English Majors and Minors

Course develops students' ability to express themselves in clear, accurate, and thoughtful English prose. Offered regularly. Fulfills first-year writing requirement. Open to first-year students only.

Writing-intensive introduction to literature using poetry, drama, short stories, and novella. Emphasis is placed on the process method of writing, basic techniques of literary analysis, and library research. Offered regularly. Fulfills first-year writing requirement. Open to first year students only.

An introduction to academic writing based on the close reading of classical texts from the Greek, Roman, and/or Judeo-Christian traditions. Students write regularly in response to reading assignments and take a series of essays through an extensive revision process. Critical thinking and links with a variety of academic disciplines are stressed along with research, documentation, editing, and writing fundamentals. Offered regularly. Fulfills first-year writing requirement. Open to first-year students only.

Study of ancient and contemporary Native American poetry and fiction with emphasis on academic writing. Students write regularly in response to reading assignments and engage in extensive revision of their work. Close attention is given to the development of academic voice, editing, documentation, critical thinking, research skills, and writing a reflective preface that is representative work from a first year writing course. Offered regularly. Fulfills first-year writing, Global Understanding, and Conceptualizing Diversity requirements. Open to first-year students only.

An examination of public essays: reviews, political commentary, letters to the editor, op-ed articles, art criticism, problem analysis, proposals for change. Students practice the craft of writing with grace, clarity, and fluency. Students read, study, and debate essays about significant topical issues by writers whose prose styles have much to teach about the art of writing. The course is for all students, majors, minors, and those interested in developing their expository and persuasive writing skills. Offered regularly. Prerequisite: English 101 or equivalent.

Workshop in the writing of short stories, verse, and plays, with an analysis of models. Offered regularly. Fulfills arts requirement.

Intermediate study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements, ranging from Anglo-Saxon literature through Shakespeare’s works.

This course attempts to comprehend Shakespeare's evolution as a dramatist and the continuing appeal of his tragic, magical and historical worlds. We will also examine Shakespeare's plays in their own time, attempting to understand how they were influenced and influenced the culture of early modern England. Because he was so attuned to the everyday lives of Elizabethan Englishmen and women, he was able to explore the deeply felt interactions of human society and imaginatively recreate characters with an unprecedented complexity and emotional realism. We will seek to understand the power with which his creations spoke the theatregoers four hundred years ago and continue to speak to us today. Fulfills humanities requirement and English department Pre-1800 requirement.

Selective survey of medieval and early modern English literature from the likes of Beowulf through the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 - almost a millennium. The goals of the class are to introduce students to several major writers and works of these centuries, to give an outline of the development of the literature, and to help develop skills in reading critically and discussing and writing about literature. Fulfills humanities requirement and English department Pre-1800 requirement. This course may be used to fulfil the first year writing requirement. For students pursuing this option, the fourth-hour requirement will be met by weekly meetings during the Common Hour (Thursdays, 11:30 to 12:30).

Course replete with folkloric, legendary, and mythic elements which can be linked to an evocative material record. These traditions are chock-full of gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, monsters, magic, trickery, and treachery. Begins with a discussion of the natures of oral narratives and of mythic archetypes, and an introduction to theoretical concepts which aid in understanding the cultural functions of storytelling and mythmaking; students then move on to discuss the development of Medieval Epic literary traditions founded upon far earlier oral materials. Fulfills humanities requirement and English department Pre-1800 requirement.

This course will chart the development of English drama from Shakespeare to Gay. Our exploration of the drama will include the thematic, the dramatic, and the theoretical and will be informed by an understanding of early modern history and culture. Students will read works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Kydd, Jonson, Dekker, Milton, Etherege, Congreve, and Gay and think about the role the theater -- public, private, and closeted -- played in early modern England. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement, and English department Pre-1800 requirement.

Poets, playwrights, and essayists in the early modern period were often in the thick of political intrigue, dispute, and faction. The playwright Christopher Marlowe was rumored to be a spy and an atheist and was killed in a mysterious bar fight that many attribute to his political involvement. John Milton not only is responsible for the great epic poem Paradise Lost, he was also jailed for his involvement in the English Civil War. We will study the interplay between early modern texts and their political contexts, investigating the role of drama, poetry, and prose in the power of the state and the ideological conflicts that abounded during this period. In the process we will be interested in the manner of political expression and resistance during this period, from the court-influenced writings of Thomas More and Edmund Spenser to the wonderfully equivocal public poetry of Andrew Marvell, as well as the central influence that literature and the printed text generally had on the rapidly changing politics of early modern England. Fulfills humanities requirement and English department Pre-1800 requirement.

Course charts the development of Robin Hood, beginning with the earliest sources and analogues; after exploring how this misty medieval figure became a commonplace of modern popular entertainment, course examines Outlaw Heroes from around the globe. Course explores why Outlaw Heroes in general are popular, as well as why Robin Hood in particular is reborn for each succeeding generation.

To say that William Shakespeare’s appeal is universal, both timeless and worldwide, is a platitude. This course examines the truth and fiction behind this platitude by having students read several of Shakespeare’s plays alongside rewritings and reproductions of these plays across time periods and across the globe. Our focus will be on the cross-cultural connections and dissonances, as well as the fascinating revisions, that occur when distinct cultures take up these plays and put them to their own purposes. Texts and films may include Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest, the modern American film Ten Things I Hate About You, the Italian documentary Caesar Must Die, the censored Thai film Shakespeare Must Die, the Japanese masterpiece Ran, and Aime Cesaire’s postcolonial rewriting of The Tempest, Une Tempete.

The eighteenth century has been called "The Age of Reason," a designation that implies straight and narrow thinking about straight and narrow subjects. To those of us who know and love the eighteenth century, it is hardly that. In Fact, its literature is full of such things as horses that talk like humans, gangs of criminals that sing operatic arias in praise of their "profession," and young men who journey to London in search of adventure and get much more than they bargained for. Through plays, poems, novels, and personal journals, we will discover just why the "Age of Reason" is a misnomer for the eighteenth century in England. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement, and English Department Pre-1800 requirement.

Course introduces students to Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost, and reads representative eighteenth-century British texts that respond to and re-imagine the key questions that shape the poem. Representative authors and genres of the period are studied, and students practice basic skills of literary analysis in regular writing assignments that introduce them to resources and research methods in literary studies. Fulfills Humanities requirement and English Department Pre-1800 requirement.

Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed important changes in the ways in which sexuality and gender roles were defined, from the rise of the “two sex” theory of the body to the development of an ideology of domesticity that continues to shape family and social arrangements today. Literature of the period not only explores such changes but also uses representations of gender and sexuality to mediate broader cultural changes, such as the rise of a credit economy and the shift to a limited monarchy. Rakes ruled the Restoration stage; Joseph Addison threatened to prosecute the hoop skirt for concealing women’s sexual indiscretions; and more than one novel of the period narrates a “harlot’s progress” from iniquity to respectability. This course explores how such representations helped contemporary readers make sense of their cultural environment and shaped modern identity. Literary readings will be supplemented by short theoretical readings from the history of gender and sexuality. Fulfills Humanities and Conceptualizing Diversity requirements and English Department Pre-1800 requirement.

Course examines how racial, ethnic, and national categories were imagined and represented just as Britain's transatlantic empire was expanding. Works by writers who experienced enslavement and imperial rule are juxtaposed with works in which Britain's imperial identity was written into being. Short historical and philosophical works provide context for literary works that show how imperial ideology developed and was debated and challenged over the course of the long eighteenth century.

