Winter 2026 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 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: Demon Twinks (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Balooni	MW 2-3:20
English 200 Literary Histories: Demon Twinks (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: In July 2021, red-eyed photos of an ill-behaved reveler on Britney Spears’s party boat went viral, earning him internet notoriety as a “demon twink.” While the nickname was new, the trope of demonic queerness has a long history in Anglophone literature. This course will begin by looking at a selection of relevant TikToks and films to unpack the cultural phenomenon of the demon twink. We will then go back in time and connect our findings to his literary predecessors, investigating such character types as the dandy of Victorian England in The Picture of Dorian Gray and the shape-shifting Matilda in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Through class discussions, in-class presentations, a short midterm essay, and a final paper or creative project, we will learn how to read literary texts, how to disagree in an informed and respectful way, and how to construct an original interpretation in the form of an argument. Armed with these analytical skills, we will approach literary and cultural configurations of non-normative sexuality to understand how representations of demonic queer desire link up with the erasure of the genderfluid Hijra communities in nineteenth-century British India and with anti-trans legislation in the US today.
English 200	Literary Histories: All the Single Ladies: Spinsters, Wives and Madwomen from 1800 to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Winter	TTh 2-3:20
English 200 Literary Histories: All the Single Ladies: Spinsters, Wives and Madwomen from 1800 to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: Following Beyoncé’s iconic call to action, this course takes a look at a number of “single ladies” - and a few who managed to “put a ring on it” - in literature, film and TV from the last two hundred years. Together, we will investigate archetypal figures of femininity, from the spinster to the madwoman to today’s “girlboss.” How do our literary and popular media construct and deconstruct these categories at different moments in history? Pairing feminist theory with primary texts, we’ll ask: how does marriage function to resolve class tensions? How does it construct and enforce constructions of race and gender? And how, according to these texts, can women find social, emotional and financial independence? Texts may include selections from Jane Eyre, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, A Room of One’s Own, Conversations with Friends, Sex and the City, and The Bachelor. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion, short lectures Evaluation Method: Participation, analytical essays and a final project Texts including ISBNs: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (ISBN 9780141441146), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole (ISBN 0140439021), A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf ( ISBN 0156787334), Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (ISBN 0156787334), Bridget Jones's Diary dir. Sharon Maguire (2001), selections from Sex and the City created by Darren Star (1998-2004) and The Bachelor created by Mike Fleiss (2002-2024) Texts will be available at: Required novels at Norris Bookstore. Other excerpts provided via Canvas.
English 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 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Rose	MW 12:30-1:50
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 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Seiler	TTh 12:30-1:50
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	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	Curdy	TTh 2-3:20
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	Shanahan	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: 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	Martinez	MW 11-12:20
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	Bouldrey	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	Seliy	TTh 11-12:20
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	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	Webster	MW 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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Howard	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 210-2	British Literary Traditions, Part 2 (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Froula	MW 9:30-10:50
English 210-2 British Literary Traditions, Part 2 (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: This lecture-and-discussion course surveys landmark works of anglophone literature by major authors across two dynamic centuries, from the Romantic poets through the Modernist' radical innovations to Postcolonial writers. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott, and Salman Rushdie. We'll study selected poems, fiction, plays, essays, letters, and journals of this turbulent and transformative period, in themselves and in light of historical developments: the industrial revolution, urbanization, scientific breakthroughs; the French revolution, democratization, rising literacy, transportation and media technologies; human, workers', and women's rights; imperialism, racialized slavery, colonialism, postcolonial conditions; and the global adventures of the English language. Teaching Method: lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation in discussion section (20%); weekly quizzes (potential extra credit); weekly posts (these count as midterm and final) (25%) ; a short analytic study (20%); a final paper and self-evaluation (35%). Steady work, heart, and improvement all count.
English 220	The Bible as Literature	Newman	MWF 11-11:50, plus discussion section
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 and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the “Old Testament” (Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Because time is short, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, the Lamentations, Jonah, Daniel, and Second Isaiah; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, Job, and the Song of Solomon, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read 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.) We’ll look more briefly at issues of translation, traditional strategies of interpretation, and the historical processes involved in constructing the Biblical canon. Teaching method: Three interactive lectures and one discussion section per week. Evaluation method: Grades will be based on regular attendance at section and active, informed discussion (25%); four 15-minute quizzes given in section (25% total); and eight weekly Canvas posts, or short critical and creative essays, written in response to prompts (50% total). Any finding of AI use on these assignments will result in failure for the course. Course materials: You can use either the *New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version)* or the *New International Version*. Other versions are not allowed because they differ too radically. You should bring a printed Bible to every lecture and section meeting.
English 234	Introduction to Shakespeare	Phillips	TTh 9:30-10:50, plus discussion section
English 234 Introduction to Shakespeare Course Description: This course will introduce students to a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and romances. During the quarter, we will be considering these plays in their Early Modern context—cultural, political, literary and theatrical. We will focus centrally on matters of performance and of text. How is our interpretation of a play shaped by Shakespeare’s various “texts”— his stories and their histories, the works of his contemporaries, the latest literary fashions, and the various versions of his plays that circulated among his audience? Similarly, how do the details of a given performance, or the presence of a particular audience, alter the experience of the play? To answer these questions, we will consider not only the theaters of Early Modern England, but also recent cinematic versions of the plays, and we will read only our modern edition of Shakespeare but also examining some pages from the plays as they originally circulated. Our readings may include Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and the Tempest. Teaching Method: Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section. Evaluation Method: Section attendance and participation, discussion board posts, a midterm, a scene performance and short papers Texts will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. The required textbook is The Norton Shakespeare, 3^rd edition, (two-volume set) ed. Stephen Greenblatt (ISBN 978-0-393-26402-9, approximate cost $90 new; $ 40 used, $39 digital; copies of the 1^st and 2^nd editions, as well as the one-volume 3^rd edition may also be used).
