Spring 2026 Class Schedule: Department of English

Spring 2026 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: Far From Home: Journeys, Exiles, and Refugees (Historical Breadth Pre OR Post 1830)	Wall	TTh 2-3:20
English 200 Literary Histories: Far From Home: Journeys, Exiles, and Refugees (Historical Breadth Pre OR Post 1830) Course Description: How does a journey from home–– a place of belonging–– shape our sense of identity and community? In this course, we will discuss ways that writers for centuries have used fantasy to contemplate home and exile. Beginning with the classical epic veteran Odysseus–– who battles monsters, sirens, and vengeful gods to return from the Trojan war–– we turn to modern stories where travelers are not traditional heroes but figures who feel profoundly vulnerable in their home spaces. Although these journeys share themes of risk and renewal, they invite us to consider strikingly different questions: How, for instance, do magic, family conflict, national borders, race, gender, and the environment shape feelings of home or displacement? Our classroom journey will involve learning to analyze literature, contextualize fiction in historical frameworks, and craft strong arguments in writing. Texts will include Homer’s Odyssey; William Shakespeare’s magical tale of love and power struggles in a fairy forest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic cli-fi novel, Parable of the Sower; Yuri Herrera’s rewriting of The Odyssey in the borderlands, Signs Preceding the End of the World; Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are; and the fantasy-drama film set in Louisiana’s eroding coastline, Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. Required texts: Homer, The Odyssey, Emily Wilson, ISBN 978-0393356250 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Folger edition, ed. Mowat and Werstine ISBN: 9781501146213 Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad, ISBN 978-1786892485 Octavia Bulter, The Parable of the Sower,ISBN ‎978-1538732182 Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Dillman,ISBN ‏ 978-1908276421 Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, ISBN ‎ 978-1782955030 Note: This section of ENGLISH 200 may count as either an Historical Breadth Pre OR Post 1830 course for the Literature Major or Minor. It may not be counted as both.
English 200	Literary Histories: Snakey Women Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)	Vieytez	TTh 12:30-1:50
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 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Lee	MW 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	Seiler	MW 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: 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	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 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Bouldrey	TTh 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	Seliy	TTh 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 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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Howard	MW 11-12:20
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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	TTh 11-12:20
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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Rose	TTh 12:30-1:50
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 213	Introduction to Fiction (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Law	MW 1-1:50, plus discussion section
English 213 Introduction to Fiction (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: A monster, a basement, a storm, a prayer—what images shape a child’s inner world? Coming-of-age novels return us to these charged moments, showing how identity is formed through memory, language, and the body. In this course, we’ll read four powerful novels that portray growing up not as a straight line, but as a series of looping encounters with the past. These works explore the physical and emotional experience of embodiment: what it means to live in a body that can feel monstrous or comforting, alien or intimate. At the same time, they ask what it might mean to transcend the body. But this course is also about how we read. We’ll ask how literary language works—how it differs from everyday speech, how structure shapes meaning, and how novels speak through what they leave unsaid. We’ll develop our own interpretations, learning how to read closely, write persuasively, and argue with precision and care. Note: Representations and opinions of gender and race in Frankenstein will not align fully with our own notions, and the casual and unreflective nature of its prejudices may be dismaying. We will certainly discuss these issues. Two of the contemporary texts on our course contain frank depictions of juvenile sexuality. Teaching Method: 2 lectures, 1 required discussion-section per week. Method of Evaluation: midterm paper (25%); final paper (35%); final exam (20%); quizzes and class participation (20%). Texts (available at Norris bookstore): Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin Classics), ISBN 9780141439471. Justin Torres, We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), ISBN 9780547844190. Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), ISBN 978-1-60819-626-5. Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (Vintage), ISBN 978-1-9848-9976-7.
English 266	Introduction to African American Literature (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Mann	TTh 11-12:20, 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 three centuries of literary and cultural production to examine and assess 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 literature and culture in the U.S. Our course will survey the following periods in Black literature and cultural production to analyze the evolution of Black cultural expression and its relationship to the historical transformations enveloping black people in each specific period: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregation, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, and multiculturalism and the “post-blackness.” Throughout, will read a range of sources including poetry and prose, and long- and short-form works to characterize 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. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (ebook).
English 275	Introduction to Asian American Literature	Huang	MW 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 275 Introduction to 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: Lecture, discussion, discussion section, writing assignments. Evaluation Method: Attendance, class participation, writing assignments, quizzes, readings, papers. Texts include: Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN 978-157322531) Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888) Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available on Canvas.
English 281	Topics in Postcolonial Literature: Rivers and Ruins: Literature and Climate in the Postcolonial World	Narayan	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 281 Topics in Postcolonial Literature: Rivers and Ruins: Literature and Climate in the Postcolonial World Course Description: This course explores how writers from the global South represent environmental crisis as lived experience rather than abstract data. Through fiction, essays, and films from South Asia, West Africa, and the Caribbean, we examine how literature offers insights into climate change, colonialism, and ecological harm—revealing how environmental damage is felt, remembered, and contested in everyday life. We begin with Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in the flood-prone Sundarbans of eastern India, where an American-Indian marine biologist searching for a rare river dolphin is rescued from crocodile-filled waters by a local fisherman and his unlikely companion, a businessman-turned-translator. As tides shift, cyclones threaten, and conservation laws collide with human survival, the novel asks whose lives and whose knowledge matter in a landscape shaped by water and state power. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, we will explore how British colonialism transforms relationships to land, language, and the natural world of southeastern Nigeria, leaving cultural and ecological ruins. Finally, short works by Jamaica Kincaid expose how colonial histories remain embedded in Caribbean environments often imagined as “natural” or “paradisiacal.” Students will come to understand nature as an active force in human history and literature as a record of the global inequity of climate change. Students will develop skills in close reading, discussion, and argumentation through short analytical writing assignments, an oral presentation, and a scaffolded research project.