The nineteenth century is known as an era of “separate spheres”: behavioral norms that broadly excluded women from public life and space. Yet Britain and its empire was also ruled for much of the century by the most powerful queen the world had witnessed in centuries. This class explores paradoxes of gender in the age of first-wave feminism, and how nineteenth-century constructions of femininity intersected with contemporaneous questions of race, class, and sexuality. Fulfills Conceptualizing Diversity and Humanities; and also fulfills ENG Pre-1900 requirement

Students will look at the changing shape of English literature from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. At a time when some theorists are asking "Is literary history possible?" we will attempt to understand a small portion of English literary history and some of the terms used to define it: "Romanticism," Victorianism," and Modernism." Among the representative authors, we may study from these three periods are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf. Through the fiction and poetry of these authors, we will also explore some of the ideas and anxieties of this age, such as the relationship between science and faith, the role of women, and the impact of colonialism. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement.

A chronological study of American writing from colonial days through the present, with some attention to the social, political, and intellectual backgrounds. Primary emphasis during the first half of the sequence falls on the Puritans and American Romantics; the second half surveys writers from the Romantics forward, including such figures as Twain, Chopin, James, Williams, Stevens, Faulkner, Hughes, as well as selected contemporary writers. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement.

Overview of African American literature from early slave narratives to realist novels and twenty-first century poetry. This course asks how foundational nineteenth-century African American writers invented and adapted literary forms to redefine the United States and construct new images of blackness. Further, we explore how their work speaks to our own moment by discussing recent literature, political discourse, and popular culture. Authors considered will include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Claudia Rankine, and Ta-Nehesi Coates.

In 1901, Charles Chesnutt observed that the United States "was rushing forward with giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-dominion," an assertion that captures the energy, anxieties, and priorities of the later decades of the nineteenth century. The nation’s "rushing" vigor, simultaneously exhilarating and troubling, is likewise evident in the period’s literature, which sought to document how vast cultural, technological, economic, and political changes impacted individual American lives. In this course, we will explore these decades through the works of Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Paul Dunbar, among others. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement.

For a variety of reasons -- cultural, political, and logistical -- the development of the American novel is delayed until political independence from England is won. In this course, we will examine novels written during the early years of the nation, tracing the ways in which the works attempt to define a distinct national identity. Authors considered will include Brown, Foster, Tenney, Cooper, Sedgwick, Child, Poe, and Dana. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement.

American literature written between 1830 and 1860 is the focus of this course, a period that has come to be known as the “American Renaissance.” As students explore the texts and contexts of these three decades, they will consider the implications of this name, what it assumes, and what it excludes. The reading list will likely include Cooper, Emerson, Poe, Thoreau, Fuller, Hawthorne, Stowe, Douglass, Brown, Whitman, and Melville, among others. Fulfills humanities requirement.

Course introducing students to American literature written around, or about, the Civil War. Beginning with a novel rumored (wrongly) to have started the conflict, students read a series of works that engage the political and social turmoil, from both Northern and Southern perspectives. Fulfills humanities requirement.

Is reading children’s literature work or play? From novels as distinct as The Governess; or The Little Female Academy (1749) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) and The Hate U Give (2017), the genre has long navigated the poles of education and entertainment, socializing children alternately as miniature adults, docile innocents, or imaginative rebels. After spending the semester surveying didactic primers, fairytale fantasies, beloved classics, and curious outliers from the Golden Age of children’s literature, we’ll end by asking how modern YA fiction upholds or subverts earlier ideals of childhood. Along the way, we will analyze the social, historical, and pedagogical contexts of our objects of study and ponder the surprisingly large philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic questions raised by these seemingly small texts.

From slave rebellions to civil war, passive resistance to armed revolt, the US experienced regular social upheaval—sometimes peaceful, more often violent—across the nineteenth century. In this course, we will explore what it means that American literature is motivated by protest. Beginning with US responses to the Haitian Revolution and ending with early twentieth-century labor unrest, we will examine the tensions between insurrection and the “domestic Tranquility” promised by the Constitution. Consulting works by authors including Tom Paine, David Walker, Leonora Sansay, Robert Montgomery Bird, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and Theodore Dreiser, we will consider the myriad roles protest might play in forming “a more perfect Union.” Fulfills humanities requirement.

Interdisciplinary exploration of the pre-Euro-colonial forms of Indigenous writing/communal narratives and the oral tradition and the interrelatedness of these forms, along with the historical, political, and cultural meanings of Native literatures and record-keeping. Emphasis on the power of the story, and the sacredness of Indigenous storytellers and their role in the nation, are central to the course. The course examines the Euro-colonial impacts and disruptions of writing/storytelling practices and how Native Americans respond(ed) to those intrusions. Works of the earliest Native writers post-European arrival, of the Native American Literary Renaissance (1960—70s), and of contemporary Natives are the core of the course. The role of Indian boarding schools, the prevalence of Euro-formed narratives in higher education, perceptions of Native people in Native and non-Native literatures, and the ways Native writers today engage cultural continuance and sovereignty in their works are discussed. Positioning the concepts of “writing” and “mapmaking” from an Indigenous-cultural context is the foundation of our conversations. Course includes readings of Indigenous-centric literary criticism from the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Intermediate study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement.

Survey of major literary works, produced throughout the world from antiquity to the present, that have had a significant influence beyond their regional and historical origins. While on the one hand, this course aims to introduce students to the respective contexts of these distinct works, thus promoting an understanding of cultural diversity, its primary goal is to research the continuing human concerns that bring together literary traditions. In addition, the course provides students with a literary history of globalization by considering how exploration, colonization, religion, economics, and the circulation of ideas have linked disparate populations. Lastly, it asks important questions about the endurance of literature by examining broader issues such as canonization, translation, publication, dissemination, and digitization. Written assignments will focus on developing critical reading, writing, and thinking skills with a comparative approach. Although this course is taught in English and open to all students, those with reading fluencies in languages other than English will be encouraged to produce their own original translations of primary texts and to pursue research projects that allow them to work multi-lingually. In addition, declared English majors will be encouraged to investigate the wider impact of English language literature outside of Anglophone societies. Fulfills Humanities requirement

This course will examine major works, themes, and concerns of the African American literary tradition, focusing primarily on writings produced from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement. Centering our discussions around the social, political, and cultural movements of the 20th century, we will consider the manner by which literature has been utilized to give voice to the reality of African Americans, thereby re-writing narratives that previously sought to exclude and negate them. This course will engage novels, short stories, poetry, essays, autobiography, and drama as a means of not only exploring African American culture, but also ultimately considering the African American presence as central to understanding American culture as a whole. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities and conceptualizing diversity requirements.

This course will grapple with the centrality of translation to the consolidation of literary canons in the global anglophone sphere. We will read novels, poetry, and other texts that have arguably entered the canons of world literature through their widespread circulation in translation. We will consider the institutional mechanisms—literary prizes, academic canons and syllabi, and popular circulation in the literary market—that contribute to the making of world literature. We will reflect on: what world literature is and how it has been defined; how works of world literature engage “otherness” in relation to objects that can be read and consumed; different models of literary cosmopolitanism; and the dominance of English as the implicit structuring condition for a global literature to emerge.

Study of the development of American poetry from 1620 to 1945. Though other writers are studied, course emphasizes Taylor, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Stevens. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement.

Bildungsroman as a genre defined by the novelistic development of a character, from youth to maturity, and their imbrication into a set of social relations. Its rise has been associated with modernity and the nation-state in Europe in the eighteenth century, although it has come to be a global genre. This course considers how the bildungsroman is adapted across a range of settings spanning the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, as well as postcolonial Britain, Ireland and Italy.