English 274	Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Literatures	Rodríguez Pliego	MW 12:30-1:50
English 274 Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Literatures Course Description: The term “literatures” at the end of this course title will serve as a guiding question throughout the quarter — how and why do we establish boundaries between literature and non-textual forms of storytelling by Native American and Indigenous peoples? Following the impulse of this question, the course will pay particular attention to the presence of oral and visual mediums in Native American and Indigenous literature. We will also study the wide variety of forms that make up Native American and Indigenous literatures, including codices, short stories, memoirs, and novels. We will begin by considering the notion that we are currently undergoing a second Native American Renaissance, or a flourishing of publications by Native American authors, and retrace publishing history back to the first Native American Renaissance, thus labeled in the 1980s. Our discussions will interrogate the notion of a renaissance as a revival of something that was previously dormant and consider the centuries-long history of storytelling by Native American and Indigenous authors. Although the course is centered on the United States, it explores the hemispheric ties of Native American authors with Indigenous writers from throughout Abiayala (the Americas). Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based course. Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final papers, participation and attendance. Texts include: Bad Indians by Deborah Miranda, Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, Carapace Dancer, by Natalia Toledo, and excerpts from Popol Vuh. Texts will be available at: Canvas and NU bookstore.
English 283	Introduction to Literature and the Environment: Green Thought, Green Worlds (Historical Breadth, Pre AND Post 1830)	Shannon	TTh 11-12:20
English 283 Introduction to Literature and the Environment: Green Thought, Green Worlds (Historical Breadth, Pre AND Post 1830) Course Description: Nature is one of humanity’s most elastic concepts. Sometimes it seems to offer a healing refuge, but sometimes it seems to threaten -- or even contradict -- human survival. Are we part of nature, or do we encounter it? Is human society as natural as the pack or pod, or a defense against “the laws of nature”? Both human and literary history have been defined by the stories we tell about the environment; our common future will be shaped the same way. What new forms of attention might address the destabilized ecologies on which we now know we depend? Tracking environmental writing from the ancient Greeks to the Anthropocene, this course offers a deep dive into the storied concept of “nature” and the rise of ecological thought and environmental literature. Philosophical reflection began by wondering whether something dystopian separates humanity from the rest of the cosmos. Longstanding ideas of a utopian “green world” have offered an escape from the greyness of everyday life and a corrective to the corruptions of the (so-called) “real world.” Meanwhile, industrial and technoscientific attempts to “master” the earth have scorched it instead, extinguishing countless species and toxifying land, water, air, and our bodies too – proving once and for all that we are a continuous part of the world. Classic literary concerns like close observation, perception, point-of-view, justice, ethics, belonging, and the wild or unknown frontier invariably draw on environmental content. And the way we represent the natural world, in turn, can be as consequential as scientific advances in the great project of preserving our planet. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation: Lecture attendance and participation in discussion; two quizzes, one short paper, an in-class midterm, a short review, and an in-class final exam. Readings: Along with popular images and scholarly essays on nature and the Anthropocene, we’ll read a very broad historical range of literary-environmental texts, including: passages from origin myths (Plato, Ovid, and Genesis), classical natural history, and pastoral verse; Shakespeare’s As You Like It; Romantic poetry; journal selections from the great 19th-century naturalists, Dorothy Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau; a novel from a nonhuman perspective (Virginia Woolf’s Flush); Rachel Carson’s absolute landmark text in both literary and environmental history, Silent Spring); and the award-winning 2024 animated film, Flow. Interspersed with these primary materials, we will draw on the writings of literary and environmental commentators like Raymond Williams, William Cronon, Ursula Le Guin, Giorgio Agamben, Amitav Ghosh, Donna Haraway, and Dipesh Chakrabarty as frameworks for reading.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Millennial and Zoomer Fictions	Jackson	MW 12:30-1:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Millennial and Zoomer Fictions Course Description: What makes a work of fiction categorically, recognizably “millennial”? What does, could, or ought the Gen-Z literary tradition look like? With these questions in mind, this course introduces theories and approaches to the study of cultural texts (novels, short stories, film, music, visual art). How do we get from reading to interpretation? What are the historical, social, and cultural contexts that shape a text and its meanings? How should our interpretations be informed by formations such as race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, and nationhood? We will practice and develop our ways of reading in a concentrated survey of post-2010s literature and media. Teaching Method(s): Lecture-discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Class participation, weekly quiz, essays (2). Texts include: Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Ling Ma, Bryan Washington, Chantal V. Johnson, Honor Levy, Girls and Insecure, The Sweet East, Bodies Bodies Bodies. Texts will be available at: Norris
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Seduced and Abandoned: Narratives and Films	Stern	TTh 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Seduced and Abandoned: Narratives and Films Course Description: This version of English 300 will examine the following works of fiction: Charlotte Temple; The Coquette; Our N--; The Scarlet Letter; and Broken Blossoms, Way Down East; and Madame X; narratives of seduction and abandonment span the era of the nation’s founding through the turn of the 20^th century, as the virtuous woman ruined by the worldly libertine has served as political allegory.
