DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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.

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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.

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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.

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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.

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Course Description: We all read for plot to one degree or another, and we all turn to this particular aspect of narrative in quite a bit of our entertainment: we want to know what happens next. But some of us--maybe quite a few of us--struggle with plot when it comes to our own writing. This course is designed to help you think through the structure of plot in narrative form. We'll cover the history of plot, try to figure out why we like it and need, and we'll also trouble and contest this necessity. You'll learn a series of tricks, but you'll also discover which ones may work best for the type of fiction you like to write. And we'll do it all through a mix of cool theories and writers, weird diagrams and acronyms, plus a lot of our own work: we'll generate a bunch of pieces, including at least one full story, with those two essential narrative questions in mind: What happens next? And what happens after that?

Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, workshops, short stories.

Texts Include:

• Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (1555977596)
• Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (1948226138)

Course Description: In this course, we will study braided essays—a nonfiction form that allows us to weave personal narratives with research, reportage, and social observations. How do we keep our narrative voice consistent while we move among seemingly disparate topics? How do we handle setting and characterization alongside data and historical facts? How do we transform multiple threads into a cohesive final essay? Through close readings of essays, we will begin to arrive at some answers that you will employ in your own writing. Regular writing exercises in class will help you to generate material for your braided essays, and workshopping, both in small groups and as a full class, will give you a chance to share your writing with peers, generating opportunities for connections and insights into your literary productions.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Sketches, Essays and Final Creative Portfolio.

Course Description: Students write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering spoken word with evocative sonic textures, tones, instrumentation and silence. This course places equal emphasis on literary quality, vocal performance and production value. We act as writers, performers, producers as we listen deeply into contemporary radio practice. We also encourage one another to experiment, to try weird ideas, to take risks. We will learn to connect with the listener, and we will investigate what it means to write for the ear, distinct from the page and screen. In the process of producing multiple audio works, we will acquire numerous audio production skills. We will write frequently, speak frequently and in varied styles. We will use field mics and studio mics as we harness our unique voices and the voices of others. We will also compute a fair bit as we learn to use audio editing software to produce polished, multilayered soundscapes. By the end of the spring term, we will be more practiced writers, more accomplished multimedia performers and producers, possess a greater number of technological skills and a greater range of artistic expression. No production or technological training is needed prior to this course.

Teaching Method: Hands-on instruction, workshop.

Evaluation Method: Short-form multimedia essays, stories, poems.

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 and move quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by engaging it or walking away from it. Finally, we’ll interrogate the impact of the evolving technology of AI on both our writing and the public’s engagement with literary works. 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. The intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, evolving 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. As part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, final portfolio and project.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 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 other's work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 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 other's work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 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 other's work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Teaching Method: Discussion, workshop.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Short Story Drafts, Final Revision

Texts Include: Published short stories.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Teaching Method: Discussion, workshop.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Short Story Drafts, Final Revision

Texts Include: Published short stories.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Teaching Method: Discussion, workshop.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Short Story Drafts, Final Revision

Texts Include: Published short stories.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

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.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

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.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

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.

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Course Description: This course introduces students to the early English literary canon from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. We will think critically about whose voices and perspectives are represented in, and omitted from, this canon. What values does it enshrine? Whose authority and perspectives does it prioritize? What context does this canon provide for later writers, including writers from traditionally marginalized demographics? Readings will include work by Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, Thomas More, Leo Africanus, John Donne, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, Oludah Equiano, and Samuel Johnson.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation, reading quizzes, poetry recitation, in-class midterm and final essay.

Texts Include: Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volumes A, B, C) ISBN 978-0393603125

Course Description: This course surveys major British literary works spanning the late eighteenth century through World War II and the postcolonial era. You will be introduced to the major literary developments of these two centuries over four units. We begin with Romanticism and its still revolutionary challenges to reigning systems of property, enslavement, patriarchy, and even reason itself (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Wollstonecraft). The class’s second unit engages the afterlife of Romantic revolution and the rise of nineteenth-century prose realism: do realistic novels and short fiction affirm Britain’s transition into an industrial world power or do they expose the inequities of urban life, alienated labor, commoditized leisure, and global empire? We’ll also read nineteenth-century poetry in unit two (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde; Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold).  The course’s third unit, New Forms, explores cataclysmic twentieth-century events and misgivings around the nation’s imperial mandate, which catalyze the rupture with realism that fuels the modernist literary movement. We’ll ponder the political resonance of such modernist formal innovations as stream of consciousness (Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and WWI and modernist poets including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden).  Our fourth unit, Against English, confronts postcolonial reworkings of the Englishness of this literary tradition’s past and future (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, M. NourbeSe Philip). 

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance/ participation/ analytic writing.

Course Description: This course introduces students to the study of cinema with an emphasis on the various “literatures” it engages, including fiction, criticism, and theory across media. It has two primary objectives: 1) to acquaint students with vocabularies and frameworks of analysis required to study cinema in terms specific to that medium; and 2) to familiarize students with a broad range of texts crucial to the study of cinema, enabling them to render persuasive interpretations. Techniques of close analysis will be the paramount skills developed in the course, hopefully leading to deeper appreciation of film and its literatures.

Teaching Method: Lecture, Discussion Section.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Exams, Quizzes, Analytical Projects.

Texts Include: Printed Course Reader.

Course Description: This course charts lives on the verge of catastrophe, breakdown, self-immolation, or extreme violence as represented in some of America’s most vibrant novels and films. We will discuss the role of melodrama, an 18^th-century French moral form that took the place of tragedy after the Revolution made classic Greek, French, and Elizabethan plays illegal to perform.  In all these melodramatic works, private obsession ultimately becomes public spectacle.  We will read Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth (1791); Our N-g (1859); Quicksand (1929); and The Great Gatsby. Featuring seduced and abandoned teens; abused Black indentured servant children; multiracial women struggling in Harlem Renaissance culture; and charming millionaire bootleggers whose obsessions with lost love prove fatal, our texts trace the arc of America’s fascination with excess.   Focusing on obsession narrated in melodramatic form, we will then view the following films:  Way Down East; Of Human Bondage; Sunset Boulevard; and All About Eve.

Teaching Method: Lecture and follow-up discussion.

Evaluation Method: Students will do frequent short in-class writing assignments and complete a mid-term and a final exam.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the terms and techniques of close, medium-specific analysis of feature films, revealing the subtle nuances of camerawork, lighting, sound, and editing that can reinforce, complicate, or even contradict the most overt signals transmitted by script, genre, or performance. The course doubles as a primer in key texts, thinkers, and enduring arguments within gender and sexuality studies, drawing from multiple traditions of feminist, queer, trans, and masculinity-focused analysis, all of which have been crucial to the development of popular and academic film culture over time. Through lectures and discussion sections, students will discover how gender, sexuality, and cinematic storytelling always entail more than meets the eye. They will hone skills of detailed, evidence-based analysis in writing as well as conversation, bolstering and sometimes disrupting their own arguments and assumptions while leaving themselves open to multiple, even contradictory interpretations.

Teaching Method: Two weekly lectures plus a one-hour discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Writing assignments (including at least two full papers), class participation.

Texts Include: All texts will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: This course will familiarize students of literature with the most influential text in Western culture from the perspective of secular literary studies. No prior knowledge of the Bible is presupposed. Among other topics, the course will explore the range of literary genres in the Bible; its narrative techniques; the historical circumstances of its composition; recurrent themes and motifs; the "typology" framing the New Testament as a reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible; and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since we lack time to read the Bible in full, we we will concentrate on books with the most concentrated literary influence from the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy); the Prophets (Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel); and the Writings (Judges, Ruth, Psalms, Song of Songs, and the saga of King David). In the New Testament, we will read selections from the Gospels and the book of Revelation.

Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, reading quizzes, in-class presentation, in-class midterm and final essay.

Texts Include: Harper-Collins Study Bible NRSV, ISBN 0062969420. Other readings will be posted on Canvas.

Course Description: We'll read a range of Shakespeare's plays: comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy, from early in his career to his final works. The course will introduce the plays by introducing them back into the context of the theatre, literary world, and culture in which Shakespeare originally wrote them. We will think about Shakespeare's contexts and how they matter: a theatre on the outskirts of ever-expanding Renaissance London; a financially successful acting company in which he played the simultaneous and often overlapping roles of writer, actor, and co-owner; a world of reading and writing in which words, plots, and texts were constantly being re-circulated into new plays; the rich possibilities of the English language around 1600. We will centrally consider the ways in which these theatrical, literary, and cultural questions register within the plays themselves. What do words, plays, stories do—how do they work—in Shakespeare's plays? Who or what is an audience or an actor in these plays? How do Shakespeare's plays stage issues such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, social class, entertainment and the media -- and how does his approach to these issues continue to speak to our own era? Plays will include: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, As You Like It, Hamlet, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Teaching Method: Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Papers, midterm, final, discussion participation.

Texts Include: We'll use the high-quality, inexpensive Folger Library annotated paperback editions of the following plays, ed. Mowat and Werstine (these editions only; physical texts required):

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (978-1501146213);
• The Merchant of Venice (978-1439191163);
• Henry V (978-0743484879);
• As You Like It (978-0743484862);
• Hamlet, Updated edition (978-1451669411);
• The Tempest, Updated edition (978-1501130014);
• The Two Noble Kinsmen (978-1982170165);
• additional critical readings on Canvas.

Course Description: Colonialism was not funny—but postcolonial writers have repeatedly turned humor into one of their most effective forms of resistance. This course introduces students to postcolonial literature through comedy, irony, satire, parody, and laughter. Focusing on fiction, drama, and memoir from Africa, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, the course examines how writers use humor to expose the absurdities of empire, undermine authority, survive violence, and critique the uneven legacies of colonial rule.

Humor in this course is treated not as comic relief but as a serious political and aesthetic practice. Students will explore why power fears laughter, how satire destabilizes hierarchy, and when humor becomes double‑edged, unsettling, or offensive. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings on laughter, ridicule, mimicry, and performance by thinkers such as Plato (laughter, order, aesthetics, tragedy hierarchy), Sigmund Freud (jokes, repression, psychic release, economy), Frantz Fanon (racial laughter, masking, colonial psyche), Mikhail Bakhtin (carnival, grotesque, popular subversive laughter), Homi Bhabha (mimicry, irony, colonial ambivalence), Terry Eagleton (humor, aggression, politics, ambivalence), and feminist theorists of humor and affect such as Gloria Anzaldúa (border laughter, survival, hybridity), Hélène Cixous (feminist laughter, subversion, excess), and Sara Ahmed (affect, feminist killjoys, unruly emotions).

Designed as a gateway to postcolonial studies, ENGLISH 265 emphasizes close reading, historical context, and discussion rather than specialized theoretical mastery. Students will develop skills in literary analysis while considering how humor travels across cultures, languages, and systems of power.

Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, guided class discussion, close‑reading workshops, small‑group activities, short contextual presentations, and occasional low‑stakes creative or analytical exercises. Emphasis is placed on discussion‑based learning and sustained engagement with primary texts.

Evaluation Methods:

• Short response papers or reading reflections
• One midterm analytical essay
• One final essay or project
• Participation, including in‑class writing and discussion
• No Final Exam.