An overview of modernist and post-modernist fiction, poetry, and drama of Great Britain and Ireland of the twentieth century. Fulfills humanities requirement.

This course explores literary and cultural expressions produced within and about the movement for African American Civil Rights, focusing on the Jim Crow period through the rise of Black Power. Taking a multi-genre approach, texts will include fiction, poetry, music, autobiography, public speeches, and essays. We will examine the manner by which the intellectual, cultural, and political elements of the movement are captured and expressed through literature. Moreover, we will consider literary expression as central to furthering the aims of the Civil Rights movement, preserving and promoting its legacy in the contemporary moment, and framing 21st Century movements toward social justice. This course may be used to fulfil the first year writing requirement. For students pursuing this option, the fourth-hour requirement will be met by weekly meetings during the Common Hour (Thursdays, 11:30 to 12:30).

Survey of poems, essays, novels, short stories and plays written by African American women. Starting with late 18th century poet Phillis Wheatley and ending with 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison, we investigate the political, social, and aesthetic concerns with which these women writers contend: spiritual conversion; woman's labors under slave bondage; reconstructing the womanhood and family ties in the post-Emancipation Era; protest against racist violence, specifically lynching and rape; black women's moral reform movement; racial passing and socioeconomic mobility; government challenges to black women's reproductive rights; and collaborative methods to organize black women-centered communities. Cross-listed with AFS-248. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities and conceptualizing diversity requirements.

Now more than ever America’s role in the world is being decided in other places perhaps even more vigorously than it is in the U.S. itself. "Amerika" takes an international approach to the study of American literature. This course examines the idea of America in relation to the place of the United States, considering how it may be transferred, reflected, perceived, and debated globally, as we read fiction written about the United States by foreign writers. For some, such as Kafka, this means imagining an entirely fabricated space, whereas for others, such as Nabokov and Lorca, it means critiquing a culture found in a newly-adopted homeland. Although we will cover early accounts, such as those by Tocqueville and Columbus, the syllabus is weighted toward the 20th century fiction from countries as wide-ranging as Germany, France, Egypt, and Palestine in order to engage current questions about the reception and creation of American culture in the twenty-first century. Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities requirement.

In the decades following the Holocaust, a “poetry of witness” rose into prominence. This poetry is motivated by the desire to remember and to record the horror, as well as to memorialize those who were silenced. In “After Auschwitz: A Literature of Witness,” we will read memoirs and poems written by survivors and collaborators of the Holocaust. Additionally, we will read a memoir and many poems by the next generation of Jews, often the children of survivors. At a moment in history when the last survivors of the holocaust are passing away, it is important that we study and remember their experiences. Fulfills humanities requirement.

This course will examine the literary and cultural production of African Americans in the 21st Century, considering ways that contemporary African American writers have—through form and content—honored and built upon the expressive traditions that preceded them. Taking a multi-genre approach, we will also consider the manner by which fiction, poetry, film, essays, and music have presented and reflected upon the contemporary reality of African Americans. Potential themes and events considered within the literature include: the aftermath of 9/11, responses to Hurricane Katrina, Blackness in the age of Obama, post-Blackness/post-Raciality, African diasporan identity and immigration, identity formation and social media, popular culture, intersectionality, #BlackLivesMatter, and social justice movements of the 21st Century. Fulfills humanities requirement.

While the immediate focus of this course will be directed toward the contemporary Hip Hop and Spoken Word Movements, we will engage the contemporary moment as part of an African American cultural legacy that is built upon a bedrock of oral tradition. We will consider the significance of orality in crafting and cultivating the forms, styles, and content of African American cultural expression. Examining oral expressions that range from music to public speeches, this course positions the spoken word as central to understanding the complex issues of identity, culture, and politics that shape the African American presence in American society Offered occasionally. Fulfills humanities and conceptualizing diversity requirements..

The study of selected masterpieces of Latino literature from the United States. Special emphasis is given to writers representing the largest segments of the U.S. Latino population: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans. Other Latino communities are represented in shorter reading selections. This is primarily a literature course engaging students in literary analysis of each text’s themes, structure and style. ENG 265 and LAS 265 are cross-listed. Fulfills humanities and conceptualizing diversity requirements..

This course introduces students to the major canons of Latinx literature that emerged in the twentieth century, together with their cultural and historical contexts from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will analyze novels, short stories, poems, and films to investigate how Latinx cultural production explores issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. As we will see, literary expressions of Latinidad and Chicanidad explore not only these issues but also group-specific standpoints and modes of consciousness inextricable from the experiences that constitute them, that is, from historical formations of racialization and mestizaje; multilingualism and code-switching; immigration and diaspora; revolution and exile; citizenship and undocumented status; labor and economic exploitation. Along the way, students will examine the differences and similarities that have shaped the experiences and aesthetic choices of different Latinx communities in the United States, while thinking more broadly about their transnational contexts in the US-Mexico borderlands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. FULFILLS HUMANITIES, CONCEPTUALIZING DIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS. ENG 266 and LAS 266 are cross-listed. This course may be used to fulfil the first year writing requirement. For students pursuing this option, the fourth-hour requirement will be met by weekly meetings during the Common Hour (Thursdays, 11:30 to 12:30).

This course will survey a number of works from African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literary canons. Each unit will investigate how minoritarian experiences are constructed through literary forms and representations across diverse twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literatures. Across units, we will identify literary expressions that grapple with the historical experiences of colonialism and slavery; racialization and double consciousness; ethnic difference and marginalization; dialect and code-switching; migration and diasporic writing; alienation and assimilation. Approaching these issues through the prism of ethnic literature encourages us to consider not only how American identity formation is constituted by a historical legacy of empire, but also how creative writing responds to—and even attempts to disrupt—such a legacy. It also encourages us to consider how a monolithic and even marginalizing category such as “ethnic literature” is itself rife with problematic assumptions about identity and difference, homogeneity and heterogeneity, national culture and multi-culturalism. As we move through each unit, we will examine the differences and similarities across the literatures of various ethnic and racial identities in the United States, while analyzing how they invoke their broader transnational contexts and how they develop complex intersections with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. In this way, we will assess how different ethnic literatures challenge more traditional notions of American cultural production, thereby also challenging our understanding of American identity itself.

Overview of the concepts and material practices of empire through global anglophone literature and pop-culture texts from around the world. This course will function as an introduction to imperialism and postcolonial studies, moving from the British, French and German empires at the peak of their influence in the early twentieth century, to American imperialism during the Cold War to the post-9/11 period. Though the figure of the conscripted soldier, the course readings will trace some major wars that shape the world from the twentieth century onwards—the two world wars, the Cold war and its proxy wars in Asia fought across Vietnam and Korea, and the War on Terror.

Intermediate study of literature focused on a specific type, or genre, of literature over a broad time-frame. Fulfills Humanities requirement

This course introduces students to the concept and literary history of transnational writing throughout the hemispheric Americas by examining a pivotal period of the nineteenth century. By 1850, slaveholding societies across the Americas were booming, giving rise to imperial dreams that decisively shaped the future of the world. Pro-slavery leaders envisioned an expansion of slavery that would create a new global empire around the Gulf of Mexico, an idealized hub of exchange linking Atlantic and Pacific, Amazon and Mississippi. We will consider how writers portrayed both the global webs of political and economic interests that set these dreams in motion and the anxieties about race and revolution by the enslaved that troubled them. How did these writers contest or unsettle grand expansionist visions? How does their artful writing change our understanding of apparently national conflicts like US westward expansion, the US Civil War, the Cuban War of Independence, or the Mexican Revolution? To pursue these questions, our course will survey portions of contemporary histories as well as primary documents from the period to understand the broader sweep of the century. We will explore how the central literary works reimagine and grapple with processes such as the transatlantic slave trade, revolutions, wars, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and exile.

