbue, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, and Karen Tei Yamashita. | ||||
English 481 | Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Mimesis and Its Doubles | West M 2-4:50 | ||
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Mimesis and Its DoublesCourse Description: Mimesis names a relation of likeness: the way a work of art of literature is like something else—not the only way, but a uniquely central way in theories of representation in the traditions of Europe and the Mediterranean. Since Plato and Aristotle, mimesis has often stood for a kind of natural relation of one thing to another. It thus paradoxically is a relation that often goes without saying: you are supposed to recognize likeness when you see it. This course will explore some of the things that literature is supposed to be like (action? the world? other literature?), but also what it means for one thing to be said to be like another thing at all. We will balance theoretical discussions of mimesis with theatrical and other explorations of its role, as well as strategies for representation besides likeness, representing things that are like nothing, and hierarchies implied or subverted by the concept of mimesis. Readings might include selections from Aristotle, Longinus, Shakespeare, Corneille, Calderon, Cavendish, Freud, Woolf, Warburg, Benjamin, Auerbach, Wittgenstein, Capote, Latour, Bhabha, Ranciere, Viveiros de Castro, or Hartman. | ||||
English 496 | MFA Poetry Workshop | Abani M 10-12:50 | ||
English 496 MFA Poetry WorkshopCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 496 | MFA Poetry Workshop | Trethewey T 2-4:50 | ||
English 496 MFA Poetry WorkshopCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 497 | MFA Fiction Workshop | Abani T 2-4:50 | ||
English 497 MFA Fiction WorkshopCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 498 | MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop | Schulman W 2-4:50 | ||
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction WorkshopCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 498 | MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop | Hernández M 10a-12:50p | ||
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction WorkshopCourse Description: TBA | ||||
English 571 | Teaching Creative Writing | Seliy M 10a-12:50p | ||
English 571 Teaching Creative WritingCourse Description: TBA |