English 285	Topics in Literature and Culture: Murder on the Bestseller List	Syvertsen	MW 2-3:20
English 285 Topics in Literature and Culture: Murder on the Bestseller List Course Description: From Serial to The White Lotus to Knives Out, our contemporary obsession with murder mysteries is everywhere. And yet, it didn’t start with podcasts and blockbusters—ardent sleuths have been chasing homicide suspects across the pages of fiction for at least two centuries. During the genre’s dawn in the mid-nineteenth century, murder and other forms of gothic violence were most often confined to remote haunted castles or the damp wilds of the English countryside. However, with the explosion of detective stories and crime fiction in the early twentieth century, these nightmares invaded the supposedly blissful, domestic consciousness of the emergent American middle class, and writers increasingly used skeptical detectives to ask dangerous questions about criminal justice practices: Whose deaths matter? Who is allowed to grieve? And can justice really be trusted to the institutions that claim to uphold it? Through reading foundational short stories by authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Pauline Hopkins (the first Black author of detective fiction), and the hard-boiled magazine mysteries of Raymond Chandler, this course will explore crime fiction from its origins as more than simply entertainment. We will engage with novels such as Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripley” thrillers, and detective fiction set during the mid-century US civil rights movement written by Walter Mosley. Finally, we will conclude by turning to the present and examining contemporary “true” crime podcasts and popular mystery films—like Serial and Knives Out—to consider how these long-standing questions continue to shape (post)modern fiction and non-fiction storytelling. Ultimately, the course will challenge you to use literary history as a lens to interrogate the social conditions of our present: Who gets justice in 2026—and who doesn’t?
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Frankenstein and Friends	Froula	MW 12:30-1:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Frankenstein and Friends Course Description: When eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley opened her eyes with “a thrill of fear” at her first idea of Frankenstein, she felt that “what terrified me would terrify others.” But never did she foresee that her contribution to her friend Lord Byron’s ghost story contest on Lake Geneva that stormy summer of 1816 would launch two centuries--and counting--of robust reading, interpretation, and creative adaptation. What momentous questions, insights, and understandings has her story inspired in its long global reception across countries, cultures, and media? How do the rich conditions and influences surrounding its creation—from the French Revolution to Mary’s intellectual legacies from her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to myths of Prometheus, Genesis, and the Ancient Mariner to scientific experiments in “animal electricity” or Galvanism, and more--shape the ways it speaks to preoccupations of readers, thinkers, and artists in particular historical and cultural moments? As for Frankenstein’s friends: what were Mary’s friends and fellow ghost story concocters—Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, Claire Clairmont--writing that summer? How does the genius loci or “spirit of place”—the sublime locales of Lake Geneva and the Alps, rich in geological, human, and cultural history—infuse their imaginative works--Byron’s and Polidori’s “vampyre” stories (Dracula’s precursors), Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”--as well as their letters, journals, and memoirs? As we join this myriadminded conversation—historical and contemporary, scholarly and popular, critical and creative--we’ll formulate and debate our own questions, develop our own readings and interpretations, deepen and hone our literary historical and analytic skills—and have fun. Teaching method: Discussion. Evaluation: Attendance, preparation, participation; written and oral exercises; course project in class presentation and essay form. Required text: (available at Norris): Third (3^rd--only) Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ed. J Paul Hunter (2021). ISBN-10 ‏, 0393644022 ISBN-13 ‎ 978-0393644029.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Acts of Interpretation	Nadiminti	TTh 2-3:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Acts of Interpretation Course Description: Reading is essential to literature: it is how we imbibe stories and understand narrative. Examining a range of twentieth-century writers from Britain, South Asia, and the United States, this course posits that reading is a necessarily interpretive act, requiring both close attention and conscious method. We will consider how literary texts stage multiple models of textual interpretation. Thereby, we will ask, what is "close reading"? How did it become a key method for literary studies, and how has it been contested by readers? We’ll encounter reading models such as “surface" reading, “distant" reading, and "close but not deep” reading. Required texts include classic novels such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Toni Morrison's Sula, and Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Storie, along with short poems and stories. all of which will all help apply the theories of reading to the act of interpretation. Assignments will include a zine, two short close-reading papers, and a final annotated bibliography.