English 308	Advanced Nonfiction Writing	Schulman	TTh 2-3:20
English 308 Advanced Nonfiction Writing Course Description: "Nonfiction" takes into account everything that refers to fact, as well as dreams, lies, imagination, and projections presented or believed to be real. In our time of unreliable authorities and misrepresented sources, the question of Nonfiction looms large. Yet, at the heart of every writing practice is the question of Craft. The ethics of its application are a simultaneous, but parallel conversation. This Workshop in Nonfiction is focused, primarily, on manuscript development: using multiple drafts, and risk-taking, creative new approaches, and experiments to make a written work communicate to the reader in a meaningful way. Grappling with something that matters is the first step. But technical awareness, the creation of choices, gives a writer a wider palette with which to transform the experience of their readers. In our class, we will use student work as the basis for conversation, as we engage and apply the fundamentals of craft: Narrative Arc, Character Differentiation, Point of View, Duration. Writing freely, but re-writing with awareness is our goal, to bring students' work to a new level.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: The Thousand and One Nights (Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures/Pre 1830)	Johnson	MW 9:30-10:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: The Thousand and One Nights (Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures/Pre 1830) Course Description: While in the popular imagination the Thousand and One Nights is often reduced to a few well-known characters, this course will take a wider approach to the collection. Over the quarter, we will read the earliest of these stories, as well as follow the collection's history as an archetypical example of world literature—from its evolution in Arabic oral and manuscript traditions, its eighteenth-century "discovery" and translation into European languages, to its modern afterlives in the novels, film, and visual arts it has inspired. We will consider how the Nights has been used in these works as a vehicle for deeply-considered investigations into narrative form as well as for clichéd and colonially-imbued images of the Middle East. Reading and watching these works next to and against the Arabic originals, we will encounter the vast variety of ways that the Nights has been a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across literary traditions. Teaching Method: Discussion-based Seminar. Evaluation Method: Mid-term examination and final paper as well as robust participation. Texts Include: Daniel Heller-Roazen and Muhsin Mahdi, eds., The Arabian Nights: Norton Critical Edition (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2009). 978-0393928082. Yasmine Seale, trans., Aladdin: A New Translation (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2021) 978-1324091110. Texts will be available at: TBA.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Supernatural Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and the Horrors of Everyday Life (Pre-1830)	Godfrey	MW 11-12:20
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Supernatural Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and the Horrors of Everyday Life (Pre-1830) Course Description: In the queer Victorian vampire novel Carmilla, the protagonist is stalked by a beautiful, bloodthirsty woman—and by the boredom and loneliness of everyday life. In Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, ghosts scheme to murder a pair of innocent children—and to wreak havoc on the boundaries between classes. How does the vampire story reflect real world fears about national identity and foreign invasions? Can a fairy tale about goblins really be read as a commentary on the rise of industrialism? In this course, we’ll examine the ways that writers grappled with difficult social realities via the strange and the supernatural, a defining literary trend of the modern era. We’ll pair classics of gothic literature and supernatural/genre fiction with primary sources including newspaper columns, parliamentary debates, and scientific tracts that shed light on the real-world social conditions that spawned these fantastic visions of darkness, terror, and supernatural threats. As we investigate the blurred boundaries between realistic representations of life and more fantastic modes of writing, we will track the shared concerns and rhetoric that knit these two categories closely together. Texts will span the nineteenth century and twentieth century, and include works by Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, and manga artist Junji Ito.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Murder, Detection, and Desire (Post 1830)	McCabe	MW 3:30-4:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Murder, Detection, and Desire (Post 1830) Course Description: Stories of murder are all around us, but literature and popular culture often revel in the interplay between killers and detectives—between those who commit crimes and those who are trying to solve them. What makes this dynamic so captivating, even tantalizing? How do feelings like attraction, desire, and the compulsion to know the truth raise complex questions both about the characters we encounter, and about us as readers and consumers of their stories? How might narratives of crime and detection toy with simple assumptions of criminality and innocence? And what can the study of such narratives teach us about the workings of characterization, plot, and genre? As we consider these questions, we will think about how valences of class, race, gender, and other identity categories shape conceptions of criminality, detection, and the "thrill of the hunt." Course texts will include a couple of novels, several short stories, and select films, television shows, and radio shows/podcasts. Titles may include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (select short stories and TV adaptation episodes), The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock, Serial Season 1 by Sarah Koenig, Killing Eve by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke, and The Residence by Shonda Rhimes.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Laughing Till It Hurts: Humor, Subversion, and Cruelty (Post 1830)	Comerford	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Laughing Till It Hurts: Humor, Subversion, and Cruelty (Post 1830) Course Description: From good-humored raillery to witty wordplay, from cruel jokes to situational humor, dramatic irony to cultural satire, dark comedy to lighthearted banter, laughter is sometimes the best medicine—if you’re the one laughing, that is. Humor and jokes have a way of playing with the line between trivial and crucial, of rendering matters insignificant and yet cutting to the very heart of things. It is a defense mechanism and a tool of social control and critique, a way of producing alignments and a way of upsetting class dynamics and power hierarchies, of bringing you in the know and of holding you at a distance. In this class, we will think about the many dimensions of humor and laughter. Why does humor die when we try to explain what’s funny about it? What does it mean to be “in on the joke” or to claim, “I was only kidding?” How are we implicated in moments when we laugh at or with characters in novels? To what extent does the compulsion to laugh expose the cruelty we are capable of inflicting on others? As we will explore in this class, humor has the capacity to be subversive and yet to reinforce norms of sociability, and its after-effects are always double-edged. Ultimately, we will ask, what are the consequences that linger when the laughing has stopped. Possible texts include Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (1729), Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and Percival Everett, Erasure (2001). Possible films include Get Out (2017) and Joker (2019).
