Courses of Instruction
Spring 2023 Courses
ENG 11a, Close Reading: Theory and Practice
Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things.
Laura Quinney
ENG 21b, The Sex of Horror, The Horror of Sex
This course explores the spectrum of feminist and gender theory approaching horror to understand how horror both reflects societal anxiety about gender and sexuality and also projects restorative narratives and radical re-imaginings of culture. We will examine recurring themes and motifs and how they transform, shift, or mutate with the fluctuating fears of the culture.This course makes the case for the horror genre as serious art, covering techniques and styles of horror literature and film, and underscoring how the genre has served as a platform to address more serious issues, such as race, class, and religion, but with a specific focus on gender and sexuality. Along the way, we will learn to think and write about the ideas, forms, conventions, and styles that connect these texts and why we enjoy reading them –or why we don’t. We will read a wide range of texts from a variety of time periods, as well as engaging with different gender theories which take varied stances on the horror genre.
Miranda Peery
ENG 23b, Eating the Middle Ages
Explores the role of consumption in the construction of medieval societies and identities. This course includes a wide range of genres, including recipes, medical texts, romances, and travelogs, to examine a variety of practices and beliefs surrounding food and eating.
Bailey Ludwig
ENG 24b, Thinking about Civilization in an Age of Book Banning
Explores how we view literature and its place in society, from the 18th century to the book-banning crises of the present. We will focus on Enlightenment debates about "civilization" as these involved gender norms, abolition, imperialism, and other concerns. Students will also examine 20th- and 21st-century anxieties about the purpose and dangers of literature. This historical examination of literature's value will challenge us to create persuasive, inclusive claims for what literature can (and cannot) do.
Sungkyung Cho
ENG 32a, 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others.
Joshua Williams
ENG 45b, Romanticism: Gods, Nature, Loneliness, Dreams
Surveys Romantic-period literature covering novels, poetry and non-fiction prose. Novels: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights. Poetry and non-fiction prose by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt and DeQuincey.
Laura Quinney
ENG 50a, Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others.
Ramie Targoff
ENG 52b, Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
This course highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film.
Brandon Calendar
ENG/MUS 55b, If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree
This course will explore the intersection of poetry and music in late 16th-c England and Italy. The course will provide an introduction to the Renaissance sonnet and other popular poetic genres that were routinely transformed into music, as well as to the musical concepts of form, rhythm and melodic mode. The course will include both male and female authors, and consider what role gender plays in both poetic and musical creation in the period.
Ramie Targoff and Sarah Mead
ENG 62b, Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers?
Emilie Diouf
COML/ENG 70b, Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
Examines films that address nature, environmental crisis, and green activism. Asks how world cinema can best advance the goals of social and environmental justice. Includes films by major directors and festival award winners.
Caren Irr
ENG 109a, Poetry Workshop
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry, stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms.
Elizabeth Bradfield
ENG 109b, Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics.
Stephen McCauley
AMST/ENG 116b, American Culture Across the Disciplines
Explores the latest research on American culture by Brandeis faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each week a different faculty member will join us to discuss their latest book or article, the questions that animate their research, and the archives, methodologies, and theories they use to answer them.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 119a, Fiction Workshop
Special topic for this semester: Writing a novel
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques.
Christopher Castellani
ENG 119b, Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
Special topic for this semester: Poems for the End of the World
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
For those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry, through a wide spectrum of readings. Students' poems will be discussed in a "workshop" format with emphasis on revision. Remaining time will cover assigned readings and issues of craft.
This special topic poetry workshop will center poetry written about the apocalypse, dystopia, and the end of the world. Considering our political, environmental, and personal climate, this poetry workshop asks students to write about, around, and free from times of despair. Using the work of Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Franny Choi, Ilya Kaminsky, Rajiv Mohabir, as well as an array of other writers, this class will investigate how writers implore, challenge, discuss, and reframe our real and imagined dystopias. Additionally, the workshop will beckon student writers to explore and determine how an ‘apocalypse’ can shape formal poetics and inspire experimental craft moves. This class not only explores the dark of our world but also calls for student writers to explore the light piercing through as well.
Porsha Olayiwola
EAS 120b, Southeast Asian Literatures in English
This course explores a range of Southeast Asian literary productions presented in English from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Materials include influential texts by Western observers (W. Somerset Maugham, Marguerite Duras) during the colonial period as well as major works by prominent postcolonial writers (Tash Aw, Eka Kurniawan, Mai Der Vang). We will consider the complex questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, twentieth-century wars, and regional identity formation under late capitalism through intersectional textual analysis.
Howie Tam
ENG 121b, Literature of Mass Incarceration
This course investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement.
David Sherman
AMST/ENG 138a, Race, Region, and Religion in the 20th-Century South
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.
Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison.
John Burt
ENG 139b, Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages).
Marc Weinberg
ENG 146a, Reading the American Revolution
Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 147a, Film Noir
A study of classics of the genre (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil) as well as more recent variations (Chinatown, Bladerunner). Readings include source fiction (Hemingway, Hammett) and essays in criticism and theory.
William Flesch
ENG 159a, Screenwriting Workshop: The Short Film and the Web Series
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. In this class we will also discuss writing for formats including a YouTube or Vimeo narrative series, IGTV narrative series and other independent production platforms. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets & outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production.
Paloma Valenzuela
ENG 165b, Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats.
William Flesch
AMST/ENG 167b, Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years. An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States.
Brandon Callender
ENG 188b, Capitalism and Culture
How does capitalism influence the culture of advanced economies? How are the arts, dreams, and everyday lives of capitalist cultures organized? What traces of pre- or non-capitalist cultures survive? When, if at all, do we imagine worlds after capitalism?
Caren Irr
ENG 103b, Women in Print
We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women.
Dorothy Kim
ENG 221a, Text, Translation, Ethics
Examines the impact of translation on the construction of cultural memory, identity, and historical narrative. Studies postmodern theories of translation alongside African and Caribbean writers to explore the ethics and politics of writing, reading, and interpreting across languages and cultures.
Emilie Diouf
ENG 248b, Social Justice and Digital Humanities: Methods and Applications
Issues around accessibility, race, gender, disability, sexuality, etc., are central to the digital humanities. This class will center these issues as we examine different method areas: archives, mapping, digital ethics, multimodality, digital pedagogy/digital praxis, data, labor, games, data visualization, new media. We will ask what methodological theories and praxis are necessary for a digital humanities that centers social justice.
Dorothy Kim
ENG 350a, Proseminar
Focuses on professional development, including teaching competency.
David Sherman