English 309	Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Writing Time: A Cross-Genre Workshop	Webster	MW 2-3:20
English 309 Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Writing Time: A Cross-Genre Workshop Course Description: Writers are time travelers. Creative writing allows us to witness our present times, to excavate and make sense of the past, and to call in new stories that the world needs now. We will begin this cross-genre class by thinking about genre-based ways of relating to time--from the lyric poetry's intensified present that always has the end in mind; to fiction's original dependence on forward-moving narrative; to creative non-fiction's way of folding time to revisit the past with present insight. We will think about how we can both use and upend these time-keeping conventions to express non-linearity, circularity, and weirdness in writings that also subvert the usual categories of genre. We will witness the present moment. We will cultivate honest yet compassionate ways of writing about our earlier selves. We will invite our personal memory to extend into ancestral memory. We will approach geological time as we contemplate our place on earth. And finally, we will cultivate our imaginations to envision new futures. All of these exercises will be designed to bring new life to our creative writing. Each day, we will begin with meditative freewriting designed to expand time and activate our faculties for witnessing and remembering. Then we will discuss a reading from our handouts. Finally, we will workshop participants’ work in a generative way—by asking questions and making connections that will invite new lines of thought. Writers from all genres are welcome in this class. You can expect to write weekly and to revise 2-4 polished pieces by the end of the course. Together, we will read and discuss books that transcend usual genre categories by authors like Maxine Hong Kingston, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, Sophie Strand, Solveij Balle, and Manda Scott. Halfway through the course, we will attend the 2026 Writer's Festival, and will learn from our visiting writers.
English 312	Studies in Drama: Weimar Performance and its Afterlives (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Manning	MW 12:30-1:50
English 312 Studies in Drama: Weimar Performance and its Afterlives (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Course Description: Focusing on dance and other performance genres during the Weimar Republic, this seminar examines works in the historical context of interwar Germany, a time of intense fracturing between the right and the left. Perhaps for this reason, contemporary artists have often deployed Weimar performance as a source for their own works. Highlighting the complex relations between history and memory, this seminar looks at works by Mary Wigman, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Oskar Schlemmer, and Bertolt Brecht and by contemporary artists who have reperformed their predecessors. Readings and discussion in English; students may deploy German or other modern languages for their independent research.
English 312	Studies in Drama: The Drama of Homosexuality (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Masten	MW 3:30-4:50
English 312 Studies in Drama: The Drama of Homosexuality (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Our focus will be the homosexuality in drama, and the “drama” of homosexuality, in Anglo-American theatre and culture, from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare through Angels in America. This course surveys that drama, but it also thinks theoretically about homosexuality's "drama"--that is, the connections the culture has made (at least at certain moments, at least in certain contexts) between male homosexuality and the category of "the dramatic." The course examines the emergence of "homosexual" and "gay" as historical categories and analyzes the connection between these categories and theatrically related terms such as: "flamboyance," "the closet," "outing," “gender trouble," "drag," "playing," "camp," "acts," "identities," "identification," and "performativity." We will also be interested in the identificatory connections between gay men and particular theatrical genres and figures such as opera, the musical, and the diva. Teaching Methods: mini-lectures; guided analysis and discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Based on preparation and participation in discussion, papers, final paper/project. Books: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Arden Early Modern Drama series, published by Arden Shakespeare/AC Black, 2009. ISBN-10: 1904271731; ISBN-13: 978-1904271734. Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band: A Play in Two Acts; Paperback (June 1968), Samuel French Inc; ISBN: 0573640041. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Vintage Books, ISBN 0679724699. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Parts 1 & 2), Revised and Complete edition, ISBN-13: 978-1559363846 Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, New Mermaids Series, ed. Martin Wiggins and Stephen Guy-Bray, ISBN-13: 9781472520524. John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library (Simon & Schuster), ISBN-10: 1982170166; ISBN-13: 978-1982170165 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, Richard Allen Cave, Penguin Classics, new edition (February 27, 2001), ISBN 0140436065. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, New American Library; ISBN 0451167783. Critical, theoretical, and historical readings; films. Books available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Feelings, Moods, Atmospheres (Post 1830)	Jackson	TTh 2-3:20
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Feelings, Moods, Atmospheres (Post 1830) Course Description: Emotions are fickle and difficult to discuss. The challenge of translating a personal feeling into something another person would understand has been a persistent quandary within philosophy, science, and art since antiquity. Nevertheless, writers and artists persist in trying. How an artwork makes us feel is often one our first insights into what we think about it, often leading us towards other, more studious observations about its content. We will read fiction, poetry, essays, and scholarship to think about and discuss emotions as a problem of interpretation. How do writers enact scenes of bliss, melancholy, dread, and hilarity? What about feelings that extend beyond the borders of personal sensation? How are emotions read differently on different kinds of people and what does this tell us about the political, economic, and environmental organization of our world? Teaching Method(s): Lecture-discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Class participation, weekly quiz, essays (2). Texts include: Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Audre Lorde, David Foster Wallace, Cathy Park Hong. Texts will be available at: Norris
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Love Triangles, Gender and Desire (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Comerford	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Love Triangles, Gender and Desire (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) 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 Fantomina, Sense and Sensibility, and Passing, as well as short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Kathleen Collins. Possible films include Challengers, Past Lives, and Twilight.