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre 1830)	Phillips	TTh 2-3:20
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre 1830) Course Description: What are the Seven Deadly Sins, how did they come into being, and how do can we make sense of the role they continue to play the 21^st century popular imagination? What is the nature of moral and ethical transgression: is sin a disposition, a thought, an action, or an external force? And how does one make amends for such transgression? Over the course of the quarter, we will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the shifting representations of sin, secrets and confession that pervade late medieval literature. Analyzing the texts of preachers and poets alike, we will investigate the ways in which medieval writers adapted their depictions of sin to address the major social and political issues of their day, highlighting certain sins while hiding others as the moment required. Along with sin, we will examine the practice of confession in its historical and literary contexts, discovering how priests, poets, and playwrights exploited and transformed this pastoral tool for narrative and social ends. While giving students with a background in confessional practice and the discourse of Seven Deadly Sins, this course will also provide an introduction to some of the major works of the late Middle Ages: Dante’s Purgatory, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Everyman. We will also explore how David Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en reworks these medieval concepts for a contemporary audience. Teaching Method: Discussion and some lecture. Evaluation Method: class attendance and participation are required; discussion board posts; two papers, short assignments and an oral presentation. Textbooks will be available at: Norris Center Book Store. [Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. II: Purgatory. ISBN 978-0140444421 (approximate cost: $16); other readings will be available on Canvas].
English 332	Renaissance Drama: Playing the Globe: Theaters of London and the World, c. 1600 (Pre 1830)	West	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 332 Renaissance Drama: Playing the Globe: Theaters of London and the World, c. 1600 (Pre 1830) Course Description: Visiting London from Basel around 1599, Thomas Platter observed that “the English don’t much care to travel abroad, but prefer to experience foreign affairs at home, in their plays.” One play from the same time asks rhetorically, “Had not ye rather, for novelty’s sake, see Jerusalem ye never saw, than London that ye see hourly?” The answer seems to be obvious. At the same time, though, and often in the same plays, playgoers examined the city of London and its customs with a new care. London and the world, the close and the faraway, were used as perspectives for grasping each other as spatial, corporal experiences, through plotting and playing. What was familiar could be mapped onto the far-fetched, and vice versa. In this class we will read plays by Shakespeare and by contemporaries who taught him and learned from him. We will study the construction of the Globe and of globes, plays as maps and maps as plays. Together these different kinds of artifact represent life both close and distant, charting new environments and new experiences linguistically, visually, and physically.
English 339	Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Shannon	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 339 Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: This seminar will work across Shakespeare’s genres (comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids), reading representative plays that show Shakespeare’s preoccupation with humanity’s cosmic place and his assessment of an ambivalent environmental situation for human beings. For critical context, shorter readings – from Genesis to the Anthropocene – will fuel our discussion. The course will explore Shakespeare’s troubled sense that humankind, alone among all creaturely kinds, does not quite “belong” to nature. We’ll assess how his understanding of “Nature” and our relation to it changes over time and how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean “green worlds” first arose to describe the retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. In Shakespearean comedy, a removal to the green world (getting ourselves “back to Nature”) counteracts one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up in a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human social order defined and established, and from what threatening “laws of nature” is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare’s premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure – to both hard weather and our own worst instincts? This inquiry into Shakespeare’s environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the longer philosophical history of wondering what it means to be human. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Sustained and substantive class participation, occasional brief assignments, one 4-page paper, and an in-class final exam (short essays -- with choices -- and some passage identifications). Readings: Our inquiry will center on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. The recommended editions are from the affordable Pelican series: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ISBN: 978014312858; As You Like It, ISBN: 9780143130239; King Lear, ISBN: 9780143128557; and The Winter’s Tale, ISBN: 9780143131748. Substantial contextual readings in early modern genres, pastoral poetry, natural history, theology, and political thought will be supplied by the instructor, as will twentieth- and twenty-first-century materials re-examining humanity’s place in – or agency over – Nature.
English 357	19th Century British Fiction: Decadent, Degenerate and Gothic: Aesthetic Hedonism in Victorian Literature and Modern Culture (Post 1830)	Godfrey	MW 2-3:20
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 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)	Spigner	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) Course Description: In his book of essays, Turning the Wheel, novelist and professor Charles Johnson says that Jean Toomer’s long poem, “The Blue Meridian” (1932): “offers us a bridge between the black experience and the profound reflections on selfhood long a part of Vedic literature.” Johnson identifies Toomer’s work as a key text within a longer tradition of Black letters that intersect with Vedic and Buddhist philosophies and practices. Considering the buzz word “mindfulness,” this undergraduate course explores the extended tradition of spiritual, contemplative, and ancient practices influencing Black letters since the 19th century. Alluding clear and consistent definition, “mindfulness” is an umbrella term that includes contemplative practices, embodiment, transcendentalism, and many other lines of spiritual and secular strategies for survival and more. This course will consider how stillness, concentration, and focus on interiority provide alternative and complementary strategies for Black survival and thriving. We will read works by Johnson and Toomer, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Paule Marshall, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Zora Neale Hurston. Additionally, we will consider the theory and criticism of Howard Thurman, Kevin Quashie, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others along with Buddhist, Vedic, and West African religious texts and studies to consider the many sides of a Black mindfulness literary tradition. We will contemplate the theory and praxis of meditation, transcendence, tantra, Dharma, ritual, and possession. Additionally, we will create and execute our own mindfulness exercises and consider how they may or may not support various politics of Blackness in our current moment. This course will require active and enthusiastic participation by everyone in the class. There will be four response papers/discussion board writing assignments, group presentations, and ongoing experimentation with mindfulness, and a final project that will engage writing as well as other media. Journaling is highly recommended for this course, as well.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: The Modern Metropolis and African American Culture (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)	Wilson	TTh 2-3:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: The Modern Metropolis and African American Culture (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) Course Description: Throughout the twentieth century, the terms “urban” and “black America” became so intimately connected that they are often used as synonyms. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production. Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the “push and pull” factors that prompted the Great Migration and the social forces that have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones; artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music may include hip hop artists from Public Enemy to Common. Critics may include W.E.B. DuBois, St. Clare Drake, Raymond Williams, Mike Davis, and Mary Pattillo. Teaching Methods: Lecture. Evaluation Methods: 2 essays; in-class Final Examination. Texts include: James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk Teju Cole, Open City Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nella Larsen, Passing Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones Texts will be available at: TBA
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Feminist Rage Fiction (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Comerford	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Feminist Rage Fiction (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: From #MeToo to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing assault on women’s autonomy, narratives of feminist rage have never felt timelier, however much they appear double-edged. Audre Lorde has argued for the utility of anger as a powerful anti-racist tool. On the flip side, however, are the ways in which media has perpetuated stereotypes of the “Angry Black Woman.” Some questions we will consider in this course include in what ways can rage be a resource of resistance and power in response to racism, misogyny, and compulsory heterosexuality in a patriarchal system? How can rage be channeled into constructive ends when it so often entails loss of control and the potential for (self-turned) destructiveness? To what extent does the commodification of angry women in media dilute the subversive power of feminist rage? And how do we address the potential for feminist rage to become absorbed into narratives of the hysterical woman or framed (often in racialized ways) as animalistic behavior? Possible texts include Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, Han Kang, The Vegetarian, and Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer. Essays and short stories may include works by Audre Lorde, Myisha Cherry, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Carmen Maria Machado. Film and television episodes may include The Power (2023) and Nightbitch (2024).