What secrets were kept behind the closed door of the nineteenth-century home? If we read and listen carefully, what can we overhear? Thought to be an idealized space of respite and retreat from the pressures of the modern world, the domestic sphere was actually rife with conflict. Whether in the free North or slaveholding South, Anglo-American housewives were enlisted to “civilize,” control, and “tame” their servants and even their own children. But how did housewives really feel about their exclusion from public life, their duty to advance the mission of imperial expansion and domesticate the “foreign” within? How did Mexican, Native, Chinese, and African American women resist this project of Americanization? This course pursues these questions as it explores the multiple meanings of “domestic” in the long nineteenth-century U.S. and introduces students to key genres of women’s writing. We will consider not only fiction about the home, as the title might most immediately suggest, but writing that invents the idea of the domestic as home, nation, and central civilizing metaphor that enables imperial conquest. Through a survey of various texts and cultural artifacts from the period including fiction, advice manuals, and political writing, we will seek to uncover the secret violences and buried histories upon which the myth of the ideal American home rests.

Intermediate study of literature which crosses disciplines and/or periods, or combines subjects in a unique way. Fulfills Humanities requirement

Course provides an historical understanding of the vocabulary, forms, and sounds of the language from the Anglo-Saxon or Old English period to the twentieth century. Important: This course counts only as an elective toward an English major and toward Education certification. It DOES NOT count as a 200-level intermediate literature course. Recommended for Education minors Fulfills Humanities requirement

"Ecocriticism" takes an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing works of fiction, poetry, and scholarship in the context of environmental issues. This course introduces students to key ecocritical concepts and how to 1) employ ecocriticism as a tool for reading and interpreting literature and 2) read literature for how it imagines the shape and shaping of the world. The course itself is organized by six topics central to Ecocriticism: Pollution, Wilderness, Apocalypse, Dwelling, Animals, and Earth. This course may be used to fulfil the first year writing requirement. For students pursuing this option, the fourth-hour requirement will be met by weekly meetings during the Common Hour (Thursdays, 11:30 to 12:30).

The invention of the printed book stands as a key development in human history – a technological innovation perhaps only recently matched by the Invention of digital technologies that allow for new forms of communication and human connection--just like the book. This course serves as an introduction to the vibrant field of the history of the book, which focuses on the material life of texts and the way that their materiality shapes books’ cultural impact. We will consider the book as a physical object; study the relationship between books and their cultures; and explore links between books and theories of textuality. Along the way, we will explore such issues as the evolving figure of the author, the development of copyright, and how people have experienced their reading of books over the centuries. The over-arching goal is to become attuned to the practical and theoretical consequences of books’ materiality. The work of the course will take advantage of Musselman Library’s Special Collections, and students will have the opportunity to learn about and engage in archival research. This course may appeal especially to students wishing to gain a broad foundation in issues relevant to librarianship and editing. Fulfills Science, Technology, and Society requirement

This course will trace changing ideas and assumptions about literature from antiquity to the nineteenth century. In order to appreciate more fully the various ideas about literary value (broadly conceived), we will consider the arguments in tandem with examples of the specific genres literature being celebrated as exemplary or, in some cases, derided as dangerous. Throughout the semester, our goal will be to acquire a sense of the historical basis for the practice of literary criticism, as well as an appreciation of the kinds of questions and problems raised by the study of literature. Students may expect to read selections from some of the following: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Sidney, Boileau-Despreaux, Pope, Vico, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Offered occasionally.

Introduction to advanced literary study. Attention is placed on close reading, using the library and electronic resources and incorporating scholarly perspectives. Course also considers a variety of theoretical approaches to literature and their place within contemporary literary scholarship. Offered regularly.

Discussion course in the writing and reading of alternative forms of fiction. Aim is to enhance understanding and implementation of various alternatives to short fiction, including short-short fiction, the novella, and the novel. Each student completes two short stories and a fragment of a novella or the opening of a novel. All styles and subjects are welcome, and students are encouraged to discover and exercise their unique writing voices. Offered regularly. Prerequisite: English 205.

Workshop in the reading and writing of short stories. Aim is to understand and implement various techniques and strategies of short fiction, including characterization, character development, variance of voice, transport, and resonance. Each student is to complete a number of exercises and two short stories (with both revised), as well as written critiques. Offered regularly. Prerequisite: English 205.

Course will provide a sampling of the vital new poetry being published today. We will read powerful volumes of poetry published within the last couple of years. Reading with attention craft, students will study the art and practice of writing poems.

Workshop in the personal essay. The personal essay presents an idea from a personal point of view, requiring both persuasiveness and a distinctive voice. Students develop a series of essays over the semester, and read a wide variety of published essays for analysis and inspiration. Students are expected to serve as peer critics, and to complete various exercises and revisions in order to write ambitious, compelling essays. Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: English 205.

Whether writing in form or free verse, poets make careful choice of sound, diction, and line length. This course will pay particular attention to the way a poem’s form (the way it looks on the page and sounds to the ear) reflects and amplifies its meaning. Readings may include poems by James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Greg Williamson, Linda Gregerson, and Jorie Graham. Requirements will include seven original poems with revisions, two short papers (“close-readings” of particular poems), and a presentation. Prerequisite: ENG 205.

Workshop in the reading and writing of memoir. Students develop narratives based on personal experience and address the question of how to transform memory into compelling writing through the analysis of appropriate models and discussion of student work. Each student is expected to complete various exercises and critical responses, as well as a substantial memoir project. Offered regularly. Prerequisite: English 205.

An advanced writing workshop in screenplay. The course focuses on reading/viewing as a screenwriter, with attention to craft, including writing and viewing exercises, discussion, and workshop sessions. These activities are in service of developing students' voice and skills as they write the main project of the semester, a feature-length screenplay. Everything students have learned about writing comes into play in this course, and everything learned here helps students with future writing, no matter what they choose to write. Can writing a screenplay help you write a better story, essay, or poem? Can writing a screenplay help you become the storyteller you want to be? Yes, it can. Prerequisite: ENG 205

This course provides students with the skills necessary to write reviews of literature for print and online publications. Students enrolled in the course will learn how to write both short and long form reviews as well as how to find and choose work to review, how to pitch reviews for publication, where to pitch their articles, how to self-edit, and how to work with editors. At the end of the course, in addition to having written a variety of reviews, all students will have written an actual pitch that they have sent to an editor. Although the focus of this course is on writing reviews of literature — whether fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, or hybrid genres — the skills students learn will apply to reviewing other art forms as well. Therefore, part of the course will involve writing reviews of events in the Gettysburg community such as concerts, theatrical productions, gallery shows, architecture, public lectures, et al. Furthermore, “Writing the Review” treats the review as a significant literary genre. As such, it has a heavy reading component; students will be introduced to the long history of the review and exposed to a broad range of contemporary reviewing platforms and publications, ranging from the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) to Avidly. In addition to writing reviews, they will write papers about the reviews they have read. Therefore, this course is open both to creative writing students advancing their writing skills and English students interested in the history and practice of cultural criticism. Prerequisite: ENG 205.

Advanced level writing workshops that are organized according to theme, motif, or subgenre, or that address the problem of writing with a specific audience in mind. Offered regularly. Prerequisite: English 205.

Exploration of conflicting theories concerning the origin and development of medieval drama. Course examines social roles, discusses issues of text and performance, and compares the relative merits of 'good literature' and 'good drama.' Students read examples drawn from a variety of genres of drama, and view performances of several plays on videotape. Class stages its own production of the Noah story. Counts toward Theater Arts major. Offered occasionally.

