Spring 2025 Class Schedule: Department of English

Spring 2025 Class Schedule

**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**

Click on a course title to view the description.

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
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 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Taveras	WF 9:30-10:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course 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	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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Sears	MW 9:30-10:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Seliy	MW 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Seliy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Scanlon	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	TTh 2-3:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
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 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. Ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton Critical Edition. ISBN: 978-0393970142 Beowulf, A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney. Ed. Daniel Donoghue. Second Norton Critical Edition (2019). ISBN: 978-0393938371 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. Third Norton Critical Edition (2018). ISBN: 978-1324000563 Thomas More, Utopia. Ed. George M. Logan. Third Norton Critical Edition (2011). ISBN: 978-0393932461 William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Second Norton Critical Edition (2019). ISBN: 978-0393265422
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 Cinema Course 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 Empire Course 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 Literature Course 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: Bernhard Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism Bart Ehrman, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction
English 275	Topics in Asian American Literature	Huang	MW 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 275 Topics in Asian American Literature Course 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: David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (ISBN 978-0452272590) Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN 978-157322531) Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888) Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (ISBN 978-1566894869) 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 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 Film Course 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 Nonhuman Course 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 306	Advanced Poetry Writing	Trethewey	W 3-5:50
English 306 Advanced Poetry Writing Course Description: TBA
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: 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 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 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) Course Description: We will spend the term delving deeply into the meaning and significance of a play often said to be at the heart of Shakespeare’s canon and of modern Western culture more generally. Devoting a full course to one play will allow us to read this enduringly important, exceptionally enigmatic tragedy intensively, scene by scene, sometimes line by line. At the same time, it will allow us to see the many and sometimes conflicting Hamlets that have existed since about 1600, when it was first written and performed. We will read the three early (and different) printed versions of the play from Shakespeare’s time. We will also encounter the play through the lenses and tools of several modern critical approaches that have sought to address the mystery of the play and its central character: psychoanalytic Hamlet, post-structuralist Hamlet, Marxist Hamlet, new historicist Hamlet, feminist and queer Hamlets, Hamlet and race, alongside the critical perspectives of some film versions and Tom Stoppard’s ingenious revision. “To be or not to be,” as we will see, is not the only question. 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) Course Description: This class will trace the surprising proliferation of plots that lead to marriage in prose fictional forms before the consolidation of the modern realist novel. (Spoiler alert: not all of these plots end in marriage!) Jane Austen’s chaste representations of courtship were preceded by over 100 years of far less polite renditions of desire, economic need, frustration, rebellion, and amorous failure. Due to women’s historical exclusion from independent paid labor, girls were expected to turn into women who became wives. This social expectation was interrogated, re-imagined, and subverted in new ways across the developing form(s) of prose fiction in Britain in the “long” eighteenth century (roughly 1660 – 1820). As we will see, the marriage plot ascribed to Austen was far from the norm in the pre-realist novel: we’ll encounter extra-marital sexual autonomy, sapphic desire, incest, sex work, delusion, discipline, remarriage, and many other plot twists which show that the literary-historical road to the courtship plot was rocky, contested, and definitely not predictable. 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: Anonymous, The London Jilt. Broadview Editions. ISBN-10: 1551117371 Penelope Aubin, The Life of Madame de Beaumont and the Life of Charlotta Du Pont. Broadview Editions. ISBN-13: 9781554813537 Daniel Defoe, Roxana. Broadview Editions. ISBN-10: 1551118076 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote. Penguin Random House. ISBN-13: 9780140439878 Anonymous, The Woman of Colour. Broadview Editions. ISBN-10: 1551111764
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) Course Description: The event of the French Revolution is one of the formative experiences for Romantic poetry. The poets often imagine themselves to be responding to the revolution, either sympathetically or critically. At the level of literary form, the many innovative poetic projects of the period are often conceived in revolutionary terms, even when they have a complex relation to political revolution. Much romantic poetry hopes to achieve a far-reaching transformation of the psyche, in the way that the French revolution had transformed the political world. In this class, we will study a wide array of writers from the romantic period, through the lens of revolution. What is revolutionary about Romantic poetry, and how is it shaped by the historical experience of revolution? In what way are romantic writers responding to the advent of modernity? What is the relationship between literature and politics, both at the level of form and content? Does it make sense to think of Romanticism as the first of the modern literary avant-gardes? Authors we will read include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Rousseau, Hazlitt, Paine and Schiller. 