Courses of Study
Sections
Department of English
Last updated: August 14, 2014 at 4:29 p.m.
Undergraduate Major in English
English has been an essential component of Brandeis from the outset. The department has three key goals in educating its students. First, students with a wide range of interests take our courses to learn about the various literary and cultural traditions that influence creative work in the English language. Second, we teach students to notice the striking and revealing features not only of literary works, but also of the texts that surround us in our daily lives. Third, those who choose to become English majors or minors will acquire the skills and the judgment required for the careful and imaginative unpacking of literary texts and their multiple contexts. Seniors may pursue an honors essay or two-semester honors thesis to culminate the major.
Undergraduate Major in Creative Writing
Creative writing workshops have been taught at Brandeis since 1951. In 1977 creative writing became one of the English tracks, and in 2003 a major in its own right. It is also a popular choice in a minor. The Creative Writing Program is structured to allow flexible participation in its activities by a diverse body of students, whose interest or commitment may vary in nature or over time. The major consists of a combination of writing workshops, literature courses, studio and performance art, and independent study, culminating in a body of creative work of high caliber, and a historical and contemporary grasp of literary currents. The major offers two honors tracks: a senior honors project, lasting one semester, or a senior honors thesis. Under the thesis option, the major culminates in a book-length thesis in poetry, fiction, or another literary genre, written under the close supervision of a creative writing faculty member over the two semesters of the senior year. Under the project option, the student works under close supervision of a creative writing faculty member over one semester to produce a 25-page chapbook of poetry or 50 pages of fiction.
The graduate program in English is designed to offer training in the interpretation and evaluation of literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.
The Department of English is committed to the study of literature, as well as the cultures and history surrounding its creation and reception. We study poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, film, popular culture, and digital media and place them in historical and geographical context for interpretation.
Core Skills
We expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:
Knowledge
Social Justice
Our curriculum is designed to encourage our students to attend to neglected voices and literary traditions.
Literature
There are no prerequisites for declaring the major, and students may declare at any time; the first step is an appointment with the undergraduate advising head (UAH), who will assign a suitable adviser based on a student’s interests. Prospective majors are encouraged to take two or three courses in the department in their first and second years. ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies) focuses on the essential skills needed for studying literature and is required for the major; it is an excellent first course for those commencing the major as well as for first or second years who are considering the major. Courses with numbers below 100 are especially suitable for beginning students.
Students interested in the creative writing program may find more information below.
John Plotz, Chair
Victorian literature. The novel. Politics and aesthetics.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Director of Graduate Studies (on leave academic year 2014-2015)
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-American literature and culture. Gender, queer theory, and sexual politics. Critical race theory. Multiethnic feminisms.
Ulka Anjaria
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asian literature and modernity. Postcolonial studies. Theories of the novel. Nationalism. Literature and the modern state. Cultural anthropology.
Poetry.
American literature. Romanticism. Composition. Philosophy of education. Literature of the American South. Poetry.
Mary Baine Campbell
Medieval literature. Poetry. Renaissance literature.
William Flesch (on leave spring 2015)
Poetry. Renaissance. Theory.
Caren Irr
Twentieth-century American literature. Theory. Cultural studies.
Thomas King
Performance studies. Gender studies. Gay studies. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama.
Susan S. Lanser
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French studies. Women writers. The novel. Women's studies and lesbian/gay studies. Comparative literature.
Stephen McCauley, Associate Director of Creative Writing
Fiction.
Paul Morrison
Modernism. Literary criticism and theory. Film studies. Sexuality studies.
Laura Quinney (on leave spring 2015)
Romanticism. Literature and philosophy. Eighteenth-century literature.
David Sherman, Undergraduate Advising Head
Modernism. Contemporary British literature. Narrative theory. Ethical philosophy. Elegy.
Dawn Skorczewski, Director of University Writing
Twentieth-century poetry. Psychoanalysis and pedagogy. Composition studies.
Faith Smith
African and Afro-American literature. Caribbean literature.
Renaissance literature. Shakespeare. Religion and literature.
Affiliated Faculty (contributing to the curriculum, advising and administration of the department or program)
Sylvia Fishman (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)
Patricia Johnston (Classical Studies)
Kathy Lawrence (Senior Lecturer in English)
Robin Feuer Miller (German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)
John Unsworth (Library and Technology Services)
Courses are listed by category after the descriptions of the majors and minors. Courses only fulfill the requirement under which they are listed. For other restrictions, please see the section, Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates.
Minor in English
Five courses are required, including the following:
A. ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies). This is the gateway course for all students contemplating a major or minor in English. It is a first encounter with the theories, critical methods, and forms of close attention to texts that the English minor has to offer. The ENG 1a reading list posted on the English department Web site gives a sense of the authors covered.
B. Any four additional ENG courses, with the following exception: only one creative writing workshop may count toward the minor.
C. Students are encouraged to take courses on related topics; the undergraduate advising head can assist students in grouping courses appropriately. For instance, students may wish to take courses in one national literature: ENG 6a (American Literature in the Age of Lincoln), ENG 16a (Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature), ENG 7a (American Literature from 1900-2000), ENG 8a (Twenty-First-Century American Literature). Alternatively, students might elect to take a sequence of courses in a single genre: for example, ENG 63a (Renaissance Poetry), ENG 157a (Contemporary Poetry), and ENG 109a (Directed Writing: Poetry). Or, students might take courses clustered around a particular topic, such as gender: ENG 107a (Caribbean Women Writers). Students may also wish to select courses that concentrate on a particular historical period (such as the eighteenth century) or a methodological approach (such as postcolonial studies). These options are not exhaustive.