Students in this course explore ancient Denmark and Scandinavia with Beowulf—the archetypal Tough Guy—as guide, maneuvering a mystical landscape of trolls, dragons, and witches, plying icy waters with Grettir the Strong, tasting Fafnir’s blood with Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, swearing blood-brotherhood with Boðvar Bjarki, Bear-Warrior, and oh, so much more! Placing the Anglo-Saxon epic in the context of ancient Germanic legend, folklore, and myth, this course helps students to understand the literary geography of the poem, as well as giving them the tools to navigate this topography by introducing them to the rudiments of manuscript study and the Old English language. Beowulf is well-known to students of English literature everywhere and even the manuscript itself is now readily available through the Electronic Beowulf project. Less familiar, though, are the sites of the epic. The location of the great hall of Heorot has long been postulated to have been somewhere in the vicinity of Roskilde in Denmark. For generations no physical evidence seemed likely to corroborate such suppositions, but recent discoveries at Lejre have reinvigorated this investigation. Archaeological work now is allowing us to place the poem in a physical geography; this opens up more fully our understanding of the world which produced the poem. In addition to a fantastic literary work, therefore, we may now begin to understand Beowulf as an artifact in a historical setting. Fulfills Humanities requirement and English Department Pre-1800 requirement.

“Love at first sight.” “Head over heels in love.” Modern cliches abound about the onset and emotions of love. But how did people think and write about love four hundred years ago? This course will explore the flood of love poetry, essays on marriage, and romantic comedies that began in the Renaissance with the Petrarchan poet Thomas Wyatt. What did these authors have to say about courtship, sex, marriage and the opposite sex? What did they say to capture the interest of their audience? We will not only be reading representations of more traditional male-female relationships in the drama and love poetry of the period, but also the homoerotic sonnets of Shakespeare, the homosocial poetry of Amelia Lanyer and Katherine Philips, and the strange figurations of divine love in the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. Fulfills Humanities requirement and English Department Pre-1800 requirement.

In this course we will investigate the major generic forms and preoccupations of the poetry of the seventeenth-century, a period in which England stood on the verge of our modern world. This period marked a series of radical changes and conflicts that altered the nature of society, and perhaps more importantly for our purposes, literature as well. Our focus for much of the semester will be on learning advanced techniques for reading and analyzing some of the great poetry in the English language, poetry by John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton and Andrew Marvell. We will study scansion, meter, rhyme patterns as well as a variety of poetic modes and forms. By the end of the semester, you will be expert readers of poetry, as well as better writers of it (if you are so inclined). As we hone our poetic skills, we will connect our enhanced understanding of these poems to some of the important developments of the century, including: the political upheavals of Civil War and Restoration; the growth and spread of a Protestant and Puritan poetics and politics; the widening public sphere and rising literacy rate; the burgeoning literary marketplace and professionalization of the author; the changing role of women both in the public and domestic spheres; the profound expansion of, and centrality of London to, English culture. This is a tremendously fascinating period in British history, both historically and literarily, and there will be a lot into which to delve. Fulfills Humanities requirement and English Department Pre-1800 requirement.

This ain’t your mother’s Harlequin Romance, baby! Love you’ll find, all right, but not the sappy sentimental kind you might expect, and in these tales battles, dragons, and the knights of King Arthur are every bit as common as lovers’ tears, instant infatuation, and bodice-ripping passion. The genre of the Medieval Romance had its earliest vernacular genesis in French and Anglo-Norman translations of Latin epic poetry, and eventually it evolved into an extremely popular courtly narrative aimed at a secular aristocratic audience. Because of these origins and aims we might expect Romances to deal with the interests and values of the courtly class, and this is indeed often the case: Spectacles of battles, tournaments, feasts, quests, and the hunt abound, along with elaborate descriptions of clothes, arms, armor, and rituals, most notably those related to “courtesy,” or polite courtly behavior. Perhaps the most well-known conventions of the Medieval Romance to modern readers are those of courtly love and “chivalry,” the code of knightly virtue and conduct. These are indeed common facets of the genre, and often Romances in fact might be said to articulate and to validate the cultural values and practices of the elite classes of the Medieval West. The Romance is much more than a mere series of re-assertions of fundamental interests and principles, however, and often it critiques the very cultures it seems designed to laud. The Medieval Romance may be—for these reasons—more difficult to define accurately than it seems upon first inspection. Offered occasionally.

What did the original performances of Shakespeare look like, sound like, smell like, feel like? This course attempts to answer this question, studying the performance spaces, the costuming, the acting styles, the lighting of the early modern stage. We will do so while also reading some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, using our knowledge of the conditions of performance to understand more fully what meanings are being conveyed in these texts.

Heard any good stories lately? Perhaps from the friend of a friend? All cultures have their stories, and as different as they may be on the surface, most myths and legends have some important similarities, as well as the crucial differences that reflect realities of a given culture and that make a particular story vibrant and unique. Storytelling provides answers to life’s persistent questions: All peoples everywhere ponder the same mysteries, and the answers developed by a particular culture can tell us a lot about that people. A society that worships a thunderbolt-wielding king god may be a warrior aristocracy; one that venerates an earth goddess fertility figure may be agrarian in nature; one that deifies tragic pop icons struck down by their own excesses may be obsessed with cults of celebrity and narcissism, as well as the inviolate sanctity of individual expression. A comparative approach to mythology allows us to grasp the fundamentally human nature underlying story-telling: Thus, although the stories we tell may be different from those of the ancient Sumerians, or those of the Celts, or those of the Sioux, the basic concerns addressed by those stories are often very similar indeed.

Course focuses on literature written between 1660 and 1743, and examines dominant literary forms and modes, as well as such issues as the education of women and marriage, changing social behavior, and growing consumerism. Through plays, prose writings, diaries, and poetry, students sample the literary richness of the period. Offered occasionally.

In 1675, King Charles II tried to shut down London’s coffee-houses, declaring them dens of scandal and sedition. In 1710, Joseph Addison declared that he would bring philosophy out of the colleges and libraries into the very same coffee-houses. This debate over coffee-houses represents one element of a larger contest over the emergence of an eighteenth-century "public sphere," a space for supposedly free debate and investigation that also promised participants the chance to talk their way into a new understanding of both their own social status and their relationship to state authority. This course will examine how the eighteenth-century British public sphere was thought and brought into being, paying particular attention to the ways its emergence was defined in and by literary texts. We will also investigate broader questions about how the ways in which individuals imagine their communities and their social relationships helps to define the scope of their agency, and how the debates that structured the eighteenth-century public sphere give us ways to approach the shifts in our own public sphere brought about by the digital revolution and the rise of Web 2.0. Offered occasionally.

Most accounts of novel’s “rise” in eighteenth-century Britain emphasize the genre’s “formal realism” and attribute its development to a triumvirate of male novelists—Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson. But behind and alongside that story exists a “secret history of the novel”: a story largely about fiction by women frequently more salacious, less realistic, and more formally experimental than the mainstream novel. Students will learn about this alternate tradition while practicing skills of formal analysis, historical research, and critical reading and writing.

“When a man is tired of London,” Samuel Johnson famously opined in 1777, “he is tired of life.” In the eighteenth century, London was bursting with life. One tenth of England’s population called it home. Many who migrated to or flourished in London found in the city a way of life that was fresh, exciting, and novel—in short, modern. In this course, we will explore how eighteenth-century cities, from London to Dublin to Philadelphia, give rise to distinctly modern forms of experience. We will examine the role that cities play in the eighteenth-century literary imagination by reading works of poetry, prose, and drama. We will focus on the nature of the individual who inhabits the modern city, and on the people who live in modernity’s shadow, at the margins of the city. Throughout, we will keep in mind Johnson’s further observation that “a great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life.”