English 377	Topics in Latinx Literature: Latinx Feminism (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity)	Rodríguez Pliego	MW 9:30-10:50
English 377 Topics in Latinx Literature: Latinx Feminism (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: U.S. Latinx and Latin American feminist literatures are often discussed as separate categories with distinct sociopolitical contexts. This course makes the case that it is not only logical but also necessary to embark on comparative readings of feminist cultural production from across the hemisphere. It weaves together feminist language surrounding the Ni Una Menos, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), and Me Too movements to frame these conversations within a transnational and transhistorical scope. This course considers female and queer writers from the twentieth and twenty first centuries who have sought to reframe women’s roles in Latinx and Latin American cultural production. We will read stories about traitors, witches, and madwomen; stories that center language as our main instrument to fabricate and rupture gender roles. Our discussions will pay particular attention to the literary traditions that authors take up to narrate the unsettling reality of gender-based violence: surrealism, horror, realist fiction, and hybrid forms. We will explore how feminist reformulations of horror, surrealism, and realism respond to the male-dominated traditions of magical realism and nationalist movements. We will also study the non-textual mediums through which feminists have historically made themselves heard, namely protest movements, performance work, and visual art Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based course. Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final papers, attendance and participation. Texts include: Short stories, visual art, poetry and essays from Amparo Dávila, Cherríe Moraga, Verónica Gago, Gloria Anzaldúa, Mariana Enríquez, among others. Texts will be available at: All materials will be scanned and uploaded to Canvas.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: Westerns (Post 1830)	Jackson	MW 2-3:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Westerns (Post 1830) Course Description: Well over a century after the West was won—or rather, seized—narratives of the wild, wild West continue to pervade mass media in the U.S. and beyond. Musical artists such as Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, Orville Peck, and Beyoncé have been credited with ushering in a “yeehaw agenda” return to cowboy aesthetics and Yellowstone and Landman, cable dramas about the modern-day West, are some of the most watched shows on television. This course is an introduction to the genre of the western as it has appeared throughout literature and visual media from James Fenimore Cooper to Cowboy Bebop. We will begin in the 19th century, when narratives of the West helped the U.S. repair its deepest ideological fissure, slavery, after the war that tore the nation apart. In the 20th century, we will consider the role of cinema in ushering in visions of the West, including the invention of the Spaghetti Western (and why we call them that). Lastly, we will turn to contemporary mutations of the western to think about how westerns persist and remain lively to issues of race, sexuality, and the nation. Teaching Method(s): Lecture-discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Class participation, weekly quiz, essays (2). Texts include: John Ford, Sergio Leone, Cormac McCarthy, Blazing Saddles, Quentin Tarantino, The Rugrats, Jane Campion, Firefly. Texts will be available at: Norris
English 378	Studies in American Literature: "The Chicago Way": Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830)	Savage	TTh 2-3:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: "The Chicago Way": Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city. Teaching Method: Discussion, brief lectures, guest speakers, and an optional urban tour. Evaluation Method: Class participation; brief written responses to each text; several options for papers of various lengths. Texts Include: Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and The Neon Wilderness; Richard Wright's Native Son; Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago; journalism by Ben Hecht, Mike Royko and others; short fiction by Sandra Cisneros, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Fitzpatrick and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, Call Northside 777, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call. Note: Texts will be available at Comix Revolution, 606 Davis Street.
English 381	Literature and Medicine: Introduction to Disability Studies in Literature (Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Post 1830)	Chaskin	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Introduction to Disability Studies in Literature (Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Post 1830) Course Description: The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, “western” literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? This is a methods class, and readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings. Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative reading. Evaluation Methods: Participation, short writing exercises. Texts Include: Excerpts from early sources including Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall (1760) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). In addition, we will read from the theoretical work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Therí Alyce Pickens, Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Jasbir Puar, and a selection of contemporary writing on illness and disability, including authors like Audre Lorde, Eula Biss, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Texts Will Be Available At: All texts will be available on Canvas.