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: The Medieval Beast (Pre 1830)	Newman	MW 9:30-10:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Medieval Beast (Pre 1830) Course Description: Animals were everywhere in the medieval world—cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens for the table; mighty horses for war; oxen for the plow; dogs and falcons for the hunt (with deer, fox, and wild boar among their prey); lambs and calves for fine vellum; lions, monkeys, and other exotics for the aristocratic menagerie; bees to give sweetness and light; “harmless necessary cats” to control mice; dragons to challenge heroes; unicorns to be caught by virgins; and even criminal beasts to be tried in court. In this class we will learn how to think with animals (or beasts, as they were normally called) in a wide range of medieval genres and discourses, including lyric poetry, illuminated bestiaries, fables, beast epic, saints’ lives, debate poems, and romance. Teaching Method: Discussion with occasional lectures. Evaluation Method: Lively and informed discussion (25%); three 5- to 7-page papers, of which at least one must be analytical and one must be creative (25% each). Texts include: Readings will include the Bestiary, a gorgeously illustrated book that describes the properties of animals and assigns them allegorical meanings; lyric poems about an Irish monk and his cat, a captive unicorn, and the lament of a roasted swan; the famous satire Renard the Fox; Wholly Animals: A Book of Beastly Tales; Chrétien de Troyes’ romance Yvain, about a knight who wins battles with the help of his pet lion; Marie de France’s Bisclavret, a werewolf tale; medieval fables such as “Belling the Cat” and “City Mouse and Country Mouse”; the tale of Mélusine, a royal lady who is part woman, part serpent; Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale about the adventures of a prideful rooster; Lydgate’s “Debate of the Horse, the Sheep, and the Goat”; and the romance of Sir Gowther, a murderer who has to do penance by eating all his food under the table with dogs. We will also do some historical and theoretical readings.
English 331	Renaissance Poetry: John Milton's Work in Context (Pre 1830)	Schwartz	MW 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 340	Topics in 18th-Century Literature: Fabricated Worlds: Sugar, Spice, and Narratives of Material Culture (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)	Comerford	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 340 Topics in 18th-Century Literature: Fabricated Worlds: Sugar, Spice, and Narratives of Material Culture (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) Course Description: What does it take to make chocolate by hand from an early recipe or write in English roundhand with ink and quill? And what do we make of the fact that “pumpkin spice” was actually a popular seasoning blend over 200 years ago? Where did these ingredients and materials come from and who labored to procure them? This is a course about objects in stories and the stories objects tell. Some topics we will explore include: the circulation and domestication of foreign objects, how commodity culture and consumption have shaped literature, and how the presence of objects in literature register cultural histories and legacies of colonial exploitation that continue to inform our contemporary moment. We will also interrogate the histories of foodstuffs like sugar, spices, tea, and chocolate, materials like dyes, textiles, and ivory, and more. Beyond reading novels, short stories, and poetry featuring a world of goods (and sometimes told from the perspective of objects like paper and pens), we will examine decidedly “unliterary” texts like recipe books, cosmetic handbooks, and craft manuals with literary eyes to consider embodied practices of making as narrative forms. This course will focus on developing students’ archival research methods through digital collections and visits to archives, and will incorporate immersive, experimental practices (including hands-on workshops where we will recreate select recipes and processes) as a methodology of interpretation. Texts may include a selection of eighteenth-century recipe collections, penmanship books, and cosmetic manuals; object-centered narratives like “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper”; Jane Austen, “Lesley Castle”; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; poems and short stories by Mary Leapor and Maria Edgeworth; and selections from Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Contemporary selections may include Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie, and selected episodes from Sanditon (2019).
English 357	Studies in 19th Century British Fiction: Join Us: Conformity and Rebellion in 19th Century Literature (Post 1830)	Godfrey	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 357 Studies in 19th Century British Fiction: Join Us: Conformity and Rebellion in 19th Century Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: In this course, we’ll reconsider the nineteenth century as an era of outcast heroes bravely struggling against the hivemind of social oppression. Themes of nonconformity and self-determination run through Victorian literature, as characters struggle to assert their independence and worth against religious, sexual, and social norms. In Jane Eyre’s defiant words, “I am a free human being with an independent will.” While our main texts will come from major nineteenth-century authors like Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, we will take frequent detours into the more weird and wonderful short stories of the period. We will supplement our thinking with philosophical critique around free will, the social body, and power. Finally, we will end our course with a brief turn to a few iconic modern reworkings of these ideas in neo-Victorian film, such as Sweeney Todd (2007) and Poor Things (2023).