In this course, we will explore what was “novel,” or new, about the formal conventions and the style of the novel; we will examine what questions, problems, and themes preoccupied eighteenth-century novelists; and we will make connections between the novel and its historical and cultural context. Many of the texts we will be reading were bestsellers in their day, and one of our main tasks will be to understand how these works delighted, absorbed, and scandalized eighteenth-century readers. We will investigate the early novel's relationship with other forms of prose fiction, and we will explore the relationship between the so-called "realist novel" and some of its alternatives. Offered occasionally.

In the sentimental literature of the late eighteenth century, hearts flutter, pulses race, and ladies swoon. The fineness of one’s feelings signifies one’s social refinement and one’s moral virtue alike. This course investigates the philosophical and social origins of this shift to sentiment and examines the poetry, novels, and plays in which sentiment circulated in late eighteenth-century Britain. Students will investigate why the late eighteenth century witnesses a shift to the body as a sign of one’s character; how the literature of sentiment represents ideals of masculinity and femininity; how sentiment is used to enforce social boundaries; and assess the reliability of moral judgments grounded in feeling. Fulfills Humanities requirement and English Department Pre-1800 requirement

Nineteenth-century Americans were, seemingly, always on the go. This course will explore narratives -- novels, poems, plays, and autobiographies -- that represent the possibilities and limitations associated with mobility, broadly understood. To provide critical perspective on the train trips and sea voyages depicted in these works, we will also explore critical writings on space, place, geography, and mapping. Offered occasionally.

In this course, we will explore the intersection between literature and the visual arts in mid to late Victorian England, with special attention paid to the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Decadent movements. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated all things English, we will look at the ways architects, artists, poets, craftspeople, socialists, novelists, and dandies sought to breathe life into an era which many felt had become unbearably materialistic, mechanistic, and downright ugly. Throughout the course, we will try to understand how the search for beauty can have profound political, social, and even economic implications. Counts towards WGS major.

For centuries, writers have grappled with a surprisingly thorny task: how to capture ordinary experience in art. Adopting a “realist” approach to life and literature, they ask: How should we represent reality? What counts as “ordinary?” Whose perspectives are portrayed? This course explores novels, poetry, and visual art that seek to hold a mirror to the world and ends by considering realism’s curious tenacity in modern genres like cinematic neorealism, documentaries, sitcoms, reality TV, and social media. Fulfills Conceptualizing Diversity and Humanities.

In this course, we will take an interdisciplinary look at the literature and culture of the "transitional" period from Victorianism into Modernism, i.e., 1880-1920. The course traces the movement in art away from representationalism towards the abstract and the surrealistic, which parallels the movement in literature away from realism towards stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques and symbolist poetry and also explore the period's interest in psychology, primitivism, and decadence. Offered occasionally.

In this course, we will examine the conjoined roles of sensation and sentiment in American literature from the early national period until the Civil War. In addition to considering how the gothic challenges assumptions about the primacy and reliability of reason and rationality, we will examine how these texts negotiate issues of identity, race, gender, and sexuality. We will consider the writings of Alcott, Brown, Freneau, Melville, Poe, and Stoddard, among others. Offered occasionally.

An exploration of three writers whose first and anonymously-published novels appeared between 1810 and 1820: Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley. Because they initially staked out discrete areas of their fictional works -- domestic life, English and Scottish histories, the findings of modern science -- studying these writers alongside one another should permit students to appreciate the range of concerns that preoccupied British readers of fiction during this period. Each of these novelists was situated to observe important institutions from within: Scott as a member of the bar, who was also deeply involved in publishing; Austen, with family connections to the church and the navy; and Shelley, who grew up at the intellectual center of English radical thought. And because two of them had sharply-opposed political stances at a time of national crisis, the course should also help students recognize some of the fault lines that divided those same readers. Fulfills Humanities requirement

During the romantic period in Britain, poetic culture was strongly influenced by a range of aesthetic concepts, often the focus of vigorous debate, that affected both the composition and reception of much of the writing of the period. Among the concerns taken up by the writers of the period are attempts to define sublimity and beauty, the possibility of writing in an organic form in keeping with spontaneity of expression, the prizing of gusto, the aspiration to reconcile competing desires and aims, the effort to use figurative language as a means of exploration and revelation, the recovery of “the real language of men” for artistic purposes, the naming (through “romantic irony”) of the gap between the real and the ideal. Readings include an extensive sampling of poems from this period, important statements about the nature of poetry by several of these writers themselves, salient reviews of their work, aesthetic retrospective statements from later in the nineteenth century about the tenor of romantic writing. Poets on the syllabus will include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Percy Shelley, Smith, Robinson, and Hemans. Fulfills Humanities requirement.

This course will explore the complex relationship between British Victorians – poets, novelists, explorers, adventurers – and the larger world. The nineteenth century witnessed the beginnings of what we now call globalization. The British Empire stretched around the globe, and for the first time, the “common people” (rather than simply the military and merchant class) were able to travel far beyond the British Isles. From the Brownings’ and Ruskin’s love affairs with Italy, to Darwin’s voyages to the South Pacific, to Joseph Conrad’s fictional journey into Africa, Victorians explored the world at large in unprecedented numbers. This course will explore the accounts, in poetry and prose, both fictional and actual, of these explorations. Authors may include John Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Anna Leonowens, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Francis Burton, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird. Fulfills Humanities requirement .

A study of the poetry, and their writing about poetry, of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, particularly as a response to the conservative turn of the best known and most influential poets of their world. Alongside them we will look at representative novelists—Scott and Austen—whose sympathies inclined more toward a tradition their poetic contemporaries tended to resist.

A study of the way in which Romanticism became a dominant presence in British culture during the last decade of the eighteenth century and in first years of the nineteenth. We will concentrate on the generation of writers -- most familiarly Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge -- who established themselves during these years, and who were united by a desire to create a new poetic idiom, grounded in the claims they could make for imagination, less conventionalized and perhaps less formal than that which they saw as dominating British culture. Crucial contexts to explore will be their differing responses to problems posed by Enlightenment thought, the French Revolution, the subsequent outbreak of war, the industrial revolution, the rise of modern science, and the dominance of English politics by Tory ministries. Writers to be introduced, in addition to those already mentioned, may include such figures as Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Darby Robinson, Walter Scott, and William Godwin. Fulfills Humanities requirement

Between 1837 (when Victoria was crowned) and 1901 (when she passed away), approximately 60,000 novels were written and published in England. If the eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the novel as a legitimate literary genre, and the twentieth century has seen its dissolution, then the nineteenth century must be seen as the novel's heyday. Because most of the novels written during this period were "triple-deckers," long three-volume novels, it is impossible to study more than a few in a single semester. But even our short list of six works shows the variety of presentation possible within the limits of the term "novel."

Audiences were divided between rapture and revulsion when three previously unknown sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë—began to publish wildly popular novels in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Ever since, their works have remained current through a constant stream of (re)adaptations. How have the Brontë sisters stayed so popular? How did these young women engage with the social problems of their era? Alongside a selection of novels, we will read a variety of poems, childhood writings, and reviews.

Advanced study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement

Course studies form, content, and diversity in American fiction since the 1940s, drawing on a selection of novels and short stories by such writers as Updike, Nabokov, Carver, Bellow, Pynchon, and others. Offered occasionally.