English 384	Studies in Literature and the Environment: Climate Change Literature (Post 1830)	Dimick	TTh 11-12:20
English 384 Studies in Literature and the Environment: Climate Change Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers’ visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can’t grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include award-winning texts as well as relatively unknown books, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers’ voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse. Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. *Texts may include:* Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower. 1993. Franny Choi. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. 2022. Cherie Dimaline. The Marrow Thieves. 2017. John Lanchester. The Wall. 2019. Lydia Millet. The Children’s Bible. 2021. Jenny Offill. Weather. 2020. 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 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Women on the Verge: Obsession and Melodrama, 1900-1965 (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Stern	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Women on the Verge: Obsession and Melodrama, 1900-1965 (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Women’s fiction and films of the classical Hollywood era, 1929-1950, feature heroines on the brink of madness, suicide, and death. Melodrama, a dramatic form that flourished in the nineteenth century and featured making virtue and evil visible, structures many of the works in our course. We will explore how and why female artistic production from the beginning of modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heyday of the “woman’s picture,” 1933-1950 featured women on the brink, rejecting the 19^th-century “marriage plot,” for a different set of endings. We will discuss the significance of “the New Woman,” the last throes of the “cult of domesticity” and the work of arguably classic Hollywood’s greatest actress, Bette Davis, whose films took up those historical issues. Mode of evaluation will be two take-home close reading exams (2 pages total) and a final project on a Davis film not on the syllabus. Works may include The Awakening, Ethan Fromme, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Plum Bun, Quicksand, and The Street. Films may include Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, In This Our Life, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Rebels and Rule Breakers: Subversive Coming-of-Age Stories in Film and Literature (Post 1830)	Hansen	MW 12:30-1:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Rebels and Rule Breakers: Subversive Coming-of-Age Stories in Film and Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: It’s fun to break the rules, and rebelling is a fundamental aspect of growing up, but some transgressions have more serious consequences than others, particularly for those who do not have the option of second or third chances. How do we navigate parental or societal expectations that do not match with our own dreams or desires? How do friendships shape us, and how is betrayal a part of growing up? How do gender, race, sexual identity, and class play a role in narrowing a person’s choices? In this seminar, we will look at a variety of coming-of-age stories dealing with the formation of identity and rebellion. We’ll also think about the ways in which speculative genres, such as dystopian fiction or animated fantasy, might be used to reframe what it means to come of age. Readings for the course will include My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel of complex female friendship, and Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian elegy. Films may include: Ladybird (Greta Gerwig), The Virgin Suicides (Sophia Coppola),The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky), Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson), Call Me By Your Name (Luca Gudagnino), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins), and the animated fantasy Spirited Away (Hazuo Miyazaki).
English 392	Situation of Writing	Bouldrey	MW 12:30-1:50
English 392 Situation of Writing Course Description: The situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class, we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of creative writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas about shaping the literary traditions of the United States starting with Melville, and moving quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by shaping it or walking away from it—Roxane Gay, Adrienne Rich, Richard Baldwin, and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with a service learning assignment and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Our class will be enhanced by the annual Return Engagement series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern’s Writing Program. My intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, and will evolve into a learning experience that is both pragmatically useful and philosophically illuminating. My hope is that this class will help us to become more conscious of our motives and processes as writers; that it will allow us to more lucidly defend creative writing as an art form and a vital contribution to society; and that it will acquaint us with the productions of literary culture, including their changing technological platforms and their relationship to social structures. This course is part of the Hewlett Diversity Initiative, and as part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities.
English 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Webster	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 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 394-2	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Martinez	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-2 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 395-2	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-2 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: Postcolonial Anglophone Aesthetics	Nadiminti	MW 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: Postcolonial Anglophone Aesthetics Course Description: From realism to magical realism to postmodernism, postcolonial literatures, ie writing around and after global decolonization, has been busy reinventing the axioms of European and U.S. aesthetics. This course has a simple but weighty premise: how do postcolonial writers harness canonical literary aesthetics in surprising ways? What new modes of pleasure, care, and critique do they generate in the process? Reading five South Asian and African writers Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Arundhati Roy, and Sheehan Karunatilaka, students will learn about the birth and evolution of postcolonial literatures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading canonical Anglophone writing such as Waiting for the Barbarians and The God of Small Things, we will encounter how the discipline of English literature began in colonial India, how nineteenth century imperialism incubated power as Orientalism, how South Asian writers adopted Latin American Boom aesthetics in the 1980s, and finally how contemporary postcolonial writing has become imbricated in global markets and prestige culture. The seminar will culminate in a 12-15 page research paper that will emerge from short writing assignments scaffolded to help understand the evolution of postcolonial Anglophone literatures.
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Soni	T 10a-11:50a
English 398-2 Honors Seminar Course Description: This seminar is designed to guide you through the many steps required to complete a research project in English. Your own research and that of your classmates will be the focus of the seminar. You will be expected to complete weekly written assignments, each of which will contribute in some way to the research and writing required for your Senior Thesis. You will craft a proposal/abstract for the project, construct an annotated bibliography of sources essential for the thesis, produce a “State of the Field” analysis, attempt close readings relevant to your arguments, and finally, write a draft introduction and chapter for the thesis. Even if none of these pieces make it into the final thesis, regular writing is an essential part of exploring and developing your ideas. ----- Since the seminar is focused on the independent research of you and your classmates, its success depends on the work you put into researching and revising, and the care and attention with which you engage the work of others in the seminar. A key goal of the seminar is to foster a collaborative scholarly community, in which you help each other hone your ideas, refine your writing and find new paths to explore. Research never happens in isolation. Although I will be guiding you through the steps of research, you should think of the seminar as a workshop space to explore and develop ideas, work through frustrations with your writing and solicit the advice of others. A central part of the seminar will be reading and commenting on the work of your peers, as well as receiving and incorporating constructive criticism from them. It is never easy to share work publicly, particular in its early stages when ideas seem unfinished and still in need of work. I hope we can create an environment in the seminar that is open, respectful, constructive and supportive. Being open to constructive criticism is the only way to improve your writing and advance your ideas. The skills you develop through the regular practices of writing and workshopping – precise analytic writing, giving constructive feedback, incorporating editorial advice – will improve your senior thesis. But these skills will also serve you well in many contexts beyond academia where you will be asked to undertake independent research. Teaching Method: Seminar, intensive workshopping Evaluation Method(s): Weekly writing assignments Texts include: Wayne C. Booth et el., The Craft of Research, 5th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) ---- ISBN: 9780226826677 Texts will be available at: Norris Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.