Primary Literary Texts (May Change):

1. Trevor Noah – Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. One World/Penguin Random House. ISBN‑13: 978‑0399588198
2. Ama Ata Aidoo – No Sweetness Here and Other Stories. The Feminist Press at CUNY. ISBN‑13: 978‑1558611191
3. Tsitsi Dangarembga – Nervous Conditions. Graywolf Press. ISBN‑13: 978‑1644450710
4. Wole Soyinka – The Trials of Brother Jero. Dramatists Play Service. ISBN‑13: 978‑0822210900
5. Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners. Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN‑13: 978‑0141188416
6. Dany Laferrière – How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN‑13: 978‑1553655855
7. NoViolet Bulawayo – We Need New Names. Back Bay Books (Little, Brown & Company). ISBN‑13: 978‑0316230841

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 “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.

Teaching Method: Lecture and Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Exams and Paper.

Texts Include: 

• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton Critical Edition) 0393614565
• Lorriane Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun 9780679755319

Course Description: In this quarter we’ll explore North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850s. We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature? Who counts as an American? Who shall speak and for whom? We embark on this journey at a moment of intense questioning about historical memory and literary traditions: for example, various organizations are still debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts). At the same time, we have all seen the removal--and sometimes the return--of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy. We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who tell contrasting stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom. This course introduces American literature from its beginnings, at the time Native peoples first encountered Europeans, through the Civil War. (A related course, English 271, takes up the later part of American literature's story. Students are welcome to take both courses.)

Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all lectures and section meetings is required and will be taken.

Texts Include: There are two required texts for the course: volumes A and B of the TENTH edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. ISBN: 978-0393884425.

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 study what the first Native American Renaissance was. 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: Lecture and Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, in-class midterm, mixed-media paper.

Texts Include: 

• Louise Erdrich, The Round House, 9780062065254
• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians, 9781597146289

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.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Midterm, Papers, Responses.

Texts Include: 

• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN 978-157322531)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888)

Course Description: In the United States, we often talk about Latinx people using blurry labels. We discuss the Latino vote, the Hispanic population, and the Latinx community. This course explores the nuances of these labels through the stories that Latinx authors have been narrating for the past six decades. As we follow characters through conflicts and inhabit their quotidian lives, we will navigate between the specificity of a story and the complexity of a Latinx identity. Class discussions will study emotional ties to places and languages, feminist thought, and the racial and ethnic diversity within the Latinx community. We will read authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Justin Torres, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Yxta Maya Murray.

A one-quarter course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course follows an illustrative sample of authors from the 1970s onward and focuses on short stories, poetry, and essays. It aims to provide students with a historical, political, and literary foundation for further exploration of Latinx literature.

Teaching Method: Lecture.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, papers, creative assignment.

Texts Include: 

• We the Animals, Justin Torres, 9780547844190
• God Went Like That, Yxta Maya Murray, 9780810146020

Course Description: Race, a working fiction we believe in—how can or do or should or shouldn’t we read race on the page or onscreen, in stories and situations defined by their distinction from what we would call real life? What sort of fictions coalesce around race that inhibit careful reading and, alternately, how can attending to race’s fictionality make us smarter about how and what we’re reading and watching? What sorts of literary traditions (genres, formal approaches) have developed out of taking race seriously as a condition of human life? This is a course places both “race” and “fiction” under view as matters of interpretation, an invitation to practice and reconsider how we read.

Teaching Method: Lecture-discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, quiz, essays (2).

Texts Include: TBA.

Course Description: Amid environmental threat and damage, writers and artists ask: how might we live otherwise? Are there values, practices, or experiments that can deepen our relationship to the environment and help us cultivate better modes of living? This course traces a history of experiments in environmental living, including Henry David Thoreau’s account of his years at Walden Pond, Jamaica Kincaid’s exploration of the politics rooted in her garden, and Eleanor Catton’s depiction of young environmentalists doomed via their individual desires. Through these texts, we analyze the capacities of literary modes like the pastoral, the elegiac, and the apocalyptic. The novels, poems, plays, and films in this course function as beacons and as warnings. Environmental experiments lead to disaster and rifts as often as they lead to connection and belonging. But collectively, these literary works draw us into the urgent project of revising environmental thought and narratives, thereby rewriting what is possible in an age of ecological collapse.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion sections.

Evaluation Method: Lecture attendance, participation in discussion, two short papers, and a final project.

Texts Include:

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 0393930904
• Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden: Book, 0374527768
• Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, 1250321719

Course Description: IFrom ASMR to the fidget spinner, how has therapy expanded beyond interactions between “therapist” and “client”? And how do the changing notions of “cure” and “care” intersect with questions of race, gender, and class? In this course, we will explore communication technologies (crisis hotlines, social media, podcasts) and consumer goods (portable audio systems, plush dolls) that promise alternative access to mental healthcare, as well as how these developments in therapeutic form have impacted art and literature. How does Tan Lin’s “vibe-y” poetry mimic our shortened attention spans, probing the racial valences of what we find “comforting” and “calming”? And how does Ed Park’s novel poke fun at the office space, where boredom and anxiety are revealed to compatible feelings? We will work together to understand the minor feelings their works both cite and elicit—healing, relaxing, soothing—and how therapeutic cultures help us understand politics more broadly today.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Course Description: What is the right thing to do? This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. Biblical ideas of justice, utilitarianism, rights theory, and more justice theories will be explored. We will read literature alongside these theories, following how such ideas of justice shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived. Class participation is required.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers.

Texts:

• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates (I will send you the online link).
• Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). ISBN-10 0374532508.
• Billy Budd by Herman Melville. (TOR). ISBN-10 1500412910.
• More texts to be added.

Course Description: Asian American literary and cinematic arts invite us to understand their achievements in terms of an ongoing interrogation of the nature and nativity of speech: From "model minority" to "enemy aliens," from fortune-cookie clichés to talk-stories, and from "FOB" to "crazy rich," the representation and self-representations of Asian Americans weave an ambivalent -- sometimes affirmative, sometimes monstrous -- and ever-changing story. In this class, we will explore works of fiction, film, and other media by which Asian American realities are created, disturbed, and otherwise transformed, with a concentration on the themes of speaking, silence, place, displacement, protest, deviance, and exile.

Teaching Method: Short lectures, discussion, collaboration.

Evaluation Method: Brief weekly writing assignments, in-class peer-reviews, mid-term paper, final project, active class participation.

Texts Include: Texts may include novels, short stories, and graphic novels by Chang-Rae Lee, Aimee Phan, Bharati Mukherjee, and Mariko Tamaki. Films and television episodes may include Fresh Off the Boat, The Half of It, I’m the One That I Want, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Crazy Rich Asians.

Course Description: This version of English 300 will examine the following works of fiction and film: Charlotte Temple; Our N--; The Scarlet Letter; Passing and Quicksand; and Broken Blossoms, Way Down East; Double Indemnity.  These narratives of seduction and abandonment span the era of the nation’s founding through beyond the 20^th century.  We will explore the genre of melodrama, from which these plots derive, which was born out of the French Revolution’s rejection of tragedy as an elitist theatrical form. According to recent film theorists, melodrama isn the underlying generic driver of cinema itself.  Our discussions will focus on gender and genre, using feminist theory to make sense of melodrama, which while often denigrated today, in its heyday was a distinctly American art form.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Short in-class essays building to longer form exegetical papers, 4-5 pages each.

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: Lecture-discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, Quiz, Essays (2).

Texts include: TBA.

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 vibrant reading, interpretation, and creative adaptation. What enduring questions, insights, and understandings has her story inspired in its long global reception across countries, cultures, languages, and media? How do the extraordinary conditions and influences surrounding its creation—the French Revolution, Mary’s intellectual legacies from her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, myths of Prometheus, Genesis, and the Ancient Mariner, scientific experiments in “animal electricity” or Galvanism--shape the ways it speaks to the preoccupations of readers, thinkers, and artists in particular historical and cultural moments? As for Frankenstein’s friends: what were Mary’s friends and ghost story rivals—Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, Claire Clairmont--writing? How does the genius loci or “spirit of place”—of 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 “Darkness,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Manfred, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” Prometheus Unbound—along with letters, journals, and memoirs? As we join this openended, myriadminded conversation—historical and contemporary, scholarly and popular, critical and creative—we’ll aim to formulate and debate our own questions, deepen our literary historical understanding, practice and hone our interpretative, analytic, and writing tools and skills, and have fun.

Evaluation Method: Prompt attendance, good preparation, active participation, written and oral exercises (25%); Friday Posts (15%); class presentation (15%); short analytic essay (15%); course project proposal and the project (25%); self-evaluation (5%).

Texts Include: Third (3^rd) Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (2022). Other required and supplementary readings will be available in Canvas Course Reserves, Canvas Files, Web, &c.

Course Description: Though we often think of fan fiction as an advent of our contemporary moment, fan fiction extends at least as far back as the eighteenth century—and much further depending on who you talk to. Fans and fictions have increasingly shaped the way we encounter literature, animating works from the past with different agendas, desires, and needs that speak to the contemporary moment. This course explores texts and the adaptations they inspire. We will think about how adaptations not only comment on and critique earlier texts, but also how they might inspire us to encounter the original text in new ways. How might we regard adaptations as standalone works, with lives and afterlives of their own? From modern reworkings of Shakespeare to critical retellings of Austen, adaptations ask us to consider how familiar stories might be leveraged to address different audiences. We will also explore some related concerns around fan fiction including fandoms and fan culture, the death of the author, and approaching work created by problematic authors.

Texts Include: The Tempest, A Tempest, Pride and Prejudice, and Longbourn. Films include: Ex Machina, Pride and Prejudice (2005), and Fire Island. Weekly readings will be paired with theoretical and critical work.

Course Description: This course explores Anglophone literature of witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, inquiring into what accusations of "witchcraft" reveal about the societies and individuals who make them. Who are the witch hunters? Who are the witches? What can these narratives reveal about gender, power, and community? We will consider dramatic texts, from William Shakespeare's Macbeth to Arthur Miller's The Crucible; modern fiction from Maryse Condé's I, Tituba to Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate; and films such as Robert Eggers The Witch (2005) to achieve a broad view of the beliefs, ideologies, and politics of witchcraft accusations. As we consider arguments and evidence invoked to scapegoat witches, we will also build our understanding of how arguments and evidence work in literary studies—distinguishing fact from opinion, interrogating assumptions, and improving writerly clarity and precision. How do we distinguish a valid line of inquiry and argumentation from a witch hunt?

Teaching Method: Discussions with brief lectures.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation, in-class presentation, in-class midterm and final essay.

Texts Include:

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth ISBN: 1904271413
• Thomas Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton ISBN: 1554814162
• Arthur Miller, The Crucible ISBN: 0142437339
• Maryse Condé, I, Tituba ISBN: 0813927676
• Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate ISBN: 0802122833
• Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch ISBN: 1250849314

Course Description: Childhood as we understand it today was invented during the nineteenth century, particularly in British fiction. This critical methods seminar investigates how literary form relates and responds to Romantic and Victorian ideas about human development, inheritance, race, and class. As we enhance the skills necessary to conduct advanced work in the humanities, we will ask: why are there so many orphans in novels by major British authors? What is innocence, and who gets to embody it? When does childhood end? How does gender shape different narratives about childhood? When did children become priceless, and how did they become so pricey? Along the way, we will use the figure of the child to interrogate different interpretative methods in literary and cultural studies. Primary texts may include Oliver Twist (1838), Wuthering Heights (1847), Alice in Wonderland (1865), and Jude the Obscure (1895). 

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, short lectures.

