DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

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: 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

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.

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: TBA

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