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Feminist Worldmaking (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/US Overlay)	Mann	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Feminist Worldmaking (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/US Overlay) Course Description: What might the world like if it were made in the image of black feminist visionaries? How and why should we invite those imagined futures into our political and social realities? In this course, students will survey a range of writing in Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, paying special attention to the world-making potential of radical thinking. Students will read foundational texts including those by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside more recent contributions from scholars including Jennifer C. Nash, Kevin Quashie, and Nicole Fleetwood to understand the shape and contour of contemporary black feminist world-making. Additionally, students will examine the veil between literature and theory and consider the ways in which these two genres of writing bleed into and reinforce one another. This course is reading intensive with weekly writing assignments and a large summative writing assignment. Texts include: Ntozake Shange, for colored girls 978-0684843261 Toni Morrison, Sula 978-1400033430
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, and the Arts of Life (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Froula	MW 3:30-4:50
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, and the Arts of Life (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: In the early twentieth century, a moment in some ways uncannily like our own, Virginia Woolf and the young artists, thinkers, and writers now known as “Bloomsbury” came of age in a violently globalizing world that their elders wouldn’t have recognized. Even as social movements challenged Europe’s racialized imperialist and patriarchal order, the Great War shattered millions of lives and led to a struggle between democratic freedoms and totalitarianisms that culminated in World War II and continues today. In such turbulent times, how to live, what to do? Centering on Virginia Woolf’s most important works, our seminar will explore the modernist Bloomsbury circle’s rich and influential creative and critical legacy. Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield wrote novels, short stories, poems, and essays in groundbreaking forms. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Dora Carrington translated PostImpressionist style to painting, homes, gardens, and the domestic arts. Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf extended the art of biography, or life-writing, in fresh, illuminating ways. Vita Sackville-West inspired Woolf’s biographical fantasia Orlando and created a world-famous garden. Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, whose list includes Freud’s complete works in translation and made Virginia “the only woman in England free to write what I like.” Ethel Smyth composed a suffrage march, a vocal symphony The Prison, and Der Wald (1903), which until 2016 remained the sole opera by a woman to be staged at the Met. John Maynard Keynes warned the world against the Versailles Treaty and led postWWII economic thought at Bretton Woods. The Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova Keynes acted Shakespeare, was sketched by Picasso, and helped Keynes found the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Throughout the decades, these extraordinary friends’ letters, diaries, memoirs, and notebooks document their practice of the everyday arts of life, private and public--family, conversation, travel, adventure, exploration, theatre, reading, walking, pets (dogs; Leonard’s marmoset Mitz), photography, fashion—against the backdrop of world-historical conditions and events. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance, preparation, participation; written and oral exercises; class presentation; option of two shorter or one longer course paper or project; self-evaluation. Texts available at: Norris.
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Lesbian Representation in Popular Culture (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Chaskin	TTh 11-12:20
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Lesbian Representation in Popular Culture (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: This class will examine lesbian representation in film and television over the last four decades. “Representation” is a tricky word in politics and media: queer communities, communities of color, and disabled communities (and those categories overlap in important ways) have pushed for more representation in film, television, the music industry, and publishing. Lesbian women have long complained of the community’s invisibility. At the same time, minoritized communities must grapple with the fact that simple representation can be a mixed bag. If the primary goal is visibility, is all representation good representation? Are lesbian villains, or lesbians who are narratively punished, still politically useful? Does the inclusion of a lesbian character (or lesbian characters) “count” if no one involved in the production of the object was themselves a lesbian? This course will explore these questions and more, discussing theoretical readings from cultural studies alongside our primary films, television, music, and print media. We will consider the difficult and derogatory tropes that are part and parcel of lesbian representation in the media, but we will engage most intensively with narratives that have attempted to expand the narrative potential of queer female life and to affirm lesbian identities—with complex results. Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative course building, in-class viewing of cultural objects. Evaluation Methods: Pop culture journal, presentation, final project Texts Include: Films: Personal Best (1982); Desert Hearts (1985); The Watermelon Woman (1996); But I’m a Cheerleader (1999); Monster (2003); Pariah (2011). TV: episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), The L Word (2004-2009), Orange is the New Black (2013-2019). Texts Will Be Available At: All material will be available on Canvas.
English 369	Studies in African Literature: Ubuntu and Ecology (Post 1830/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures)	Mwangi	TTh 11-12:20
English 369 Studies in African Literature: Ubuntu and Ecology (Post 1830/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures) Course Description: This course engages the philosophy of ubuntu—often seen as focused on human relationships—in conversation with the more than human world. Together, we’ll read inspiring works by Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Wangarĩ Maathai, and Micere Githae Mugo, alongside African fiction, poetry, and drama, to see how ubuntu can shape the way we read literature. We will revisit major debates in African literary studies—most notably the “language question”—through the twin lenses of ubuntu and ecology. Consider, for instance, how the call to preserve indigenous languages resonates with the call to protect the environment. Yet here lies a productive tension: why do we resist the notion of art for art’s sake, while simultaneously affirming the environment for its own sake? This paradox invites us to rethink the grounds on which value is claimed and defended. Alongside ubuntu, we will also explore non-Bantu equivalents, situating it in dialogue with other African philosophies such as ijough ave, Hunhu/Unhu, and ujamaa. This course honors the memory of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025), Micere Githae Mugo (1942–2023), and Wangarĩ Maathai (1940–2011). Their voices will guide us as we read, reflect, and write about ubuntu and ecology throughout the term. At the end of the course, the student should be able to appreciate ubuntu’s investments in deep ecology and its recognition of the environment’s intrinsic value—valued for its own sake—rather than merely its instrumental value as a resource for human use. Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, debates, role-play, library and archival visits, and small group discussions. Evaluation Methods: Two 5-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and I-minute papers (ungraded). No final exam. *Ben Okri. Every Leaf a Hallelujah. Apollo, 2021.* ISBN-10‏: ‎ 1800241623; ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-1800241626 Nnedi Okorafor. Who Fears Death. DAW, 2014. ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 9780756407285; ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978 0756407285 Zakes Mda. The Whale Caller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 0374287856; ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374287856 Tochi Onyebuchi. War Girls. Razorbill, 2020. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0451481690 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0451481696 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The River Between. Penguin 2015. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780143107491 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143107491 Wangari Maathai. Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World. PRH Christian Publishing. ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 030759114X ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307591142 Besi Head. Maru. ‎ Waveland Press, 2013. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1478607610 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1478607618
English 374	Topics in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Writing from Memory (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/US Overlay)	Taito	MW 2-3:20
English 374 Topics in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Writing from Memory (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/US Overlay) Course Description: Memory is an enduring and powerful source of inspiration for Indigenous storytelling. However, it can also be deeply controversial and contentious. In his creative non-fiction essay titled “Beauty & Memory & Abuse & Love”, Navajo author Bojan Louis offers a cutting take on memory by an anonymous Blackfeet writer: “You never ask a Native to talk about their childhood. That’s Indigenous 101. You think life on the reservation is pretty? Fuck that. Natives never talk about their childhood”. From a similar place of tension and discomfort, Kanaka 'Ōiwi writer Nālani Mattox prefaces her poem “1 page per life” with this memory: “For the mainland English teacher who flunked me in English Literature in the summer of 1978 at UH. She cost me my graduation with the rest of my class in June 1980. Thank God she was only visiting”. Seared in her mind and body, this memory, she writes in the last line of her poem, “haunted” her forever. In both examples, memory is unsettling; yet both Louis and Mattox have transformed these memories to create Indigenous texts and stories. This course asks: Beyond the mind and body, what are other sites of intergenerational memory accessible to Native American and Indigenous writers? How do they navigate a complex phenomenon like memory across these various sites? What types of texts do they produce within their chosen location(s) of memory? This class will be organised into three sections that explore Indigenous writing from three different sites of memory: 1. Body and mind. 2. Archival texts. 3. Tangible artifacts. Each section will focus on Native American and Indigenous texts that respond to these various sites of memory. These texts include but are not limited to Whereas Layli Long Soldier (2017), Shapes of Native Nonfiction (2019) Eds: Washuta and Warburton, Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz (2020), No Country for Eight-spot Butterflies (2022) Julian Aguon, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2024) Deborah Miranda, Paper Cuts (2024) Jim Terry, and An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific (2024) Eds: Bacchilega, ho‘omanawanui, and Warren. Students will produce critical and analytical reflections of the way selected writers have reconfigured memory to create compelling Indigenous stories. Students will also select one memory site and produce a creative and critical response to their chosen site of memory, referring particularly to selected class texts.
English 381	Literature & Medicine: Disability Lifeworlds (Post 1830/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures)	Nadiminti	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 381 Literature & Medicine: Disability Lifeworlds (Post 1830/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures) Course Description: How does literature work through the structural and social struggle of disability to create discrete, sustainable worlds? How night the language of disability mobilize not just an identity category but a robust aesthetic apparatus of thought and feeling? This course works through Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Britain, and the US to ask how disability remaps collectivity care, and personhood by querying vocabularies of cripness, capacity, debility, and illness. We will examine how disability challenge assumed categories of exceptionality and capitalist productivity, while also asking significant questions about civil rights and human rights. In addition, the course also tracks how disability studies has evolved beyond a narrow Anglo-American focus to understand complex Global South realities. Reading disability theorists like Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Eve Sedgwick, Jasbir Puar, and Eli Clare, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, short stories, and art. Evaluation Method: Assignments will comprise presentations, weekly discussion posts, and a final group video project. Texts include: Ved Mehtq’s Face to Face, Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, IM Coetzee’s Slow Man, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: American Nightmare: Ghosts, Zombies, and Tales of the Apocalypse (Post 1830)	Hansen	MW 12:30-1:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: American Nightmare: Ghosts, Zombies, and Tales of the Apocalypse (Post 1830) Course Description: Recent American novels and films are filled with the dead, the undead, and something-in-between. Whether it is a ghost child suspended in the Tibetan bardo or a teenage girl with a rare immunity from infection trying to make her way through a zombie-filled post-apocalyptic America, these characters move through landscapes replete with supernatural beings, both evil and benign. What might this fascination with the supernatural say about our connection to the past and our anxieties about the future? In this course, we’ll look at one novel set in and tethered to the past—George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo—and one novel set in the post-apocalyptic Baltimore of the future, Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea. We’ll also consider ghosts, zombies, and other monsters in the tv series Stranger Things, a mix of 1980’s nostalgia and horror; Craig Mazin’s The Last of Us, which chronicles a young girl's violent journey across a hostile America of the dystopian future; Ryan Coogler’s vampire picture Sinners, set in the 1932 Mississippi Delta; and Jordan Peele’s multilayered social horror film, Get Out, set in the very recent past of 2017. We’ll think about what these visions of a dangerous and divided America, filled with strange and unearthly beings, might have to tell us about our culture, our guilt, our fears, and our desires.