Evaluation Methods: Blue Book notebook, leading discussion, short writing assignments, midterm essay, final essay.

Texts may include:  Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847); Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865); Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895); critical essays by Robin Bernstein, Lee Edelman, James Kincaid, and David Kramnick, among others.

Course Description: The goal of this course is to familiarize students with practices of “close reading” fundamental to the broader study of literature and culture. With this general goal in mind the course will proceed in two sections. In the first section of the quarter students will read selections from Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century along with short fiction by contemporary authors, possibly including George Saunders, Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and others. The second half of the course will build on the first by considering the topic of aesthetic judgment. Put otherwise, the second half of the course will think about how and why we talk about art in the ways we do (and why that matters). Why, for example, does it make sense to call something ‘interesting’ and something else ‘cute’ or something else ‘slop’? The idea here is that getting to know this mode of thinking will improve our sense of how close reading matters. For this portion of the course we will think in depth with literary theorist Sianne Ngai. This progression will prepare students to develop a final analytical paper on an aesthetic judgment.

Teaching Method: Discussion, short lecture.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Papers, participation.

Texts Include: 

• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 978-0674088122
• Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century 978-0691265704
• Printed course reader

Course Description: If you’ve watched Saltburn or the Netflix series Bridgerton, you know that the English estate has undergone some cultural revision. No longer the opulent backdrop of period drama, the country house is the site of reckonings with the history of England’s overseas empire, traffic in captive people, and flagrantly unequal distribution of wealth and power. In this class, we will trace the ongoing force of English literary refigurations of landed property initially tied to the largesse and power of the lord of the manor. We’ll first explore the early modern country house poem, where the landed estate serves as a locus of pastoral abundance and naturalized social, architectural, and ecological order. But as we will discover, cracks appear in this vision. Moving forward, we encounter the idealized country house contested from the vantage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels whose narrators and protagonists include servants, colonial subjects, and witnesses to family decadence financed by slavery. We’ll turn to twentieth-century texts that claim the decaying country house as source of ghostly national nostalgia. Our final unit will engage public revision (in print, monuments, and activism) of the estate as “English Heritage.” We will watch at least one episode of Bridgerton (Season 1, 2020) and the film Saltburn (2023) to assess recent popular re-representations of the landed estate.

Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on three short essays and one group presentation.

Texts May Include:

Country house poems may include: Aemelia Lanyer, “A Description of Cookham” (1611); Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616); Thomas Carew, “To Saxham” (1640); Robert Herrick, “A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton” (1648); Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House” (1651); Abraham Cowley, “On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House” (1668); John Dryden, “To My Honoured Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton in the County of Huntingdon, Esquire” (1699); Anne Finch, “Upon My Lord Winchilsea’s Converting the Mount in His Garden to a Terrace” (c. 1703); Mary Leapor, “Crumble-Hall” (1751); John Agard, “Upon Revisiting Mansfield Park” (2006).

Novels and short stories may include: Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (1762); Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847); Arthur Canon Doyle, “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” (1891); Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938); Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Isabel Colgate, The Shooting Party (1980); Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day (1989).

Course Description: The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process. NOTE: This class may not be taken by students who have previously enrolled in ENGLISH/CLS 211.

Teaching Method: Brief lectures, discussions, and co-labs.

Evaluation Method: Weekly (w)reading exercises; mid-term paper; final paper.

Texts Include: All texts for this course will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: TBA

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?

Texts Include: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, and Han Kang, The Vegetarian. Short stories and essays include selections by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkala-Sa, Carmen Maria Machado, and Leonora Carrington, Audre Lorde, and Claudia Rankine.

Course Description: Perhaps no words inspire as much heart-stopping fear and greedy pleasure as those of Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown to her “dearest, gentle reader”: “You do not know me, and rest assured, you never shall, but be forewarned dear reader, I certainly know you.” It’s all well and good to thrive on the scandals and rumors of others, but even in Bridgerton’s glitter-dusted, macaron-toned fantasy world, no one is safe from a public dressing-down in the gossip rags. This is a course about gossip and rumors—the havoc they wreak, the dynamics they shift, shake, and upend. This is also a course about the secret pleasure and social utility of gossip as a mechanism for cementing connections and intimacies, conveying information, and influencing collective undercurrents. So often belittled as the idle chatter of frivolous women, gossip rarely garners the credit it deserves as a tool of subversive social power. Indeed, the ease with which it can be disregarded proves its influence can fly under the radar. We will consider the way gossip organizes information and establishes channels of power through the negotiation of secrecy and disclosure. We will also explore the ease with which gossip narratives take on lives and agency of their own and seemingly circulate without origin. Some of our orienting questions include how does gossip become gendered and how does gender inflect the way gossip is received and interpreted? How does gossip operate through different mediums—whispered words, letters, social media? And most centrally, we will consider how the stories we hear and tell others about shape the way we perceive people and things, regardless of whether or not we know those stories to be true. One thing’s for certain: there’s nothing like getting the inside scoop—after all, who doesn’t love a good story?

Texts Include: Jane Austen, Emma (1815); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905), Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (2021). Short stories may include work by John Updike, Helen Oyeyemi, and more. Films and shows may include Mean Girls (2004), Women Talking (2022), and episodes of Gossip Girl (2007) and Bridgerton (2020).

Course Description: As we follow along the road to Canterbury, we not only hear a compendium of stories—both pious and irreverent—but we also meet a collection of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society: a noble knight and a “manly” monk, a drunken miller and a virtuous priest, a dainty nun and a domineering wife, who compete with one other, trading insults as well as tales. As we read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, from pious exempla to moral fables, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience. We will also examine the changes Chaucer makes to his sources, by comparing several of his tales to the stories told by Gower and Boccaccio. Against and alongside this literary context, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales: How is a romance different when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife? What is the relationship between the teller and her tale? And conversely, when does the tale transcend its teller? We will be reading Chaucer’s poem in the original Middle English, becoming familiar with the vocabulary and the sound of the language by reading aloud. At the end of the quarter, we will give an in-class performance of one of the tales.

Teaching Method: Discussion and some lectures.

Evaluation Method:  Class attendance and participation required; discussion board posts; language quizzes; an oral presentation; and three short papers. 

Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $25) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions).

Textbooks available at:  Norris Center Bookstore.

Course Description: Medieval culture was overwhelmingly Christian, but it was heir to several pre-Christian religions. Germanic paganism brought monsters, defiant heroism, and expectation of a coming “twilight of the gods,” while Celtic paganism supplied magical objects and mysterious Otherworld visitors. Contrary to popular belief, the Church did not suppress the use of pagan sources, but medieval writers transformed the materials they inherited, producing sophisticated texts that present a Christian point of view layered above tantalizing and elusive pagan subtexts. In this multimedia class, we’ll look at (1) the Old English world of Beowulf along with a recent apocalyptic novel based on it, Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife; (2) four tales about magical shape-shifting characters: Marie de France’s Yonec and Bisclavret, The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and (3) the romance of the Holy Grail—a Celtic magical cauldron that evolved into a prized Christian relic. The class will include a performance of Beowulf in Old English, sung to the Anglo-Saxon harp; websites on key archaeological finds; and three film adaptations by Éric Rohmer, David Lowery, and the unforgettable British comedy team, Monty Python.

Teaching Method: Discussion; some lectures; film viewing.

Evaluation Method: Oral presentations; five very short assignments; three 5-7 page papers.

Texts Include: 

• Old English elegies, "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer"
• Beowulf (translations by Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley)
• Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife
• Marie de France, "Yonec" and "Bisclavret"
• Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Tale"
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Chretien de Troyes, Perceval
• Robert de Boron, Merlin and the Grail
• Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Holy Grail"

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 seminar 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, beast epic, saints’ lives, debate poems, and romance.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Discussion; three 5-7 page papers, including one creative paper.

Texts Include: 

• anonymous lyric poems
• Richard Barber, trans., Bestiary
• Chretien de Troyes, Yvain, or The Knight with the Lion
• Marie de France, "Bisclavret" and "Yonec"
• Gerald of Wales, "Of the Prodigies of Our Times" (selections)
• Renard the Fox
• Jean d'Arras, Melusine
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Sir Gowther
• Chaucer, "The Nun's Priest's Tale"
• David Bell, Wholly Animals: A Book of Beastly Tales (selections)
• Lydgate, "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep"
• five critical and historical essays

Course Description: Fantasy, confusion, seduction, despair, faith: these burning topics flourished in the famous love poetry of the English Renaissance. Why, we will explore, did people serving in the court of Queen Elizabeth become obsessed with writing sonnets about frustrated desire? How did poets link the confusion caused by tortuous love with other issues–– how to express feeling in writing, how to get ahead in the world, or how to “possess” others imaginatively? How were the “private” issues of love deeply intertwined with politics, religion, race, nationalism, and gender identity? When did love cement social bonds and when was it an unruly force that seemed to unravel the very fabric of the self or the community? We’ll tackle these questions by reading poetry in the context of religious controversies, court politics, colonialism, same-sex desire, feminism, medical theory, and early modern science.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Class engagement; quizzes; papers; oral presentations.

Texts Include:

• The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems (which includes Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets. You should buy this book (ISBN: 9780199535798).
• Romeo and Juliet. You may read this play in any scholarly edition that has notes, such as the Norton, Riverside, Bevington, Signet or Arden. Editions online without notes will not allow you to understand the language.

Course Description: Today we study and perform the plays of Shakespeare, but for playgoers of Shakespeare’s time, the play was not the only thing. The business of playing in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries—playwrights, actors, supernumeraries who collected pennies from playgoers and sold them food or beer—participated worked on scales both larger and smaller than the play: the location of the playhouses in London, the yearly repertories of competing companies, genres of plays and kinds of parts in them, but also the working words and gestures of the actors and the worn worlds of prop and costume. Looking at these other aspects of playing at reveal patterns invisible at the level of the individual play. We will approach Elizabethan playing as a self-organizing system made up not just of plays, but of many agents, interests, and objects. In this class we will study plays, of course—but also neighborhoods of London, floorplans of playhouses, lists of props and players’ wills, the plays different companies put on to take advantage of trends and slow periods. Looking at how plays were made and what they were made out of, we will develop different ways of looking at “Shakespeare’s theater.”

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Participation, papers, other projects, testing.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: Just about everyone has heard of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, whether they know Shakespeare’s play or not. But Romeo and Juliet’s story does not start or end with Shakespeare. Almost three hundred years earlier, Dante mentions it in passing in the Divine Comedy. More than three hundred years later, Romeo and Juliet turn up in West Side Story as teenagers from different backgrounds in gentrifying Manhattan, and they appear in dozens of other versions in between. Romeo and Juliet owe much to traditions of both courtly love and bawdy country stories, and they in turn have given us many of our ways of understanding love and the intensities that surround it. Idealized or criticized, Romeo and Juliet seem to slip free of the work in which they appear to lead many other lives. In this class we will explore some of the ways Shakespeare’s play and Romeo and Juliet’s story have appeared and reappeared, changed and persisted. We will use this body of writing to explore some different ways of reading, understanding, and using literature. We will also learn how we use this story to think about values, about love, about violence, and about stories themselves.

Teaching Method: Seminar

Evaluation Method: Participation, papers, other projects, testing.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: This course will bring together English Renaissance literature, classical and Renaissance theories of spectatorship, and academic writing on horror as a genre. Building on canonical thinkers from Aristotle to Kristeva, we will consider how early modern theater anticipated conventions of the Gothic novel, the genre more traditionally cited as the birthplace of horror. Across three units—focused on revenge tragedy, witches, and monsters—we will consider the psychological, cultural, and civic functions of this horror or proto-horror literature. We will think critically about the potential, the inevitability, and the risks of approaching early literature through anachronistic frames of reference.