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: 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) Course Description: Over the last decade, posters announcing “Refugees Welcome Here” have appeared across the American landscape. The post-9/11 era has seen the displacement of 38 million people over the Middle East and North Africa due to the ever-escalating effects of US militarism, not to mention the thousands of civilians who have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and surrounding regions. Against the backdrop of what Afghan anthropologist Anila Daulatzai calls “serial war,” what does the figure of the refugee tell us about the status of human rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In other words, what are human rights and why do we care about them? Who gets to be a human and who doesn’t? Beginning with fiction from the mid-to-late twentieth century, this course examines the dialectical logic of dispensation and denial of human rights through literary texts across nations and genres. We will employ the lens of political theory around race, citizenship, territory, and the category of the human across global sites like Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Mexico as well as detention sites like Guantánamo, and Manus Island. The course problematizes an investment in the rhetoric sympathy and sentiment to unlearn what Didder Fassin calls “humanitarian imperialism,” instead asking what it means for human rights subjects to make demands, rather than petitions, for protection from torture, genocide, and extralegal violence. We will read fictional as well as nonfictional accounts by global authors to consider key figures such as the refugee, the undocumented migrant, the detainee, and the animal as instantiations of what Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer,” i.e. the human who remains outside of a polity as a sacrificial surrogate against the safe haven of the settler/citizen within. Students will be introduced to scholars working in the intersections of political theory, human rights, and literary studies such as Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Achille Mbembe, Sonali Thakkar, and others. Reading List: Bessie Head, Maru Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, or The Pessoptimist Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stroeis Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountain Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends Jerome Tubiano, Guantánamo Kid Malik Sajad, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Haji Hotak and Other Stories
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 20^th 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: 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) Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners’ criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside Homer’s Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we’ll consider: Joyce’s transmutation of the Odyssey into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters’ conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; conditions of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the psychopathology of everyday life (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex, birth, death; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance and theatricality, both studied and unconscious; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life— and political bite--of jokes, comedy, satire, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce’s reported remark that women's emancipation is “the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is”; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the burdens, powers, and pleasures of language; the play of voices: narrative voice, interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation; noises and soundscapes from the cat’s “mrkgnao” to a screeching tram and characters’ inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce’s beyond-English; and more. We’ll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding, often life-changing book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic; and we’ll seek revelation by reading, thinking, and discussing it together with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.
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) Course Description: In a spirit of “worldly”—multicentric, not monocentric—critical thinking, we’ll study selected works by border-crossing, internationally renowned twentieth- and twenty-first century women writers who address an array of issues in women’s lives, in genres, forms, and media ranging across essays, fiction, poetry, drama, graphic narrative, cinema, and theory. Authors include Virginia Woolf (England), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand), Jean Rhys (Dominica/England), Toni Morrison (USA), Gloria Anzaldúa (USA), Marjane Satrapi (Iran), Annie Ernaux (France), Anna Burns (Northern Ireland), Alison Bechdel (USA), Elena Ferrante (Italy), and Lili Elbe (Denmark), with supplementary texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Audre Lorde, and others.
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) Course Description: How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, a narrative of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in a colossal fictional world? 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 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) Course Description: Techno-Orientalism names a variant of Orientalism that associates Asians with a technological future. This seminar will explore how Techno-Orientalist tropes are used by, played with, and rewritten by Asian American authors. We will study how twentieth-century and contemporary issues of technology, globalization, and financial speculation collide with a history of yellow peril and Asian Invasion discourse, as well as how these tensions manifest in figures and tropes such as robots, aliens, and pandemics. Texts include poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film. Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method: Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay. Texts include: Franny Choi, Soft Science (ISBN 978-1938584992) Ling Ma, Severance (ISBN 978-1250214997) Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution (ISBN 978-0393064841) Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (ISBN 978-0307739452) 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 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) Course Description: TBA
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: 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) Course Description: This course has two principal missions: 1) refining and deepening students’ grasp of the artistic labor of adapting literary texts into feature films, not just via script choices but in all areas of moviemaking; and 2) thinking critically and expansively about the women-centered narratives that have made their way into contemporary cinemas, with what emphases, tropes and counter-tropes, demographic ranges, and target audiences. The archive of source texts will range across fiction, memoir, journalism, plays, even social media posts. As an advanced English course, students will often be expected to read one novel and watch one film per week, with a close critical eye on each. In reflecting a range of women’s experiences, some narratives will challenge us in ways they confront sexuality, violence, and power…and also inspire us with innovation, humor, and bold expression. (List of assigned text may rotate in the months before Spring, especially as film availability on major streaming services rotates.) 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). Texts will be available at: All can be ordered at local Evanston bookshops, such as Bookends & Beginnings (on Orrington) or Booked (on Main), or online at Bookshop.org, which exclusively works with independent booksellers. Please support these independent enterprises if you can.