Intensive study of the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway, especially during their salad days in the 1920s, with a look at some other contemporary writers who influenced them or were associated with them. Course examines the nature of Fitzgerald and Hemingway's imaginations, the development and characteristics of their distinctive fictional voices, and the causes of their declining powers in the 1930s. Offered occasionally.

A study of three early twentieth-century American novelists: Edith Wharton, the cultivated member of high society in old New York; Theodore Dreiser, the relentlessly unsentimental journalist from Indiana; and Willa Cather, the nostalgic Nebraskan. We will read two or three novels by each writer, focusing on each novel individually, to place it in its biographical, geographical, literary and cultural context; but also stepping back to look at the three writers in relation to one another, looking for both connections and diverging outlooks among them. We will also look at critical works and some primary documents, such as correspondence and memoirs. Among the novels to be read will be The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Offered occasionally.

This course will look at the ways in which women writers in the U.S. have experimented with and invented new literary forms in their respective engagements with personal identity, starting with Emily Dickinson and running through the 21st century. Writers under analysis may include H.D., Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Theresa Haak Kyung Cha, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Haryette Mullen, Mónica de la Torre, and Myung Mi Kim. The course will include field trips and author visits.

Students begin by examining the work of key figures in the beat movement. Our focus here will be on the autobiographical imperatives behind the work of these writers; specifically, they sought to make their everyday lives the bases of their literary art. Our next concern will be with extensions of the beat impulse beyond the 1950s. In the 1960s certain comically inclined writers continued the linguistic innovations of the beats yet at the same time began to scrutinize beat efforts to construct an alternative identity. Specifically, we will look critically at the "primitivist" impulses informing the desire to become a "White Indian." We will then read works that emerged out of the more politically explosive 1960s as the hipster gave way to the hippie. Throughout this course we will be making reference to adjacent developments and innovations in the field of avant-garde or underground film practice. In addition we will investigate the decline of utopian aspirations in the 70s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Among the writers included are Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Pynchon, Percy, Doctorow, Acosta, Berger, Kesey, Barth, Didion, Brautigan, and Southern. Offered occasionally.

What does Asia mean? Where are its borders? How do its people understand themselves and their relations to other peoples and places over the course of the twentieth century? This class will approach these questions by reading for the varied internationalisms, alliances and ties that Asia produces and finds itself embedded in over the twentieth century.

At the end of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf foresees the coming of a new generation of women writers. It is now over 70 years since Woolf wrote her manifesto. Since then, many women have written many books. Perhaps now it is time to explore the new directions taken by modern women writers. How have they used their new "habit of freedom"? Are they writing exactly what they think? What are they writing about? What innovations have they made on literary tradition? What shapes do their imaginative visions take? How have they revised literary history? In this course, student will read such contemporary women writers as Julie Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Maryse Conde, Allegra Goodman, Bharati Mukherjee, Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Jeanette Winterson. During the second half of the semester, we will read and discuss writers selected by the students. Offered occasionally.

A study of the literature of the two decades between the two great European wars of the first half of the 20th century, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Writers to be studies include Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Woolf, Waugh and Greene. Offered occasionally.

This course will undertake an in-depth study of William Faulkner’s major works of fiction and their impact on -- and place within -- literary Modernism. We will begin by looking at some of Faulkner’s early influences, such as Sherwood Anderson, and then trace the arc of Faulkner’s major novels and stories, considering both their experimental and their more conventional aspects, particularly in light of the literary movements and artistic developments surrounding him and the reception of his work throughout the twentieth-century. Of particular concern will be Faulkner’s invented Yoknawpatapha County in Mississippi, his various methods of narration, and his interest in "truth," all in an effort to explore what he meant when he stated, "I don’t care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can’t stand a fact up, you’ve got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it’s not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction." At the end of the semester, we will discuss Faulkner’s film work in Hollywood. Finally, we will begin to consider his legacy as it is expressed in more recent cultural production, particularly in literature of the Global South by writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Offered occasionally.

This course explores the prominence of LGBTQ identities and narratives within African American literary and cultural traditions. Through a purposefully multi-genre exploration of African American literature, spanning from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary moment, we will focus on writers who identify as part of the LGBTQ community, as well as those artists who prominently feature LGBTQ subjects and figures within their work. While examining the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender in creative expression, we will also engage the broader social, political, and cultural implications of these works, considering themes of marginalization, identity formation and articulation, social justice, and activism. Fulfills Humanities and Conceptualizing Diversity requirements.

Students in this course will examine U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American literature in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century and moving through more contemporary voices, we will read novels, poems, and critical works that address the historical and cultural relationship between the American North and South, i.e., between global geographies that have been divided into core and peripheral zones. The concept of the 'Western hemisphere' gained cohesion through the displacement and erasure of indigenous populations across the global South. We will therefore assess how the recovery of knowledge, history, and freedom remains central to literary works that mobilize a hemispheric imagination. Students will explore how imperialism, racialism, polyculturalism, and multilingualism not only shaped cultural production in the Americas but also provided a shared experience of loss and fragmentation that becomes the object of modernist representation across national divides. Moreover, students will examine the literary devices and narrative structures that constitute cross-regional anxieties concerning historical origins, geography, chronology, and memory across the continent. In addition to primary texts, we will engage criticism across the fields of Atlantic, borderlands, and diaspora studies to identify and understand key concepts that span the fraught yet emerging field of transnational American literature.

Afrofuturism is an artistic and critical movement concerned with the place of science fiction and technology in black culture. This interdisciplinary course investigates the origins and influences of African/ African American contributions to science fiction in the forms of literature, comic book arts, film, music, performance, and visual culture. Beginning by highlighting the historical roots of Afrofuturism in African American speculative fiction dating back to the nineteenth century, this course then focuses on the different ways African/ African American artists and thinkers have used science fiction to critique contemporary forms of racial difference and imagine alternate futures. Additional topics of discussion will include Afro-pessimism, Afro-optimism, utopia, futurity, blackness, and metaphysics.

This course explores how American authors combined literary realism with mythical, marvelous, and magical representations of the world, rendering natural phenomena supernatural. Considering Thomas Carlyle’s concept of “natural supernaturalism” and its impact on Romanticist and Transcendentalist thought, this course explores how a similar concept developed among a set of twentieth-century texts across the Americas. Originating amid historic struggles for liberation, these texts can be understood as literary expressions of postcolonial thought that transform surrealistic practices of Western avant gardism to assert the aesthetic autonomy of non-Western communities. We will begin by examining the foundations of this literary turn as a set of African diasporic and Caribbean narrative strategies. Thereafter, we will trace the expansion and propagation of the mythic, the marvelous, and the magical across Latin American and Native American cultural contexts, ending the semester with a view towards more recent developments in contemporary popular film. Students will bring these texts—together with secondary sources—into comparative dialogue, noting cross-cultural connections between different texts and films. As we encounter these works, we will explore questions such as: What literary strategies and narrative techniques are used to naturalize the supernatural? How do these strategies change when moving across different global geographies and cultures? What folkloric traditions and scientific developments influenced what some critics call the “ontological foundations” of these literary forms, and what elements of faith, irreverence, and metafiction constitute their more “epistemological foundations”? Fulfills Humanities, and either Global Understanding or Conceptualizing Diversity. ENG 365 and LAS 365 cross-listed.

While the paradigm of human rights declares a commitment to equality and universal access to basic freedoms, its development and impact in the world has been uneven and contradictory. In fact, the discourse of the human emerges precisely because a declaration of universal rights failed to emerge consistently across racial and legal lines after the French and American revolutions. Thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Joseph Slaughter have shown that human rights as a field has often been marked by a structural interdependence on the state, the corporation, or, indeed, the market. This course asks how literary representations of human rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries raise important questions about empathy, violence, torture, citizenship, and security. By blending literature with political theory, the course explores key human rights figures such as the migrant, the detainee, the refugee, and the undocumented through novels, short stories, and graphic novels from Kashmir, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Guantánamo and the US, and Australia’s Manus Island.