Teaching Method: Two 80-minute meetings, brief lectures and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation, reading quizzes, in-class presentations, midterm and final papers written in class.

Texts Include: 

• Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ISBN 978-1904271604
• John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ISBN 978-1904271512
• Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ISBN 978-1472520456
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ISBN 978-1904271413
• Thomas Dekker et al, The Witch of Edmonston, ISBN 1904271529
• Darryl Jones, Horror: A Very Brief Introduction, ISBN 978-0198755562

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.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Questions, Papers.

Texts Include: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton, ed Kerrigan. ISBN-10: 0679642536.

Course Description: How can we think about the transhistorical nature of queerness in English culture? Moving from the Renaissance to the present, the course follows the literary careers of two influential tragedies -- Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s adaptation and rewriting of it in Richard II -- to think about the representation of queer kingship over time. Together we’ll analyze theatrical revolutionary Bertolt Brecht’s landmark early twentieth-century adaptation of Marlowe’s play and its “alienation effect,” twentieth-century productions and films of Marlowe tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman’s), and twenty-first century rewritings, including a re-gendered Shakespeare version, and a Marlowe companion play that incorporates figures in/against queer culture from Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk, and Julie Andrews to Margaret Thatcher (Tom Stuart’s play After Edward). We’ll conclude with the recent gay rom-com film “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings will delve into the history of sexuality, queer readership and book history, and theories of dramatic adaptation and performance.

Teaching Method: Mini-lectures and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Essays and projects; course engagement through participation and Hypothesis annotation.

Texts Include: 

• Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Arden Early Modern Drama (Bloomsbury), ISBN 9781408133453. Paperback.
• William Shakespeare, Richard II, Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds., updated edition, Folger Shakespeare series (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 9781501146282. Paperback.
• Bertolt Brecht, Edward the Second: A Chronicle Play, Eric Bentley, trans., Grove Press, ISBN 9780802151476, ISBN 10 0802151477
• Tom Stuart, After Edward, Oberon Modern Plays, ISBN 9781786827050
• "Red, White, and Royal Blue" on video may require renting/buying access via Amazon online.

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 Include: a selection of eighteenth-century recipe collections, penmanship books, pamphlets, 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. Contemporary selections may include Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie.

Course Description: Step aside, Bridgerton. If you’re in search of drama, intrigue, seduction, and scandal, eighteenth-century British novels can make even Bridgerton look mundane. If Bridgerton appears to reimagine Regency England as more racially diverse than it really was, the actual Britain of the eighteenth century was by no means racially homogenous, and interracial encounters and marriages as well as mixed-race figures were increasingly present in life and literature of the period. In this course, we will read novels, narratives, and short stories featuring mixed-race figures. The dramatic rise in texts representing mixed-race characters as heiresses in the latter half of the century highlight rising concerns about which interests were most important to preserve—economic ones or racial ones. As we will explore, wealthy mixed-race heiresses also often occupy a contradictory position as both a product of and beneficiary of plantation slavery and exploitation mercantile ventures. Tracking the appearance of mixed-race characters in British literature alongside the development of empire, increasing cross-racial contact, solidifying racial formations, generic conventions, and the marriage plot, we will think about how novelistic and narrative forms cohere through the simultaneous representation and suppression of mixed-race figures. How does the trajectory of the marriage plot shift for mixed-race characters? How are multiracial characters depicted as mobilizing their racial indeterminacy? What anxieties, values, and interests do these texts, largely authored by white British women, register? Throughout the class, we will interrogate how multiracial characters consistently trouble tidy narratives of racial difference as well as the genres to which they belonged.

Texts Include: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688), The Female American (1767), Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), and The Woman of Colour (1808). Shorter works include: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786) and Jane Austen, Sanditon (1817). Films and shows may include Belle (2013) and selected episodes of Sanditon (2019) and Bridgerton (2020).

Course Description: This class is a reading-intensive study of a selection of Jane Austen's novels, with strong emphasis on close reading the innovative language of her prose. Though best known for her contributions to the popular genres of romance, Austen has always been a writer's writer, meticulous in composition and renowned as a stylist. Our focus will be on the satirical edges of her work, and on understanding how irony works in her novels. We'll read some 18th century precursors and some recent criticism as help, but most of the class will be spent with Austen herself. In addition to the novels listed, we'll read from her early writings, letters, and the epistolary novella Lady Susan.

Teaching Method: Short lectures and seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; quizzes; short writings assignments; midterm; longer final writing assignment.

Texts Include:

• Jane Austen, Emma ( ‎ 0141439580)
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (0141439513)
• D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (069112387X)

Course Description: How do literary figures and poetic practices take shape as a response to the asymmetries of cultural encounter? This course explores the marketplace of ideas, things, and people crossing the Atlantic before and after 1800, that — for better and worse — built the world we live in today. We will be especially attuned to important trends of thought as they traveled among Great Britain, the European continent, West Africa, and the Americas. Addressing such topics as ghosts and the Gothic, anti-slavery and colonial discourse, transcendental philosophy, and new understandings of “nature,” the course examines the effects of European expansion across the Atlantic in the period spanning the 18th and 19th centuries. What forms of power were necessarily imposed in the course of this expansion, and what kinds of violence forgotten or suppressed? As we will discover, the literary texts of the Romantic era often ask or beg precisely these questions, in a variety of genres and forms. Please note that, although we will often consider how history gets told and retold, this is not a history course: our focus is instead on the comparative analysis of literary representation.

Teaching Method: Short lectures, with seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; quizzes; short writing assignments; midterm; longer final writing assignment.

Texts Include: 

• Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (ISBN 0140444394)
• Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (ISBN 0142437166)
• Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays (ISBN 014243762X)
• Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text (ISBN 9780199537150)

Course Description: The year 1847 marked the publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, each written under the same surname. As rumors circulated across London about Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—were they brothers? Were they all one man?—Emily and Anne Brontë contracted tuberculosis and died. Only their sister Charlotte would live to see the world discover their true identities, which means that only she would have any say in how their works would be remembered and understood. This course interrogates the legacies of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, three sisters who transformed the English domestic novel with their genre-bending fiction about marriage, gender, race, madness, colonialism, and the wild Yorkshire moors. Beyond analyzing their most canonical novels, we will also examine a range of Brontë materials—such as biographies, retellings, pop music, and film adaptations—that illustrate the intrigue these literary siblings have garnered across time and space. How are the Brontës reanimated in recent fiction, and for what purpose? Why do we remain transfixed not only by their novels but by the girls and women they might have been? Additional texts may include Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Emily (2022), and “Wuthering Heights” (2026).

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, short lectures.

Evaluation Methods: Blue Book notebook, leading discussion, midterm essay, final essay.

Texts may include: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; Agnes Gray; Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); selected poems and juvenile fiction; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (1990); To Walk Invisible (2016), dir. Sally Wainwright; Carmen Maria Machado, “The Resident” (2017); Emily (2022), dir. Frances O’Connor; “Wuthering Heights” (2026), dir. Emerald Fennell.

Course Description: In the Victorian detective novel, The Moonstone (1868), Rachel Verinder’s diamond vanishes on the night of her eighteenth birthday. But who is real criminal in the story– the thief who lifted the jewel from Rachel’s safe, or the British army officer who first stole it from a temple in India? This course examines the birth of the detective novel (as well as Sherlock Holmes, one of the world’s most famous detectives) in nineteenth-century popular fiction and asks how authors used themes of crime, detection, and punishment to make sense of their place in Britain’s global empire. How did authors transform anxieties about British imperial violence and colonial rebellion into narrative suspense? How do detective logics render certain crimes visible? And how do they render others—especially those committed by the empire itself— invisible? Reading gothic, sensation and detective fiction alongside historical legal cases and newspaper reports, we will consider how fictional narratives and real-world reporting used shared rhetorics to define the limits of crime and justice, innocence and Englishness.

Evaluation Method: The course will include a final research paper which invites students to become detectives themselves—investigating the literary and historical representations of an imperial “crime” of their choice.

Texts Include: A selection of the earliest works of English crime fiction, including Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of Four” (1890). We will also consider a selection of twenty and twenty-first century fiction. Possible texts include H.G. de Lisser’s Jamaican gothic, The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929) and Abhir Mukherjee’s Indian detective novel A Rising Man (2016).

Course Description: The nineteenth century was an age of empires—but it was also an age of oceans. Merchant ships, pirate vessels, and convict transports crisscrossed the seas, carrying goods, people, and power. In this course, we follow the routes of empire, investigating how the ocean became a stage for adventure, exploitation, and resistance. Reading Robinson Crusoe’s fictional tale of shipwreck and survival alongside Mary Prince’s account of enslavement’s harsh realities and additional selections of British and Caribbean fiction, we will consider how maritime mobility could promise both freedom and profound unfreedom. What do seafaring novels reveal about British and Caribbean identity and the ways that they were intertwined? Does hidden treasure represent imperial fantasy or the buried memory of colonial violence? With readings of pirates, smugglers and mutineers, we'll  push our investigations further, questioning how these figures transform the sea into a site of revolutionary justice and community. We'll also ask how contemporary reimaginings including Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) and Black Sails (2014) romanticize or reckon with the violence at the heart of Atlantic empire? What does their persistent presence in contemporary texts and media reveal about our culture today? Pairing nineteenth-century texts with contemporary poetry by Derek Walcott and M. NourbeSe Philip and postcolonial scholarship by Nicole Aljoe and Edward Said, we’ll think and write about how representations of the sea can confront violent histories and imagine more equitable futures.

Additional readings may include selections from Emmanuel Appadocca (1853), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), Armadale (1866), and Treasure Island (1883)

Course Description: Novels often describe real and complete worlds that are proximate to our own, with entirely imaginary people living their daily lives in a continuous but parallel universe. But what happens when the contract with the “real world” is broken? How do we understand novels that reanimate myths, folktales, and legends not outside of, but within the real? What new worlds emerge and how might they interfere with the real? Around 1950, Latin American writers began to break away from “realist” writing to explore a realm between the real and the magical, giving rise to what is now the established style of “magical realism.” Following the “Boom” period of Latin American writing, magical realism became a household style for South Asian and American literatures, ranging from Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison. Throughout the quarter, we examine the evolution of the style from its nascent critique of Latin American dictatorship to its struggle with postcolonial disappointment to the open transhistorical wound of the Atlantic slave trade. The course charts an inquiry into a revolt against the dictates of the real and considers how the deployment of this style can yield significant political interventions. Texts will include texts like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The course will also foray into theories around magical realism and its variations. Assignments comprise one close reading paper, in-class presentations, and a creative zine exploring magical realism.

Teaching Method: Discussion/seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance/participation/papers.

Texts Include: 

• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, ISBN-13: ‎978-0374537388
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1400034710
• Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, ISBN-13: 978-0140157376
• Toni Morrison, Beloved, ISBN-13: 978-1400033416

Course Description: South Asian writers seem to win a lot of literary prizes. Ever since Salman Rushdie catapulted to international fame with the Booker Prize in 1981, writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have become the mainstay of not only literary prize cultures and the festival circuit but also U.S. university campuses. What has made South Asian literature so popular, especially when it deals with somber questions of anticolonial resistance, postcolonial nation-building, violence, and loss? This course will introduce students to twentieth and twenty-first century South Asian Literatures in English characterized by exciting stylistic innovations in magical realism, modernist language games, lyrical prose, and biting satire. By examining novels, short stories, poems, political writing, and films, we will ask, how has literature shaped both the promise and failure of the postcolonial nation-state? What might South Asian writing teach us about the global project of democratic world-making? Topics of discussion will include gender, caste, empire, globalization, migrancy, and environmentalism.