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) Course Description: What won’t girls do for each other? Slumber parties—revenge plots—kissing practice—makeovers—hiding bodies—shoplifting—exorcisms! This class reclaims modern “woman’s fiction,” a broad and dismissive publishing term, to unpack the strong, consuming, and sometimes combative relationships between best friends on the page and screen. In these texts, queer desire erodes the borders of “just friends,” and emotion and attachment dissolve the boundaries of personhood between besties. How do strong female attachments subvert hetero-patriarchal norms through history? How do mimicry, identification, and desire blend together? To explore these questions of identity and attachment, we will begin with twentieth-century short fiction and film, including Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), and Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Later texts include cult classics Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997) and Jennifer’s Body (2009), Sarah Ahmed’s blog feministkilljoys, Brit Bennett’s historical novel The Vanishing Half (2020), and selected episodes from Insecure (2016-2021) and Yellowjackets (2021). Students will approach these texts through a critical background in the history of emotion and affect theory. 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 393-3	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-3 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course 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 394-3	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-3 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching 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 395-3	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-3 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching 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 397	Research Seminar: Divas of Classical Hollywood	Stern	MW 3:30-4:50
English 397 Research Seminar: Divas of Classical Hollywood Course Description: In this seminar, we will explore the concept of the classical Hollywood Diva by studying the films of actresses working during the Golden Age of Cinema, 1930-1950. Our divas include Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Hattie McDaniel, Barbara Stanwyck, Theresa Harris and beyond. At least one of each of these women’s films appears on our Course Reserves list and will form our objects of study for the seminar. Several of the films feature two of our actresses performing together. After choosing an actress as your focus, you will be asked to begin research in five areas: star biography; industry history (how Hollywood was created; the classical era; modes of production; the studio system); historical studies of the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s commitment to WWII; primary source documents (contemporaneous film reviews and artifacts from fan mail and clubs, often run out of the studio ); and film criticism from 1950-the present. This work will culminate in a curated 10-12 page installation in which you argue for your diva’s transformational significance in feminist film history.
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 Book Course Description: Your mission: to recover a work of poetry published in the nineteenth-century United States from the library’s open stacks or from Special Collections, and to make every aspect of it the object of intensive study—from the paper quality to the binding to the cover to the illustrations to the book design to the publisher to the author to the book’s circulation and reception, and including all of the words and poems inside it. By investigating every aspect of a book of poetry in this way, you will be demonstrating what can be learned by attending not simply to the content of the poems, but also to the poetic and printed forms in which these poems originally circulated. To do so is to engage in the interdisciplinary scholarly methods of what has come to be called Studies in the History of the Book, and by quarter’s end, each member of the class will have pursued unique questions and reached unique conclusions about a single book that provides a window on the cultural work of poetry in the nineteenth-century United States. You can read examples of what other students in past sections of this class have accomplished by checking out the website of their completed essays: https://sites.northwestern.edu/eng397/. Alongside 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 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 Realism Course 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, Solidarity Course 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 Aesthetics Course 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 471	Studies in American Literature: The Black Novel	Mann	Th 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: The Black Novel Course Description: In this course students will assess how the novel has figured in the development of Black literature and life over the long 20^th 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 21^st century and how it has called for different worlds through innovative technique and style. We will read topically from the end of the 19^th century through to the 21^st 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: Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 978-1636003672 Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 978-0060838676 Ellison, Invisible Man 978-0679732761 Brooks, Maud Martha 978-0883780619 Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain 978-0375701870 Butler, Kindred 978-0807083697 Bambara, The Salt Eaters 978-0679740766 Morrison, Beloved 978-1784876432 Everett, Erasure 978-1555975999 La Valle, The Changeling 978-0812985870
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 Doubles Course 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	Trethewey	T 2-4:50
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Hernández	M 10a-12:50p
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: TBA