English 411	Studies in Poetry: Modern Poetry & Poetics	Froula	Th 2-4:50
English 411 Studies in Poetry: Modern Poetry & Poetics Course Description: When Fenollosa wrote that the dawn of the twentieth century turned a new page in the book of a rapidly shrinking world—a “startling chapter,” with “vistas of strange futures,” “world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe,” “hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races”— he framed modernity’s historical condition as a breaking of the bounds of closed cultures founded on collective belief systems (The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry). Fenollosa anticipates Edward Said’s concept of worldliness, and of worldly creative and critical practices, as the arduous shift from monocentric cultures to multicentric cultures, in collision, dialogue, and creative, visionary translation and mistranslation of all kinds. What then is at stake for modernist poets, poetry, and poetics? In the spaces and voids created by crises of common belief during this period marked by endless national, racial, and international struggle—not least, racialized imperialisms and two technologically-driven world wars--there emerged a “revolution of the word.” Our seminar will explore some of the myriad ways in which poets responded to modernity’s shattered epistemic and ontological worlds and to the imperative to imagine, dream, create, “make it new”—to bring into being new poetics, in dialogue with other languages and traditions: poetics of moral witness; of form (lyric, epic, fragment, hymn, prose poem); of voice (dramatic monologue; persona); of location (e.g., Yeats’s poems of colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial Ireland); of sonic and visual word and line (vers libre/free verse; creative typography; performance modes). We’ll consider some key perspectives, influences, debates, contentions, experimental breakthroughs, and abject failures that arose from poets’ distinct senses of the past, the turbulent present, and the collective future. At the heart of our seminar will be poems and closely related prose writings, to be drawn from Caedmon, Arnold, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, WWI trench and civilian poets, Eliot, Williams, Toomer, Stein, Tagore, Auden, Margaret Walker, Hughes, Brooks, Walcott, Dove, Erdrich, Lee, Merwin, others suggested by students. Alongside them, we’ll read selections from historical, critical, and theoretical texts, such as Benjamin, DeMan, Culler, Johnson, Venuti, Ramazani; and we’ll meet with Special Collections Librarian Jason Nargis to learn about modernism’s material publishing culture--little magazines, small presses, first editions. In consultation with the instructor, students will design course projects that draw upon their particular research interests, theoretical predilections, and critical sense to speak to our seminar’s common goals. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, weekly posts, class presentation, mini-conference paper, respondent for a classmate’s paper.
English 435	Studies in 17th-Century Literature: Epic, World, History	West	T 2-4:50
English 435 Studies in 17th-Century Literature: Epic, World, History Course Description: Ezra Pound called epic “a poem including history,” relating and distinguishing two aspects of what may be the most ancient of all poetic forms. Epic poems articulate stories that are also histories; they represent history, and as they are passed from age to age and culture to culture—as they pass into history—they become history themselves, of their world and of their own form. Individual epics emerge from many different worlds—of archaic Greece, newly imperial Rome, the colonial Americas, revolutionary early modern England, the myriad-minded Caribbean archipelago, among others—and take it upon themselves to contain worlds, the one they emerge from and other, possible worlds. Individual epics and epic as a genre has been associated with primitive nationalism, imperialist ambition, and the agentless insatiability of capitalist modernity, but also with resistance to them, especially among contemporary writers who have explored epic as a critique of the universal solvency of the novel. In this course we will explore epic as a poetic form that seeks to make worlds and histories. Readings will be drawn from epics like Homer’s Iliad (and Alice Oswald’s Memoriam); Vergil’s Aeneid (and Renaissance imitations like those of Maffeo Vegio, Camões’ Lusiads, or Ercilla’s Araucana); Dante’s Inferno (and Lorna Goodison’s Jamaican reframing); Milton’s Paradise Lost (and Lucy Hutchinson’s responsive Order and Disorder, Blake’s Milton or Pullman’s Dark Materials or Malcolm X’s revolutionary Milton); Joyce’s Ulysses; and Derek Walcott’s Omeros, as well as theorists of epic, history, and worlds, including Bakhtin, Greene, Lukacs, Moretti, Herder, Schiller, Voltaire, Ovid, Quint, Tasso, and others.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: The Environmentalism of the Poor	Dimick	Th 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: The Environmentalism of the Poor Course Description: After detailing Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier’s influential distinction between “full-stomach” and “empty-belly” environmentalism, this course focuses on literary engagements with the latter. We track class and environmentalism through literature set in electronic waste dumps, tent cities of the unhoused, and disaster zones. Via this reading, we catalogue the capacities and limitations of literary modes associated with poverty—including social realism, the documentary, and sentimentalism. This class delves into environmental knowledge and movements emerging from communities subjected to poverty, but it also attends to unsettling slippages between practices of environmental simplicity and experiences of economic deprivation. Primary texts will be drawn from 20^th- and 21^st-century literature of the United States and the global South. Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussion.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Possibility within Form: The Grotesque Body and the Global Novel	Abani	M 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Possibility within Form: The Grotesque Body and the Global Novel Course Description: The novel has often been seen as a vehicle for nation and tradition building. But the form also contains the ability to subvert these categories. Subversion in this case is a decrowning of power, the process of constructing an alternate history, state, or community of ideas. Carnival and the grotesque, as theorized by Bakhtin, will guide our reading, as we explore the body as a site of narrative and a powerful tool of subversion. We will read five novels - from Finland, the UK, China/Tibet, Japan and Nigeria – as vehicles of the transnational and necessarily transitional sites of narrative. I will provide some foundational secondary reading, but a big part of this course is the student doing research for readings to support their theories. Our focus is on a guided close reading. We will question what these novels and the bodies created by them can reveal about the form of narrative, subversion and its dialogue between traditions.