Teaching Method: Discussion/seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance/participation/papers.

Texts Include: 

• Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable. ISBN-13: 978-0141393605
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children. ISBN-13: 978-0812976533
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. ISBN-13: 978-0812979657

Course Description: This course explores how postcolonial writers engage the environment not as passive backdrop but as a contested site of struggle, survival, and resistance. Students examine how colonialism and global capitalism have reshaped relationships to land, water, animals, and climate, and how literature responds to environmental violence, dispossession, and ecological crisis while imagining alternative modes of care, belonging, and sustainability.

In addition to novels and memoir, the course features brief poetry interludes, engaging short works by writers such as Niyi Osundare, Kofi Awoonor, Gcina Mhlophe, and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others, foregrounding poetry as a vital form of ecological critique, protest, and cultural memory. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings in postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities by thinkers such as Rob Nixon (slow violence, environmental injustice), Homi Bhabha (hybridity, colonial ambivalence), Robert J. C. Young (colonialism, decolonization, resistance), Cajetan Iheka (African ecologies, resistance aesthetics), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (islands, oceanic ecologies, empire), alongside other scholars at the intersection of postcolonialism, ecology, and resistance. The course emphasizes close reading, historical context, and comparative analysis.

Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, guided discussion, close reading workshops, small group activities, short contextual presentations, comparative analysis across genres, and occasional low stakes reflective or creative exercises. Emphasis is placed on discussion based learning and sustained engagement with primary texts.

Evaluation Method: Short response papers or reading reflections, one midterm analytical essay, one final essay or project; participation, including discussion and in class writing.

Texts Include: 

• Amitav Ghosh – The Hungry Tide. Publisher: Mariner Books. ISBN 13: 978 0618869843
• Indra Sinha – Animal’s People. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 13: 978 1416523325
• Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 13: 978 0374527071
• Ken Saro Wiwa – A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. Publisher: Penguin Books. ISBN 13: 978 0140255379
• Linda Hogan – Solar Storms. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 13: 978 0393343687
• Nnedi Okorafor – Lagoon. Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks. ISBN 13: 978 0062299039
• Poetry Packet (Canvas)
  Selected poems by Niyi Osundare, David Rubadiri, Kofi Awoonor, Benjamin Zephaniah, and women poets such as Gcina Mhlophe (orality, land, communal memory), Kristina Rungano (land, political struggle), Grace Nichols (Caribbean ecologies, embodiment), Warsan Shire (displacement, environmental precarity), and Safia Elhillo (diaspora, memory, landscape), among others, engaging environmental crisis and resistance through diverse poetic forms.

Course Description: In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary black speculative fiction, including works by Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin, to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to interrogate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about black life, worlds, and futures. The course argues that speculative works—both narrative fiction and theoretical writing—invite readers to think beyond the boundaries of known realities to see new modes of being in the world. Our study will concern texts written in the contemporary, but students will be invited to consider how contemporary manifestations of the speculative and radical necessarily speak across time and space into both past and future manifestations/imaginaries of black experiences, embodiments, and identities.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Papers and projects.

Texts Include: 

• Victor La Valle, Destroyer 1684150558
• N.K. Jemisin, Far Sector 1779512058
• Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland 0374266778

Course Description: Toni Morrison was a Nobel Laureate who experimented with a number of literary genres, including her famous novels and—less famous, still renowned—essays and criticism. This course offers an introduction to the work of Toni Morrison, as author, critic, and literary citizen. Alongside various texts within her oeuvre, we will read past and recent criticism on Morrison, attending formal as well as cultural and historical considerations. This course affords an occasion to practice and develop ways of reading and expressing thought.

Teaching Method: Lecture-discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, quiz, essays (2).

Texts Include: TBA.

Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners’ criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside Homer’s Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we’ll consider: Joyce’s transmutation of Homer’s Odyssey into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters’ conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; conditions of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the psychopathology of everyday life (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex, birth, death; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance and theatricality, both studied and unconscious; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life—and political bite--of jokes, comedy, satire, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce’s reported remark that women's emancipation is “the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is”; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the burdens, powers, and pleasures of language; the play of voices: narrative voice, interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation; noises and soundscapes from the cat’s “mrkgnao” to a screeching tram and characters’ inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce’s beyond-English; and more. We’ll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding, often life-changing book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic; and we’ll seek revelation by reading, thinking, and discussing it together with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.

Requirements and evaluation: Attendance, preparation, participation (20%); Weekly Close Readings and After-Class Comments, collected as Midterm and Final (25%); Presentation with 1-2 page handout (15%); option of two shorter or one longer paper or project (35%); Self-Evaluation (5%).

Required Texts Include:

• Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text). Please use this edition even if you own another.
• Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (California, 1989).
• Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald's or another translation.

Recommended Texts:

• Joyce, Dubliners.
• R. Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982).
• Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Barry (Oxford, 1991).

Supplementary readings, recordings, and films via Canvas Course Reserves and Library Media. 

Course Description: Whether looking to popular TV shows, Heated Rivalry and Yellowjackets, or to surreal short stories featuring mutant soccer players, we find that literature shares a variety of playful connections with games and competitive sports. Both writing and athletics, for instance, are often considered leisure activities, each follow their own set of rules, and the two equally rely on different types of participation in the forms of viewer and player, reader and writer. Beyond that, no known culture exists without storytelling or games. In this course, we will ponder, deepen, and lengthen this list of similarities as we explore stories, poems, essays, films and shows that have engaged with different athletic activities from a range of perspectives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do different social and cultural identities affect narratives told about athletes? What literary and other media forms are best able to capture the movement, precision, viewpoints, or play of a given sport? We'll read skateboarding sonnets by an ex-pro skater turned poet, watch fictionalized worlds of boxing and queer body-building play out on screen, and check out the novel Tapping the Source, by “the godfather of ‘Surf Noir,’” before watching Keanu Reeves in the cult-classic film it inspired, Point Break. From wrestling to football, field hockey to baseball, writers have long been invested in athletics as both spectator and player, commentator and character. By reading and watching, discussing and writing, our course will uncover the athletes, real and fictional, that have kept the impulse to play alive within the literary arts and beyond.

Course Description: Fake heiresses, startup visionaries and wellness gurus. From social media’s “girlboss” and “tradwife” influencers to Wall Street “wolves,” contemporary culture seems obsessed with people who bend—or break—the rules of capitalism. But the figure of the hustler long predates the Silicon Valley. Beginning with a brief study of one of literature’s early scammers in excerpts from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), we will spend the bulk of our course considering the allure of the contemporary “hustler” or “scammer.” Why do some hustlers become cultural icons while others are condemned as criminals? What distinguishes a visionary founder from a fraud? And how does modern capitalism and the era of digital technology reward exaggeration, performance and risk? Through novels, films, television, and investigative journalism, students will examine the blurred boundaries between entrepreneurship and fraud. We will ask what our ongoing preoccupation with scams uncovers about our cultural desires for self-made success and what they reveal about the way we each construct and sell our own identities within a neoliberal society. Along the way, we will draw on theories of capitalism, performance and affect to consider whether the real scam is the promise of meritocracy itself.

Evaluation Method: Assignments may include a pop-culture journal tracking a contemporary hustle, a creative imagination of your own scam with a critical reflection, and a final paper analyzing the rhetoric surrounding a real or fictional grift.

Texts Include: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), The Wolf of Wall Street (2007), and Bad Blood (2018), alongside viewings of Catch Me if You Can (2002), Inventing Anna (2022), and Saltburn (2023).

Course Description: This course examines African drama as a major literary and cultural form. By centering drama, the course foregrounds performance, embodiment, ritual, language, folklore, and audience—elements foundational to African expressive cultures and social life. African drama is studied not only as text, but as event and practice, shaped by space, voice, movement, and historical circumstance. The course focuses on Anglophone African drama, with particular attention to protest theatre, drama for education, ritual and folkloric drama, women’s drama, and modern theatrical experimentation, including the African drama of the absurd. These forms are read as responses to colonialism, post‑independence disillusionment, apartheid, gendered authority, and political repression. Students will engage texts—and critical writings—by a wide range of dramatists and theorists, including Efua Sutherland (folklore, narration, and audience participation); Zulu Sofola (tragic form, custom, and women’s authority); Tess Onwueme (gender, political satire, and the African drama of the absurd); and Kole Omotoso (African adaptations of classical tragedy). Comparative theoretical perspectives will include brief excerpts from Aristotle, Brecht, and Beckett, used selectively to frame discussion rather than to maintain perceived hierarchies. African drama will also be situated in comparative perspective, particularly in dialogue with Greek and European theatrical traditions, to illuminate shared concerns with tragedy, ritual, and political power. Special emphasis is placed on women dramatists, whose work has been central to African theatre yet remains underrepresented in many curricula.

This course is dedicated to the memory of Biodun Jeyifo (1946–2026), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025), and Micere Githae Mugo (1942–2023), whose scholarship, artistry, and commitment to performance, language, and resistance continue to shape how African drama is read, taught, and understood.

Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, staged readings, debates, performance analysis, archival visits, guest lectures, and small-group discussion.

Evaluation Method: Two analytical essays, short responses, performance or scene analysis, participation, and ungraded in-class writing, regular self-assessment. No final exam.

Texts Include (may change):

• Ama Ata Aidoo –Anowa (Ghana). Heinemann/Longman. ISBN-13: 978-0582641971.
• Efua Sutherland – The Marriage of Anansewa (Ghana). Longman. ISBN-13: 978-0582642466.
• Zulu Sofola – Wedlock of the Gods (Nigeria). Heinemann/Evans Brothers. ISBN-13: 978-0435901983.
• John Ruganda – The Burdens (Uganda). Oxford University Press, African Writers Series. ISBN-13: 978-0435901150.
• Robert Serumaga – Majangwa (Uganda). Heinemann/Gollancz African Theatre. ISBN-13: 978-0435900689.
• Wole Soyinka – Death and the King’s Horseman (Nigeria). W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN-13: 978-0393927607.
• Athol Fugard – Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (South Africa). Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0195710508. 
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o & Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ – I Will Marry When I Want (Kenya). Heinemann. ISBN-13: 978-0435909606.

Course Description: How do we gauge and engage with a narrative of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in a colossal fictional world? One can find only a few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, more ambitious books than Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, the book is long, and part of our work will be to consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading A Big Book. But Moby-Dick is also big in another sense: it has proven to be a hugely influential and profoundly consequential novel. Indeed, one cannot really understand U.S. literary, cultural, and political history if one has not come to terms with its story and the issues it engages. Our work will be, like Captain Ahab, to take on Melville’s Leviathan better to understand the worlds the novel has helped to shape—including, by no means incidentally, our own. Among the topics that the novel addresses that are on the table for discussion and for exploration in a paper or a project: political and democratic theory; race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism; slavery in the United States; extractive capitalism and ecocriticism; intertextuality, book history, and source studies; queer theory and the history of sexuality; neurodivergence and disability studies; and adaptation across media, including film and opera.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Regular attendance, Energized participation, Weekly quizzes, Midterm paper, Final paper or project.