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: Besties and Frenemies: Representations of Female Friendship in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Film (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment)	Godfrey	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Besties and Frenemies: Representations of Female Friendship in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Film (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment) 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 388	Studies in Literature and Ethics: Advanced Bible as Literature (Pre 1830)	Schwartz	MW 9:30-10:50
English 388 Studies in Literature and Ethics: Advanced Bible as Literature (Pre 1830) Course Description: This is not a survey course of biblical literature, but a deep dive into selected texts from the Torah, the Writings, the Prophets, and the Gospels. Our focus is thematic: creation and chaos, good and evil, free will, concepts of nature and the human, community, responsibility, repentance, forgiveness, and biblical ideas of justice. We will also investigate how these biblical ideas inform a sample of later literature, with attention to The Tempest by Shakespeare. Requirements: Participation and attendance are required. Questions will be submitted about the readings. Oral report, and two in-class essays. No prior knowledge of the readings is required. Texts: The Jerusalem Bible ISBN 10–0385499183 The Tempest, Arden, edition ISBN 10–1350133957
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	Donohue	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	Webster	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	TTh 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: Divas of Classical Hollywood Course Description: This course explores the life and work of five classical Hollywood Divas: Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Hattie McDaniel and argues for their ongoing cultural significance to American thinking about race, gender, embodiment, and class. Students will choose an actress to work on and view at least five of her major pictures. To introduce us to the methodology and vocabulary of film analysis, we will read David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson’s compendious Film Art: An Introduction; we will also examine works of feminist film theory, like Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” star studies work by Richard Dyer, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, and classic and recent essays on individual films. Students will write a 15-page research paper on the star and film of their choice, arguing for the ongoing cultural significance of their chosen figure and her oeuvre. Mode of evaluation: oral presentation, annotated bibliography, and fifteen-page final paper.
English 434	Studies in Shakespeare & Early Drama: Shakespeare’s Environmental Theory of Humankind	Shannon	W 2-4:50
English 434 Studies in Shakespeare & Early Drama: Shakespeare’s Environmental Theory of Humankind Course Description: This seminar will work across Shakespeare’s genres -- comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids -- to consider the ways they might all be read as “versions of pastoral.” Reading plays that show a preoccupation with our cosmic place and the sense of an often hostile environmental situation for humans, we’ll trace Shakespeare’s worry that we, alone among all other species, do not “belong” to nature, but stand apart from it (and not in a good way). The critical concept of Shakespearean “green worlds” first arose to describe the retreats into nature and away from society that typically occur in the comedies. A removal to the green world -- getting “back to Nature” -- enables a rebalanced socio-political life to be officially restored. But how well does this traditional sense of a salubrious Nature hold up, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human social order defined and established, and from what apparently threatening “laws of Nature” is it supposed to defend us? In other words, what might an environmental or even a planetary perspective entail … around 1600? As we consider a “human epoch” that sweeps from the idea of Eden to the Anthropocene, we find a special torsion in the idea of nature in Shakespeare’s era. We will take time to think about the ways Shakespeare’s premodern vision of human existence might amplify our thinking about contemporary environmental crises. To provide locales for our focused readings of As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale, contextual materials will range among selections from Genesis, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Pliny, Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, George Gascoigne, John Gerard, Richard Hooker, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Hobbes, to writing by William Empson, Rachel Carson, Raymond Williams, Amitav Ghosh, Donna Haraway, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Hannah Arendt	Gottlieb	T 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Hannah Arendt Course Description: This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism. For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt’s contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the “holes of oblivion.” Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions? Arendt’s next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action. As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the “active life”—we examine Arendt’s attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a “contemplative life” concretized. This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness. As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human “conditionality,” and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: The Planetary in Contemporary Art	Mwangi	Th 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: The Planetary in Contemporary Art Course Description: This graduate seminar investigates how the “planetary” emerges as a critical, ecological, and aesthetic problem specifically within the contemporary—its temporalities, epistemologies, and shifting claims to newness. With sustained attention to late‑20th‑ and 21st‑century artistic and literary production, the course examines how contemporary art and theory articulate, contest, or reimagine the interface between planetarity and the contemporary as concept, period, and mode of attention. At the same time, the seminar foregrounds how the contemporary provides a critical vantage from which to reconsider foundational aesthetic formations, inviting students working in earlier periods to explore how older artistic and intellectual traditions acquire new resonance when approached through planetary and ecological epistemes. In tracing these contemporary formations, the course also foregrounds the subtle but persistent allusions the contemporary makes to foundational aesthetic and intellectual traditions, revealing how early‑period frameworks continue to structure, haunt, and inflect present‑day planetary thinking. Emphasis will be placed on the fostering of holistic humanistic perspectives attentive to the tensions, disjunctions, and transformative ruptures that unfold across temporal scales. A corollary objective of the course is to bring planetary ecology—its crises, imaginaries, and material demands—into conversation with the evolving category of the contemporary, to illuminate how artists register and respond to environmental transformations. Through readings in literature, visual culture, and interdisciplinary theory, we will explore how globalization, ecological crisis, mediation, and