English 465	Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Method	Nadiminti	W 2-4:50
English 465 Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Method Course Description: Is there such a thing as a postcolonial method? If so, what are its spatial, temporal, and theoretical constructs as well as its limits? This course examines the rise and evolution of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary apparatus across literature, history, and culture. The course will examine how postcolonial theory thinks through vectors of colonialism, capitalism, race, and gender in distinct ways. This course will begin with key theoretical texts like Orientalism and Masks of Conquest, work through major debates of the 1980s to 2000s around postcoloniality, literary form, and subaltern historiography, before spending the last third of class around race and contemporary imperial formations. In effect, we will think about the formation of postcolonial studies both through and against Cultural Studies, the Subaltern studies group, invocations of the Third World, the institutional development of Global South theory, and finally the fiercest critiques of postcolonial studies like Dalit studies and decolonial studies. Postcoloniality has been invoked to modify categories like the unconscious and sovereignty, but faulted for its aura and exoticism: how do these approaches allow us to think about the future of postcolonial studies and its core political commitments? Readings will include BR Ambedkar, M.K. Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Natalie Melas. Neil Lazarus, and others. We will also dip into some literary texts like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Shanahan	Th 9:30-12:20
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: This course aims to further the development of a student's craft in the writing of poetry with a focus on poems that seek to engage and document public histories, allowing us to place the explorations of our own experiences within a larger historical context. Through reading several collections of poetry and essays on poetry and historical memory, we will explore the intersections and rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and smaller, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories—as well as the gaps in these histories, the willed forgetting and cultural amnesia often surrounding them. We will discuss and analyze the ways in which some poets have used history in their work as well as the particular formal strategies of their poems, conduct research for writing new poems, define strategies for using information gathered from our research, and produce portfolios of poems that engage public history and/or the intersections between public and personal history. Selected essays on poetry and history—as well as a few collections of poems—will serve as texts for the course.
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Abani	M 9:30-12:20
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: Dear Writer, Welcome to this fiction workshop. There are many ways to approach a fiction workshop, but whatever the approach is, it is important to keep in the foreground the idea that we are making literature. What do I mean by this? We have to move beyond the limitation of making a small piece of art that is competent and sufficient to pass a class, and to impress our peers in a classroom (virtual or otherwise), to being able (aspirationally at least) to place the work we make within the larger context of tradition, genre and aesthetic considerations. Remember literature is a frame applied to story at a remove, concerned more with cultural and field/canon making, than with production itself. In this workshop we should focus on all our reading of each other, and perhaps in the supplied readings, on 2 main approaches. Mastering of these two approaches opens up possibilities in writing in very unique ways and will move our craft forward exponentially. In this class we will look at the idea of story and narrative separately and then blend. All story, it seems, arises from, and carries a deeply emotional drive; whereas narrative is more about organizing or the organizational drives that bring clarity and focus to story. You will submit a three-to-five-page aesthetic statement about your approach to fiction and story, editing and writing, and what you’re hoping to develop or achieve by the end of this class, while locating yourself in a tradition (not vaguely but with concrete examples). You will also submit a 15-to-20-page story or first novel chapter. Both of these are due on the first day of class, no exceptions. There will be supplemental and secondary readings and videos to help illustrate a pathway into deeper conversations. We will be flexible and adapt these additional resources as the quarter unfolds its own unique opportunities and challenges. I look forward to seeing you soon. Warmly, Chris Abani
English 520	Professionalization Workshop	Breen	Tu 2-4:50
English 520 Professionalization Workshop Course Description: The aim of this course is to offer PhD students an open and supportive community for discussing professionalization issues of all kinds. It is intentionally designed to be low stress, with P/NP grading and little-to-no homework. Class meetings are intended to help you make the most of your time at NU while also preparing you for positions after graduation. Some sessions will focus on the academic genres that you’ll need to master over the next few years, including the dissertation chapter, the prospectus, the conference abstract, and the course description. Others will be more strategic, addressing issues such as managing committee expectations and navigating difficult relationships. Many class meetings will have a hands-on component, aimed at producing working drafts of documents such as the (academic) CV and the (nonacademic) resume. Time will be reserved in each class session for questions and unstructured discussion (with the option to submit questions anonymously if that is more comfortable). I promise that my answers will be as straightforward as possible.
English 571	Teaching Creative Writing	Seliy	W 10-12:50
English 571 Teaching Creative Writing Course Description: In this course, we will engage with a wide range of possible approaches to the instruction of creative writing. To begin, we will look at the history of Creative Writing programs and the models of teaching that have traditionally guided MFA programs. We will then move on to discuss theories of learning as they apply to fine-arts courses. We will take into consideration intersectional challenges (race, gender, class, disability, etc). And we will think about the differences between teaching undergraduates and graduate students. In the second half of the course we will move into the practical work of designing creative writing courses that have a beginning, middle, and end, and also a clear set of achievable learning objectives. You will do the practical work of drafting syllabi, generating exercises, and selecting reading material for introductory courses in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.