Texts Include: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. (Norton 3rd edition; ISBN: 9780393285000). Everyone MUST read this edition. Other readings on Canvas.

Course Description: This course will involve the close reading of Faulkner's three-four great tragic novels of race and identity: The Sound and The Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Until very recently, these works have been considered central to the canon of modernist fiction and read as meditations on the tortured consciousness of the artist (The Sound and The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!) or the dilemma of the outsider adrift in an alienating world (Light in August). Saturating Faulkner's novels are images of the anguished history of race relations in the American South from the 19th century to the Great Migration and Great Depression. Yet the tragic legacy of slavery, Faulkner's abiding subject, has been understood by critics as a figure for more abstract and universal moral predicaments. Our investigation seeks to localize Faulkner's representation of history, particularly his vision of slavery and the effects of the color line, as a specifically American crisis, embodied in the remarkable chorus of narrative voices and visions that constitute his fictive world.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: During the quarter, you will write two short  in-class close reading examinations, as well as a final project of 8-10 pages on a topic of your choice that you have discussed with me. All written exercises are due over email in the form of Microsoft Word attachments. One quarter of your grade will be based on your participation in class discussion. Anyone who misses a class will require the professor's permission to continue in the course. No late papers will be accepted. Conflicts with deadlines must be discussed with the professor and any extensions must be approved in advance.

Course Description: How is it that a minimally-educated, gay, and idiosyncratic Brooklyn carpenter and journeyman printer became the indispensable poet (along with Emily Dickinson) in U.S. literary history? This question is the point of departure for a sweeping seminar on Walt Whitman’s writing career. Extending from virtually one end of the nineteenth century to the other, Whitman’s writings also provide an opportunity to engage with crucial events and issues in U.S. history, including slavery and racial representation, gender and homosexuality, urbanism, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Starting with Whitman’s journalism and short stories, we’ll then turn to his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, and the focus of his on-and-off revision for nearly forty years. We’ll read Whitman’s writings in facsimile--that is, as reprints of the way they looked when they first circulated, which is an especially appropriate way to study the writings of this writer who was also a printer, and who took a hands-on approach to the publication of his works. Finally, at course’s end we’ll consider the enormous number of poets, artists, writers, and free thinkers of all stripes for whom Whitman has been an inspiration, forbear, and chosen family.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Engaged Participation, Two essays, 8 pages each. Possible in-class quizzes; probably no exams.

Texts Include: Facsimile editions of the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, and a fourth of WW's Civil War poems, Drum-Taps. Other writings on Canvas.

Course Description: Techno-Orientalism names a variant of Orientalism that associates Asians with a technological future. This seminar will explore how Techno-Orientalist tropes are used by, played with, and rewritten by Asian American authors. We will study how twentieth-century and contemporary issues of technology, globalization, and financial speculation collide with a history of yellow peril and Asian Invasion discourse, as well as how these tensions manifest in figures and tropes such as robots, aliens, and pandemics. Texts include poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film.

Teaching Method: Seminar, discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, papers.

Texts Include:

• Ling Ma, Severance (ISBN 978-1250214997)
• Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (ISBN 978-0307739452)
• Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (ISBN 978-0593466490)

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 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: Lecture and Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and Participation, in-class midterm, creative assignment.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: This undergraduate course examines contemporary ethnic American literature through a comparative lens, with attention to how race, migration, and colonialism shape literary expression in the United States. Drawing from Black, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous, South Asian, and other diasporic traditions, the course explores how writers engage questions of identity, belonging, memory, resistance, and community across differing historical and political contexts. Students will analyze fiction, memoir, poetry, and hybrid texts, with some introduction to critical theory, in order to consider both the distinctiveness and interconnectedness of ethnic American experiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on comparative reading practices, relational frameworks, and the role of literature in responding to systems of power, exclusion, and cultural formation in contemporary America. Writers may include Chimamanda Adichie, Gloria Anzaldúa, Michael Chabon, Sandra Cisneros, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tommy Orange, Ocean Vuong, among others.

Course Description: In this seminar, students will analyze how race has worked in relation to the Broadway musical from the early days of the form through to the contemporary. Students will consider how transformations in American race relations, immigration policy, geopolitics, and social policy have influenced when and how race manifests in the genre.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Papers and projects.

Texts Include: Materials online.

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? 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 Method: Seminar

Evaluation Method: Writing assignments, research project, participation.

Texts include:

• All texts will be provided on Canvas as screen-reader-compatible PDFs.

Course Description: How does literature represent the social struggle of disability? This course examines how disability literatures mobilize not just identity categories, but, in fact, robust models of thought and feeling. We will read Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Japan, 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. Panning back from textual representations, 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, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, novellas, and art. Texts include Ved Mehtq’s Face to Face, Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, IM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K,  Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection, and Sauo Ichikawa’s Hunchback.

Teaching Method: Discussion/seminar.

Evaluation Method: Assignments will comprise in-class presentations, a short close reading paper, and a final visual and tactile zine.

Texts Include: 

• Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0143135203
• J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0140074482
• Sauo Ichikawa, Hunchback, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0241700785

Course Description: In his text Playing God, Glen Colquhoun offers the following symmetrical poems: “Today I do not want to be a doctor”/Everybody’s cholesterol is high/Disease will not listen to me/Even when I shake my fist … / and “Today I want to be a doctor”/Nobody’s cholesterol is high/Disease has gone weak at the knees/I expect him to make an appointment … (pgs 74 – 75). In her memoir, There is a cure for this, Māori writer Emma Espiner writes: “The doctors who make the best teachers are the ones who would show you the worst things. They are driven to wake medical students up to the reality of our patients’ lives. They want you to do house calls to the caravan parks, to work at the clinics of homeless shelters, to visit homes that have no power or are filled with black mould” (pg 132).

Colquhoun and Espiner are medical practitioners based in Aotearoa New Zealand. They are ‘doctors who write’; highly trained individuals who draw on their medical vocations to create compelling stories that merge humanity and the medical sciences. Through their works, readers are allowed a glimpse of how ‘medicine works’. This course asks: What unique stories do medical practitioner-writers tell? How do their narratives unravel hidden dimensions of modern medicine? What literary forms - poetry, short story, and memoir - do these stories take?

This class will examine the following literary texts written by doctors from four different geographical locations: New Zealand – Glen Colquhoun (Pākeha) Playing God (2002) and Emma Espiner (Māori) There is a cure for this (2023); Cook Islands – Tom Davis (Cook Island) Makutu (1960); United States of America – Alvord (Navajo) and Pelt The Scalpel and the Silver Bear (2000); and India – Rashid Jahan, Shankar Raina, and Shirin Shashikant Valavade whose short stories appear in the anthology Medical Maladies  (2023). Together, these texts weave a layered account of transglobal medicine.

Course Description: This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The focus will be the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Shakespeare, and a modern work by Melville will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But we will also heed how literature itself offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Questions, Papers.

Texts Include:

• Bible excerpts (can use online)
• The Last Days of Socrates. (Penguin). ISBN-10 0140449280
• Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. (Arden Edition). ISBN-10 1474280145
• Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw. (Penguin Edition). ISBN-10 0140437916
• Billy Budd by Herman Melville. (TOR). ISBN-10 1500412910
• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates (I will send you the online link)
• Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). ISBN-10 0374532508

Course Description: This course explores themes of feeling and emotion in literature. 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? How are emotions seen differently on and by different kinds of people and what does this tell us about the political, economic, and environmental organization of our world? Guided by such questions, students will expand and develop their knowledge and incorporation of literary theory and other methods of interpretation.

Teaching Method: Lecture-discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, quiz, essays (2).

Texts Include: TBA.

Course Description: Dreams and dream visions, prophecies and rhapsodies! Literature has long been an art form that invites visions—reveries, fantasies, apparitions, imaginative insights—that distort the boundaries between reality and the unknown, the earthly world and the divine. This class sets out to explore these imaginative and estranging poetries and novels, paintings and other visual mediums, that have come to their authors in unusual ways: prophetic dictations from God (or dead poets), messages delivered in dreams, waking visions, literary fate dolled out by The Tarot. What are the political stakes of dreaming aloud in literature? What are the gender and racial, cultural and social, significance of traditions, such as tarot, automatic writing, and clairvoyance within the literary arts? From Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath’s surreal stories to Edgar Garcia’s lucid-dream poems, this class will look to figures who risk getting a little weird in order to channel their experiences into the singular language of visionary literature. In addition to reading and discussing literary texts, our class will attend a field trip to special collections to experience archival materials related to our course.

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, short lectures.

Evaluation Methods: Blue Book notebook, leading discussion, short cumulative assignments including a fanfiction analysis.

Texts may include: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817); Rudyard Kipling, The Janenites (1924); Austenland (2011), dir. Jerusha Hess; Qui Nguyen, She Kills Monsters (2011); Esther Yi, Y/N (2023);  I Saw the TV Glow (2024), dir. Jane Schoenbrun; episodes of Star Trek (1966), Friday Night Lights (2006), Swarm (2023), and Heated Rivalry (2025); criticism from Andrea Long Chu, Stewart Hall, Claudia Johnson, and Amanda Montell, among others.

Course Description: From vampires and goblins to mad scientists and reanimated corpses, the monsters that stalked the pages of Victorian fiction continue to haunt our screens today. What do these monsters reveal about the subconscious fears and forbidden desires embedded in Victorian culture? Does Frankenstein’s monster offer commentary on colonial rebellion? And how does Dracula’s bloodlust reflect anxieties about queer sexuality? In this course we’ll examine how writers used supernatural tales and monstrous creations to grapple with the industrial, scientific and colonial revolutions sweeping the British Empire. Turning to these same monsters’ modern reincarnations in the second half of the course, we will also ask what their persistence into twenty-first century media has to say about our culture today. What shifting concerns about gender, class, race and science explain these monsters’ enduring appeal – or altered appearances? Along the way, we’ll think about adaptation, genre, and why these nineteenth-century figures remain the blueprint for many of today’s blockbusters.

Evaluation Method: In a creative midterm assignment, students will design their own monsters, producing both a visual representation and a critical essay explaining its theoretical underpinnings and its engagement with a particular historical context.

Texts Include: “Jabberwocky” (1872), “Goblin Market” (1862), and Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897). Modern reworkings of these monsters may include The Bride! (2026), The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) and Sinners (2026). 

Course Description: This course introduces students to the study of the modern American horror film, beginning with Psycho in 1960 and continuing to the present. There are many possible versions of this course, and this one concentrates on a number of films widely regarded as classics of the genre in addition to more recent efforts. The course will study 1-2 feature-length films per week proceeding chronologically. Along the way we will analyze influential examples of various horror sub-genres, e.g. the slasher, found footage, body horror, supernatural possession, etc. Our prevailing concern will be with bodies – bodies represented onscreen as well as the bodies of the audience – and asking how horror cinema puts these bodies into relation. We will read essays in film theory and history to think about this question and more. The class will proceed mainly via short lecture and guided discussion. Students will pursue and develop a final research project with opportunity for analytical and creative expression.

Teaching Method: Discussion, Short Lecture.

Evaluation Method: Research Project, Attendance.

Texts Include: Printed Course Reader.

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 in-class close reading exams 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?