Over the course of the semester, we will explore the literary output of one of the 20th Century’s most prolific writers, James Baldwin. Students will have the opportunity to deeply engage and critically reflect on Baldwin’s fiction, essays, and poetry. Moreover, Baldwin’s writing will serve as the foundation for our exploration of themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality that continue to make his work as relevant in the contemporary moment as when they were first published. Fulfills Humanities and Conceptualizing Diversity requirements.

What is an orangutan from Borneo doing in Edgar Allen Poe’s first detective story? Why do so many images of the foreign appear in early U.S. fiction? This course will stage a series of close encounters with an anxious—and even haunted—early U.S. literary imagination as it conjures fantasies of the foreign. Whether as antagonists or lovers, threats to the sanctity of the domestic or heroically moral “Others,” we can find these fantasies in nearly every early genre from the gothic to the romance, the sentimental, naturalism, local color writing, and realism. How did these founding genres mediate experiences of what was encountered as “foreign?” What role did this tendency in literary culture play in the construction of a national culture and the projects of U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism? To pursue answers to these questions, we will track these fantasies of the foreign across a range of genres in both texts that manifest broader social anxieties about racial and cultural differences, and those written in the early U.S. that contest these prevailing tendencies. We’ll contextualize our engagement with this literature by looking at historical artifacts from the period, including political cartoons, legal proceedings, visual art, and even wallpaper that represent, at turns, fearful and utopic ideas about what the U.S. was or could be.

What visions and portents were the uncharted landmasses and depths of the Atlantic made to hold? A period of massive English colonial expansion began in the early seventeenth century that saw the rise of a new transatlantic economy. As goods and raw materials circulated the planetary currents of the Atlantic throughout the succeeding two centuries, colonialists and those upon whose labor they depended wove tales, wrote literature, and philosophized about the “exotic” peoples and landscapes they encountered. The Atlantic world was a vast expanse that took on many meanings—danger, opportunity, paradise, death. In this course, we will consider how social and economic changes went hand in hand with ways of portraying them in the making and remaking of the worlds of the Atlantic. We will compare colonialists’ writings with the impressions sketched by lesser-known and less-empowered figures that troubled them: pirates, laborers, indentured servants, the enslaved, and other working people who navigated the ocean as rebels, resisting the ruthless rulers of the mercantile and slave trading economy. We will focus, that is, on a material and representational battle that was playing out within the constraints of this newly global commercial and literary economy. Taking as our starting point Linebaugh and Rediker’s seminal history of the modern world, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, we will then read novels, poetry, and other writing ranging into the early nineteenth century that thematize travel, circulation, commerce, and the violence inherent in the maintenance of the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, we will explore the kinds of insights we can generate when we adopt conceptual frameworks other than the nation state for the study of early American literature. What do we see, for instance, when we foreground the impact of transatlantic exchange, including translation, on literary form, notions of the human, and the production of an intellectual or artistic persona? The Atlantic studies approach that Linebaugh and Rediker provide will allow us to test ways of reading early national literature that reframe it as part of the making and circulation of peoples and ideas among Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

This course will examine the role of autobiography in African American literary and historical narratives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, considering autobiography, memoir, autobiographical fiction, and fictional narratives that are written in an autobiographical style. Understanding that autobiography offers personal reflection on lived experiences, we will broaden our scope to consider how African American writers create narratives that center around personal experience yet speak to the shared reality of their community. Fulfills Humanities and Conceptualizing Diversity requirements.

Students will examine literary interpretations of the American Civil War, with particular emphasis on nineteenth-century representations. Not only a critical political and social event, the Civil War also provided a flexible reference to postbellum thinkers and writers; students will explore the different ways in which figurations of the War and the myths it spawned were manipulated to endorse or critique various political, social, economic, and racial practices. Fulfills Humanities requirement

This course will examine the problems and parameters of truth in the American literary traditions of realism and naturalism. While considering the sundry implications of a fictional practice that defines itself according to standards of accuracy and truthfulness, we will also explore the ways in which such a program challenges basic assumptions about the purpose of literature, the limits of fiction, and the nature of reality. Although the focus of the course will be on nineteenth-century American literature, we will also consider the ways in which the evolution of photography, the development of various academic disciplines (like, for example, psychology or anthropology), and changing information technologies impacted the definitions of truth, of reality, and of fiction. The reading list will include works by Dreiser, Howells, Wharton, Norris, Chesnutt, James, and Twain. Offered occasionally.

This course examines the complex relationship between writers of color and America, emphasizing concepts such as patriotism, racial and ethnic marginalization, social critique, nationalism, and diasporan identity. Centering literature—to include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and lyric—in debates over slavery, immigration, imperialism, civil rights, and citizenship across the arc of American history, this course maintains a particular emphasis on social justice movements as inspiration and context for literary production, but also as key moments for critical exploration of American identity.

Students will explore questions of difference. Do women and men write differently? Do women and men read differently? Do men and women represent themselves and each other differently? According to Cynthia Ozick, the answer is no: "When we write we are not women or men but blessed beings in possession of a Promethean art." However, many people disagree with her. According to Whitney Chadwick, "Patriarchal power is structured through men’s control over the power of seeing women." We are all involved in power struggles to name the real. "It is crucial," writes Felicity Nussbaum, "to open texts to the power struggles that define subjectivities." Students will look at how different subjectivities are constructed and at how they are challenged and subverted. Readings will include both theoretical texts about aesthetics as well as literary texts. Offered occasionally.

This course will explore the philosophical impulses, and pretensions, of American literature in the nineteenth century. Students will read the prose of Emerson, Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Fuller, Douglass, and James in tandem with philosophical and theoretical works by Cavell, Arsic, Agamben, Deleuze, Nussbaum, and others. It is strongly recommended that students complete a course at the 290 level before enrolling in this class. Offered occasionally.

Intensive studies of announced special themed literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.

Intensive studies of announced topics in Medieval and Renaissance literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.

Intensive studies of announced topics in seventeenth and eighteenth century literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.

Intensive studies of announced topics in nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.

Intensive studies of announced topics in American literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.

An advanced writing workshop, focused on any of several genres, including, but not restricted to, fiction drama, screen-writing, poetry, and personal memoir. Prerequisite: ENG 205 and one 300-level course in creative writing.

Individualized tutorial counting toward the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded A-F

Individualized tutorial counting toward the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded S/U

Individualized tutorial not counting in the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded A-F

Individualized tutorial not counting in the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded S/U

Individualized research counting toward the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded A-F

Individualized research counting toward the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded S/U

Individualized research not counting in the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded A-F

Individualized research not counting in the minimum requirements in a major or minor graded S/U

Individualized study project involving the research of a topic and the preparation of a major paper under the direction of a member of the department. Research and writing are done during the fall semester of the senior year. Prerequisites: By invitation of department only.

Internship counting toward the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded A-F

Internship counting toward the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded S/U

Internship not counting in the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded A-F

Internship not counting in the minimum requirements in a major or minor, graded S/U

Summer Internship graded A-F, counting in the minimum requirements for a major or minor only with written permission filed in the Registrar's Office.

Summer Internship graded S/U, counting in the minimum requirements for a major or minor only with written permission filed in the Registrar's Office

Half credit internship, graded S/U.