emergent forms of world‑relation compel a rethinking of both the artwork and the category of the “new.” Theoretical touchstones include Raymond Williams, Giorgio Agamben, Susan Stanford Friedman, Jean‑Luc Nancy, Terry Smith, Nicolás Campisi, Lionel Ruffel, Kathryn Yusoff, Elizabeth Povinelli, Rosi Braidotti, and Heather Davis, whose writings collectively shape current debates on contemporaneity, ecological planetarity, environmental crisis, multispecies entanglement, and planetary‑scale cultural imaginaries. These frameworks will help us examine how the contemporary is defined, experienced, and questioned in relation to climate precarity, ecological interdependence, and shifting cultural imaginaries of the Earth. Students will engage literary and artistic practices that grapple with global aesthetics, temporal rupture, ecological vulnerability, and new configurations of relationality that exceed national, regional, or historical frames. Case studies from 20th‑ and 21st‑century literature and contemporary art will illuminate how creative practices negotiate tensions between novelty and repetition, immediacy and historicity, locality and totality. Ultimately, the course seeks to develop a clear and discerning understanding of how the planetary—ecological as well as cultural—is figured, theorized, and sensed within the evolving rubric of the contemporary. Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, discussions, presentations. Evaluation Method: 6000-word paper, annotated bibliographies, class presentations, weekly self-evaluation, and peer critiques. Texts (May Change): The Whale Rider (1987) — Witi Ihimaera. Harcourt paperback (2003), ISBN 9780152050160 The Hungry Tide (2004) — Amitav Ghosh. Mariner Books paperback (2006), ISBN 9780618711666 Parable of the Sower (1993) — Octavia Butler. Grand Central Publishing paperback (2019), ISBN 9781538732182 The Stone Gods (2007) — Jeanette Winterson. Mariner Books paperback (2009), ISBN 9780156035729 The Old Drift (2019) — Namwali Serpell. Hogarth paperback (2020), ISBN 9781101907153 The Fifth Season (2015) — N. K. Jemisin. Orbit paperback (2015), ISBN 9780316229296
English 471	Studies in American Literature: The American Modernist Novel, Black and White	Stern	Th 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: The American Modernist Novel, Black and White Course Description: In this seminar, we will closely read two great American novels, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Ann Petry’s The Narrows (1954). You will be expected to read Faulkner’s epic at least twice. But we will begin with Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, the chronicle of her sociological engagement with America’s last-living former enslaved person, Oluale Kossola. Hurston’s non-fictional 1929 account, unpublished until 2018, features exclusively Black voices that tell the story of Africatown, Alabama’s all-black community formed in the aftermath of the state’s final foray into the illegal international trade in enslaved peoples, in 1861. We will juxtapose this ethnographic material with Faulkner’s “historically” inflected fictional envisioning of a poor white boy’s rise, through canny strategy, rugged charisma, and unspeakable ruthlessness, to the top of the slavocracy in pre-Civil War Mississippi. The novel then recounts Thomas Sutpen’s inexorable self-destruction and the ruin of his dynasty in pursuit of a pure, white, family line soon after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Faulkner’s story is, arguably, the greatest and most difficult American novel of the first half of the 20^th-century, featuring multiple narrators working across three generations and two regions, and influencing, among other luminous writers, Toni Morrison, who wrote her master’s thesis on his work. Morrison has widely discussed how Faulkner influenced both her creative endeavors and her criticism. We will end the quarter with Ann Petry’s magisterial The Narrows, which employs a very different modernist style from Hurston or Faulkner, reviving the Naturalism that marked American literature in the fin de siècle, but with a raced and gendered texture all its own. The plot features black male and white female star-crossed lovers, whose intellectual affinities and education make up for the racial divide from which each comes. Petry’s use of free indirect discourse unfolds in a kaleidoscopic patterning and a characterological breadth that recalls Dickens as much as Faulkner. Her male protagonist, scholars say, is loosely based on Paul Robeson. Petry has largely been lost to classrooms, but our work this quarter seeks to remedy that. We will read additional assorted critical essays across the quarter, available in the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom! and on Canvas. Mode of Evaluation: Bluebook close reading Journal, in which you select a passage from the primary material not discussed in class and collected in week 4 and week 8. Final Installation Project focusing on a material artifact described by either Faulkner or Petry, to be traced through a work of literature, and an historical archive, and a cinematic or televisual text, and in the popular culture of either 1833-1910 or the 1950s. For example: Charles Bon’s New Orleans; Judith Sutpen’s “wedding dress”; Link Williams’ cigarette case; Camilla Treadway Sheffield’s red convertible.
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Reading Form	Jackson	M 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Reading Form Course Description: This course introduces theories and central questions about form alongside relevant literary and visual texts, focusing on classic and modern accretions of formalism as a method of literary interpretation, as inflected—and debated—by contemporary critics such as Ellen Rooney, Caroline Levine, Colleen Lye, Eugenie Brinkema, and Anahid Nersessian, among others. While the U.S. predominates assigned primary texts (novels, poetry, film, visual art), scenes therein require attention to the global embedded within that national project, as well as race, gender, and class as historical formations subject to revision at the site of reading.
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities	Bey	W 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities Course Description: In this course, rather than simply discussing black people who fall under a marginalized gender or sexual category—black gay men and lesbians; black transgender people—we will be taking a different, more radical direction. This course will be one that concerns how blackness as a historical, philosophical, poetic force troubles the limits of gender and sexuality such that those terms are rendered inoperable and radically otherwise. Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities, thus, reckons with what genders and sexualities are and mean, in the context of blackness and outside of or adjacent to that context, and how we might undermine, critique, interrogate, depart from, move within, or imagine outside of entirely these categorizations that are ultimately, as this course will show, regimes of whiteness, normativity, and hegemony.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Staff	Th 9:30-12:20
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: A graduate level poetry workshop for MFA+MA students. Open to other university graduate students by application.
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Hernández	Th 9:30-12:20
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: A graduate level creative nonfiction workshop for MFA+MA students. Open to other university graduate students by application.