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: two in-class short midterm exams; 8-10 page final project.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: Only recently has it become possible to “change sex” through gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy. But in another sense, that possibility has long intrigued the human imagination. In this course we will survey two thousand years of trans fictions—in verse, prose, and drama; in Latin, French, and English; in tragic, comic, and epic form. Our protagonists will range from the famous mythic hero/ine Tiresias through medieval saints, cross-dressing lesbians, a female knight, an operatic castrato, a 300-year-old poet, and a Greek-American child of incest.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, three 5-7 page papers; one may be creative.

Texts Include: 

• Ovid, Metamorphoses (selections);
• Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend (selections);
• Heldris of Cornwall, The Romance of Silence;
• Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Mutability of Fortune (selections);
• John Lyly, Galathea;
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night and Sonnet 20;
• Honore de Balzac, Sarrasine;
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando;
• Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex;
• Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy.

Course Description: In recent years, the TikTok anthem, “I’m looking for a guy in finance” sparked a question that has been universally acknowledged since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Do we date and marry for love or money? From Regency drawing rooms to reality TV mansions, courtship has long functioned as a marketplace where beauty, wealth, and social status operate as currency. But how does framing romance as a competition or a transaction inform our understandings of love and who is able to acquire it? Examining a contemporary culture filled with dating app algorithms, reality dating competitions and plastic surgery transformations, this course considers how the modern “marriage market” endorses certain performances of gender, sexuality, and consumption. What are the emotional and economic costs of participating in the marriage market—and from abstaining? And how are these costs distributed along the lines of gender, race and class? While this course begins with a survey foundational literary marriage markets, our primary focus will be tracing their afterlives in twentieth- and twenty first-century culture. Throughout the course, students will engage with feminist and post-feminist theory, as well as Marxist and sociological scholarship to consider the question: Can love ever escape the logic of the market?

Evaluation Method: Assignments may include an analytical case study of a recent social media trend, pertaining to romance and the self-formation.

Texts Include: Fiction such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven” (2008), Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013), and Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person (2017). We will also consider social media, television and film including Mike Fleiss’s The Bachelor, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) and Celine Song’s The Materialists (2025). 

Course Description: Sugar and spice and everything nice, bows and Barbies and bronzing drops from Sephora. Is that what girlhood is really made of? Where does girlhood get messy or monstrous, stressful or strange? Who gets to be a girl, and who is forgotten in our popular narratives about girlhood? In this course, we’ll examine representations of girlhood in 20th and 21st century Anglo-American literature, cinema, and television through the lens of queer theory. Our readings will ask us to consider girlhood as a contradictory set of experiences that can happen to people of all genders. We’ll think about what girlhood feels like to children who are all too often excluded from or only ever partially imagined within it, as well as for children who desire a girlhood that rejects them or reject the girlhood that is thrust upon them. Writing assignments such as the song analysis, where we’ll each add a song of our choice to a course playlist and explain how it enlivens our course themes, will help us challenge our own assumptions about what queerness really looks and feels like in practice. Finally, we’ll identify and complicate a wide cast of characters that emerge—to various degrees—in our cultural renditions of the many places where girlhood looks queer, such as tomboys, children who kill, effeminate sons, and toxic (and maybe homoerotic) best friends. Core texts will include Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Eve’s Bayou (1997), and episodes of Showtime’s Yellowjackets (2021—), with possible additions from Lucy Dacus, Jack Halberstam, Karen Russell, and Jenny Zhang, among others.

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, short lectures.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, two short essays, creative final project.

Texts may include: Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman (1951); Toni Morrison, Sula (1973); Heavenly Creatures (1994), dir. Peter Jackson; Eve’s Bayou (1997), dir. Kasi Lemmons; Tomboy (2011), dir. Celine Sciamma; torrin a. greathouse, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (2018); short stories by Margaret Atwood, Dantiel W. Moniz,  Karen Russell, and Jenny Zhang; critical theory by Kathryn Bond Stockton, Sarah Projansky, and Jack Halberstam, among others.

Course Description: It’s a tale as old as time—a poor servant secures the hand of a wealthy prince and they live happily ever after…or that’s one version of how the story goes. This course considers the enduring popularity of the Cinderella story across multiple centuries. Why has this particular narrative arc continued to haunt literary texts, from the massively popular novel Pamela to the much-beloved Jane Eyre to classic romcoms like Pretty Woman? We will interrogate the persistence of the fantasy of marrying up as it relates to the politics of class, as well as the way gender and race inflect these narratives. How do retellings reframe the so-called “heroes” and “villains” of the stories? When does this narrative trajectory sustain a happy ending and when, by contrast, might it fail to deliver a satisfying conclusion? What does this narrative reveal to us about our own investments and what is the basis for this fantasy? We will also consider the centrality of clothing and performativity to the plot’s momentum—why are performative transformations or “makeover moments” essential to enacting the plot? We will also interrogate the structure of the marriage plot—what does it mean for (heteronormative) marriage to be the central device through which upward mobility is attained? And what happens when that marriage is not a fulfilling conclusion? This course will address the lasting appeal of fairy tales and question the values and morals they purportedly uphold.

Texts Include: Charles Perrault, Cendrillon (1697), Brothers Grimm, Aschenputtel (1812), Angela Carter, “Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper” (1979) and other fairy tale adaptations. Excerpts from Pamela (1740), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Eyre (1847), Lady Tremaine (2026). Possible films include Cindy (1978), Pretty Woman (1990), Disney’s Cinderella (2015), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018).

Course Description: We live in an increasingly image-driven world, as cultural critics have noted, yet authors have long experimented with images in their work, often testing or blurring the border between text and image. This course explores the diverse, complex, and sometimes tense relations between modern literature and the visual arts, working through literary representations of art works, experiments in visual poetry, artists’ books and zines, and text-based visual art. In asking us to see literature and read images, how do these works create new and sometimes radical opportunities for making meaning, building community, and imagining futures? This course will make hands-on use of collections in the Block Museum and the Deering Art Library, and over the course of the quarter you will learn how to identify archival materials, develop a robust research question, and craft a sustained argument with primary and secondary source evidence. Skill-building exercises will culminate in a final research essay of 12-15 pages that investigates any literary or artistic work from the university’s collections.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussions, hands-on workshops, classes in Special Collections and the Block Museum.

Evaluation Method: Research exercises, peer review, final research essay.

Texts Include: May include works by Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Etel Adnan, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir.

Course Description: How are cities—marked by aspirations and inequalities, shaped by memories and struggles—written? How do urban environments come to life across novels, poems, and films? This course examines contemporary literature set in Tokyo, Rome, Johannesburg, Chennai, Dakkar, Kingston, Chicago, and other metropolises. As we read, we will examine urban genres like flânerie and catalogue narrative strategies used to capture the density of city life. We will ask: Who is visible in these works and who remains in the shadows? How do transportation systems, housing policies, immigration, and weather drive plots and impact characters? To increase our understanding of these cities and their literatures, supplementary readings will draw on urban studies, environmental history, and postcolonial theory. The course builds to a 15-page research paper, allowing each student to select a city and analyze its relation to a literary work.

Teaching Method: Seminar

Evaluation Method: Annotated bibliography, oral presentation, and fifteen-page final paper.

Texts Include: Readings will likely include works by Miri Yu, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dinaw Mengestu, Garnette Cadogan, Aminata Sow Fall, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Course Description: What is realism?  Do we even have to ask?  English 397 will investigate this seemingly obvious literary mode.  First, we will explore the conventional wisdom that realism emerges alongside the rise of modern science:  just as experiment becomes the standard of scientific truth, so early fiction bases its claim to be truth-like on its simulation of experimental testimony.  We’ll read one exemplar of experimental witnessing, the travel narrative, in both true and fictional forms:  the privateer William Dampier’s A New Voyage Around the World (1697) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).  We will accompany these texts with short readings of scientific experiments (from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air) as well as some contemporary theories of the rise of the novel.  We will then read Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which recounts its author’s enslavement, displacement, manumission, and further voyages, to examine how Equiano redeploys the tropes of the travel narrative to argue for abolition. 

Turning to nineteenth-century realism and beyond, we will read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) to consider its treatment of perceptual evidence, the founding premise of the realist mode.  How does Austen complicate or even reject sensory self-evidence as the basis for knowledge?  We will then read one classic of French realism, Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions or Père Goriot (in English), alongside canonical critical takes on realism by Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, and Roland Barthes.  In the course’s penultimate unit, we will consider the status of the real in contemporary science studies.  We will examine the constructivist-realist debate in the history and sociology of science (readings by Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking, Steven Shapin, and Bruno Latour), whereby scientific truth may be a function of social convention.  We will be attuned to claims that it is the literary aspects of science that mask the constructedness of scientific truth—claims we will be in a good position to examine.  We end the quarter with two contemporary novels that challenge the capacity of realist literary convention to capture marginalized realities:  Miriam Toews’s Women Talking and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.  What, we will ask, is the literary and social currency of realism today?  Has realism internalized a capacity to reflect critically on the reality that it claims faithfully to represent?

As a research seminar, this iteration of English 397 affords a range of prospective topics for a long research essay, extending from realism’s founding texts through nineteenth-century realism, science studies, and contemporary feminist and antiracist appropriations of realism.  We will dedicate sustained class time to the tasks of articulating an essay topic, developing a bibliography, and structuring and drafting an argument.  To further these ends and promote collective understanding, some class sessions will be organized as workshops.

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.

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.

Course Description: This seminar explores the various approaches to literary analysis in the 21st-century academy, including the pitfalls to avoid when using certain theories and methods of reading. Examining the history of English as a discipline and the emergence of different methods of analysis, we will discuss both established and emergent critical approaches and assess their applicability in the reading of a particular set of texts and in engaging different audiences. Of particular interest to us is the future of humanistic knowledge, research and writing practices in the neo-liberal academy. How do creative writing, literary theory, and literary research inform one another? In what ways can we be innovative and “marketable” in the neo-liberal realities of our times while remaining true to the core values of humanistic education? In a world that is inundated with theoretical approaches, how do we choose a methodology that best suits our goals? How can we enfold activism in our research and maintain academic standards? The main aim of the course is to equip ourselves with skills to handle different types of texts—activist, theoretical, creative etc. —in the classroom, during research, and in public-facing engagements. At the end of the course, the student should be able to analyze a primary literary text (or a set of texts) using the most appropriate theory and methodology and in a way that the analysis would have resonance beyond the narrow confines of the academy.

Texts include:

• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
• Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus and Other Essays
• Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline
• Bruce McComiskey, English Studies Reimagined
• James F. English, The Global Future of English Studies
• Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

Course Description: Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon’s polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations puts additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where the moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration may include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey and Harriet Mullen; turntablists DJ Spooky, Jazzy Jeff, and Premier; songs by musicians from Ella Fitzgerald to MF Doom; and pieces by visual artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. Theoretical texts may include work by Barthes, Baudrillard, Moten, and Saussure, as well as ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists.

Course Description: Shakespeare studies and early modern studies have long been a fertile ground of methodological exploration and ferment influencing literary studies more broadly (examples include textual bibliography and editing, psychoanalysis, new historicism). This seminar will function both as an introduction to Shakespeare’s dramatic writing at the graduate level, reading a selection of plays from across Shakespeare’s theatrical career, and as an entry point for a range of current critical approaches. We will read selections of very recent books and articles drawn from: queer and feminist studies; transnational approaches; early modern critical race studies; literacy, language-learning, and early modern pedagogy; trans approaches; approaches to time, anachronism, and authorial biography.  At the same time, we will engage with two foundational areas that continue to inform critical work: textual studies/history of the book and performance history. Plays include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, As You Like It, Hamlet, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen.  Because close textual work will be a part of our process, required critical editions are TBA.

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. We will rad Milton scholarship and see the diverse approaches made to his work.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Oral Report, Papers.

Texts Include: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton, ed Kerrigan. ISBN-10: 0679642536.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: This course is an introduction to Arabic literary production of the long nineteenth century as it engages the “nahḍa” (awakening), understood variously as a discourse on modernity, a utopian social project, and an epistemological rupture wrought by colonialism and capitalism. With special emphasis on the genealogies, practices, and problematics of Arabic literary modernity, this course will introduce students to the major works of Arabic literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the major debates, social changes, and material developments that attend the period, including (but not limited to) language reform, migration, print capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In short, we will try to understand how these authors, through their texts, both produced and theorized modernity for their readers in the localized contexts of Imperial influence and control on the one hand, and the global–though uneven–nineteenth-century processes of social, political, economic, and technological change.

Primary texts will all be available in English translation, but those able are encouraged to follow in Arabic. A separate section can be arranged for discussing the Arabic-language versions.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Short paper, seminar paper.

Texts Include: 

• Rifa’ al-Tahtawi, Imam in Paris [The Extraction of Gold from a Description of Paris] (1826).
• Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, vols. 1-2 and 3-4 (1855).
• Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What Isa Ibn Hisham Told Us (1907).
• Tarek El-Ariss, Ed., The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahḍa (2018).
• Qāsim Amīn, The Liberation of Women (1899), The New Woman (1900).

Course Description: How have vocabularies of disability evolved in twentieth-century narrative? Tracking how the concept develops alongside questions of citizenship, this course considers how disability is fundamentally a political claim that exceeds its status as either a medicalized or an identity category. We will examine how narrative represents disability as an embodied and embedded structural condition of power by reading twentieth- and twenty-first century novels and memoirs from India, South Africa, and the United States. Exploring key formulations in the field such as narrative prosthesis, stigma, the metaphors of illness, bodyminds,  maiming, and more, this course simultaneously introduces graduate students to the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. Texts include Ved Mehta's Face to Face, J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Jaipreet Virdi's Hearing Happiness, and Andrew Leland's The Country of the Blind alongside recent monographs from the field.

Course Description: There are few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, or more ambitious novels than Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). This graduate seminar contends that an understanding of U.S. literary, cultural, and political history requires engaging seriously with this novel, its influence, and its role in the history of literary criticism. Among the topics our scrupulous reading of the novel will explore: political and democratic theory; race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism; slavery in the United States; extractive capitalism and ecocriticism; intertextuality, book history, and source studies; queer theory and the history of sexuality; neurodivergence and disability studies; and adaptation across media, including film and opera.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Oral presentations and a substantial research paper.

Texts Include: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. (Norton 3rd edition; ISBN: 9780393285000). Everyone MUST read this edition. Other readings on Canvas.

Course Description: The terms “sovereignties” and “Americas” in the title of this course stand at the crossroads of old and new dialogues about their meanings. This course considers Indigenous and Native American notions of sovereignty that imagine nationhood outside of the nation-state framework. It reads these theorizations of sovereignty and nationhood alongside Latin American and Latinx anti-imperial writing. We will consider José Martí’s late nineteenth-century articulation of “Our America” alongside the rise of the Guna word “Abiayala” and its use by Indigenous activists from Latin America, and “Turtle Island” as the name that Native American creation stories give to our continent. Our discussions will trace connections between the storytelling traditions of Native American, Indigenous, and Latinx authors across the hemisphere. We will study the narrative forms that authors take up as they construct or critique nationhood: essays, short stories, novels and poetry. We will also examine how authors break down these forms by taking up communal authorship, orality, visual media, and multilingualism as narrative strategies that provide aesthetic and ideological challenges to canonical articulation of nation-state sovereignties.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, paper abstract, presentation, paper.

Texts Include: 

• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 9780140086836
• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians, 9781597146289
• Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World 9781908276421

Course Description: In this graduate seminar, students will read Black feminist literature and analyze it for its relationship to theories of biopolitics.

Teaching Method: Seminar

Evaluation Method: Papers, teaching demonstration.

Texts Include: 

• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton Critical Edition) 0393614565
• Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse 0061695130
• Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha 0883782375
• Toni Morrison, Beloved 1400033411
• Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography 1642598984

Course Description: “Queer theory” and “New Queer Cinema” were two neologisms born of the same early-1990s moment in Anglophone academia and public film culture. Both saw themselves as extending but also complicating the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological parameters of prior formations like “gay and lesbian studies,” "gay liberation," or “LGBT film.” These new and spreading discourses stoked each other's productive advances. Scholars developed and illustrated new axioms through the medium of the movies, while filmmakers rooted stories and images in changing notions of gender performativity, counter-historiography, and coalitional politics.

This class honors but also decenters this peak period in the reclaiming of “queer.” We will unpack relevant scholarly and filmic trends before, during, and after this much-revisited heyday of queer cinema. We will also track competing narratives and subsequent trajectories around “queer” in the way we perform readings, imagine bodies, absorb histories, spin narratives, form alliances, enter archives, and orient ourselves in space and time. Diversities of race, gender identity, nation, class, and political project will inflect our understandings of “queer” and even challenge the presumed primacy of sexuality as its key referent.

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussion, including some components of formal presentation by the professor and the other participants.

Evaluation Method: Written assignments, class participation.

Texts Include: All materials will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: This course introduces students to a sequence of "materialisms" worked out from the (long) 18th century to the present. While readings and discussions will gravitate toward contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist ecological thought (including the afterlives of ideas like "primitive accumulation" and "metabolic rift" in recent feminist, anti-colonial, and environmental frameworks), we will also spend substantial time looking at the writings and influence of earlier thinkers whose controversial materialisms have returned to critical attention in recent decades (e.g. Spinoza, Herder). A guiding aim of the course is to assemble a fuller sense of the historical and conceptual underpinnings of first-world environmentalism; so we will ask what "matters," and to whom, in large part by putting the nature of "greenness" under scrutiny as a critical category. Readings will emphasize theory and philosophy, but please note there is a strong and central emphasis on poetry throughout, as well.

Your grade for this course will be based on your attendance and regular participation, a shorter midterm essay, and a longer final essay in the form of a 10pp “conference paper.” Assignment structure and expectations will be circulated separately for each.

All readings will be made available through Canvas. I will recommend editions of Spinoza's Ethics and Marx's early writings.

Teaching Method: Short lectures and seminar discussions.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; short midterm essay; longer final essay.

Texts Include:

• Spinoza, Ethics (any edition, Penguin Classics preferred)
• Marx, Early Writings (any edition, Penguin Classics preferred)

Course Description: This is a course about how we talk about art and why it matters. What does it really mean to call something “cute”? How about “interesting,” “#oddlysatisfying,” “slop,” or – reaching back into the past – “beautiful” or even “sublime”? This course explores questions of aesthetic judgment through a sustained and in-depth reading of Sianne Ngai’s 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Along the way we will read selections from authors writing in earlier periods (Kant, Lyotard) and major influences on Ngai (Marx, Jameson, Cavell). We will also consider more recent and primarily internet-based categories of aesthetic judgment as well as possible alternatives to "judgment" (such as when art serves as a prop for self care; or when the term "aesthetic" signals a lifestyle, e.g. "cottage core," "dark academia," etc). Time permitting we will read more of Ngai’s work. To ground our discussion we will sample a range of aesthetic texts across media.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Papers.

Texts Include:

• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 978-0674088122
• Printed course reader

Course Description: This graduate seminar explores core concepts, questions, and methodologies within the environmental humanities. Rather than reading literature and literary scholarship in isolation, we will trace their entanglements in environmental history, anthropology, philosophy, geography, and other adjacent disciplines. What, we will ask, are the unique affordances of literary study when confronting environmental questions and challenges? What are the risks and rewards of conducting interdisciplinary environmental research?

The syllabus will be tailored to support the particular interests and pursuits of students in the course, but topics may include climate writing, environmental justice literature, environmental racism, global and local scales, militarized and nuclear environments, and queer ecologies. Collectively, the readings will ensure familiarity with classic texts in the environmental humanities and introduce students to the cutting edges of this wide-ranging field.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Participation and Paper.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: In his 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin wrote: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Similarly, William Faulkner declared, “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” More recently, as James Longenbach put it, “in addition to being many other things, poems are statements about our place in the world, and like every other act of communication, they are historical.” Thus, this workshop will focus on the writing of poems that engage and document various histories, allowing us to place the explorations of our own experience within a larger historical context. In so doing, we will explore the rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and smaller, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories. We will discuss the ways in which some poets have used history in their work, define some strategies for using information gathered from our research, and write a series of poems that engages those histories to which we have some connection or by which we feel compelled to explore.

Teaching Method: Workshop.

Evaluation Method: Craft/Process Essay and weekly poem assignments 30%; Ability to Critique/Class Participation 20%; Final Portfolio: 6-8 poems and final essay 50%.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: A graduate level poetry workshop for MFA+MA students. Open to other university graduate students by application.

Course Description: The goal of this class is to revise material currently in progress, but don’t freak out if what you have right now doesn’t feel substantial or ready: you’ll generate enough to keep yourself going as we go forward. If you’re working in your genre, I strongly encourage you to consider working material that could potentially be part of your thesis. If fiction is not your genre, that’s OK! I’m excited to see what you’ll create---and excited too to see how the elements of craft we’re exploring here are in dialogue with your poetry and your non-fiction. You’ll still be writing stories here, though. As we revise, I hope that we all discover what practices work best for our own writing, so that we’re not just revising but also developing a deeper understanding of the strictures and demands of this recursive process. That’s all a super long way of saying that we’re revising, sure, but we’re also here to figure out how to revise---it doesn’t look the same for everyone, and it honestly doesn’t even look the same for the same person. It shifts from project to project, like everything else.

Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers, craft presentation.

Texts Include:

• Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts (1641293411)
• Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself (0393332179)

Course Description: A craft and imagination oriented approach to fiction writing. Students will workshop each other's work with an eye towards narrative drive, emotional resonance, and grappling with something that matters.

Teaching Method: Discussion based Workshop.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Handing work in on time, collegial generosity, taking chances.

Texts Include: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (‎0811229076)

Course Description: Working together, students will develop nonfiction pieces with conscious attention to craft and the challenge of grappling with material that matters. Narrative drive, voice, emotional resonance, risk taking are simultaneously instinctual and acquired impulses. The emphasis is on manuscript development as students grow through multiple drafts.

Teaching Method: Workshop, Discussion, Craft Analysis.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Collegial generosity, Submitting work on time, Trying out new approaches.

Texts Include:

• Lilliana's invincible Summer by Christina Rivera Garza (978-0593244111)
• We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I by Raja Shehedah (978-1635423648)

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: ENGLISH 520 is the Professionalization Seminar students are required to take once before they graduate, ideally in the third year. We’ll discuss professional norms and expectations in academic, alt-ac, and nonacademic jobs, keyed to students’ particular interests, fields, and questions. Topics may range from article submission and revision; grant writing and project management; collaboration in research groups and with extra-university partners; best practices for a sustainable writing schedule; and job market preparation. English 520 is graded P/NP and requires minimal preparation outside of class.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

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.