D. Transfer credits, Advanced Placement credit, and cross-listed courses do not count toward the minor.
Minor in Creative Writing
Five semester courses are required, including the following:
A. Three semester courses in directed writing (poetry, prose, or both). See course category breakdown for list of directed writing courses. Such courses facilitate writing under direction in a creative and critical community and are offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
B. Two ENG electives.
C. Transfer credits, Advanced Placement credit, and cross-listed courses do not count toward the minor.
Courses are listed by category after the descriptions of the majors and minors. Courses only fulfill the requirement under which they are listed. For other restrictions, please see the section, Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates.
Literature Major
Ten semester courses are required, including the following:
A. ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies). This is the gateway course for all students contemplating a major in English. It is a first encounter with the theories, critical methods, and forms of close attention to texts that the English major has to offer. The ENG 1a reading list posted on the English department Web site gives a sense of authors covered.
B. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written before 1800. For specific information about whether a particular course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement, please consult the instructor or the undergraduate advising head. See the listing of courses below.
C. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written after 1800. By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below.
D. One course each from at least two of the following three categories:
1) Literary Theory
2) Media/Film
3) Multicultural Literature/World Anglophone
Multicultural literature courses are those that focus on texts written by ethnic or racial minorities within the US or Great Britain; World Anglophone courses focus on texts written in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). See the listing of courses below.
The literary theory, media/film and multicultural literature/world Anglophone requirements must be fulfilled in addition to the historical requirements: there can be no double counting (i.e. The Novel in India cannot fulfill both the world Anglophone and the post-1800 requirements). By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below.
E. Three elective semester courses. These may include any course offered or cross-listed in the department with the following exceptions: no more than one creative writing workshop may be counted as an elective. Cross-listed courses are considered to be outside the department and are subject to the restriction in special notes below.
F. At least two courses must be 100-level (courses ending in 9 are excluded); these may fall into any of the above categories. Normally 100-level courses will have prerequisites, such as ENG 1a plus one additional course in the department. We suggest 100-level courses be taken in the junior and senior years.
G. There is no double counting between course categories (i.e., The Novel in India cannot count for both the world Anglophone and post-1800 requirements).
Honors Track: Consideration for graduation with honors requires a GPA of 3.50 or higher in courses counting toward the major, and satisfactory completion of a senior honors essay (one-semester ENG 99a or 99b), which counts as an eleventh course. Qualified students may elect instead to complete the senior honors thesis (ENG 99d for two semesters) of which one section may count as an elective. To write an honors essay or thesis, students must arrange to be advised by a faculty member in the department who has agreed to direct the essay or thesis. The undergraduate advising head can assist students in finding appropriate directors. For an essay, students only need one advisor. For a thesis, students need an advisor and a second reader to approve the work. Departmental honors are awarded on the basis of excellence in all courses applied to the major, as well as all courses taken in the department, including the senior essay or thesis, as determined by the department faculty. Students in the creative writing major who complete ENG 96d will be considered to have completed a senior honors thesis.
For more information please visit www.brandeis.edu/departments/english/undergraduate/majors/honorstrack.html
A student majoring in literature may double-major or minor in creative writing.
Creative Writing Major
This major may be declared upon the completion of three courses in directed writing and of ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies) or ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice). Ten semester courses are required, including the following:
A. ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies) or ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice) which should be taken as early as possible.
B. Four semester courses in directed writing. See course category breakdown for list of directed writing courses. At least two of the required workshops must be from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 categories. At least one course in directed writing must be completed before the end of the sophomore year. A student may take as many workshops as she or he might like, but three should be concluded before the beginning of the senior year. No more than one course in directed writing can be taken in any semester in the same genre. Two such courses may be taken in different genres. Such courses facilitate writing under direction in a creative and critical community and are offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. All directed writing courses are by instructor's signature and require a manuscript submission. Majors cannot be guaranteed entry to such courses outside the selection process of each.
C. One course in foundational texts: ENG 10a, ENG 10b, ENG11b, ENG 132b, or HUM 10a.
D. One course in multicultural or world Anglophone literature. Multicultural literature courses are those that focus on texts written by ethnic or racial minorities within the United States or Great Britain; world Anglophone courses focus on texts written in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). Other courses may also be suitable; students with questions should consult the Director of Creative Writing. See the listing of courses below.
E. Two semester elective courses, at least one of which must be offered by faculty in the English department. Cross-listed courses are considered to be outside the department and are subject to the restriction in special notes below.
F. An elective course in a studio or performing art.
Senior Creative Writing Honors Project Option: One semester of ENG 96a or 96b, as an eleventh course required for the major.Students interested in this option should consult with the Director of Creative Writing within the first month of the semester prior to the proposed study to discuss application guidelines and an adviser for the project, usually a senior faculty member the student has worked with before.
Normally, all four workshop requirements (including two from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 categories) will have been completed prior to the start of the project, and all but two of the literature/studio art requirements.
The project will culminate in a creative body of work of high standard smaller in scope than the book-length thesis. A 25-page chapbook of poetry, for example, or 50 pages of fiction: several short stories or a novella.
Recommendation for departmental honors will be made by the creative writing faculty to the English department based on the excellence of the student's record in the major, and the creative work as exemplified in the honors project.
Poetry or Fiction Thesis Option: Eleven semester courses are required. The directed writing requirement is reduced to a minimum of three semester courses in directed writing (poetry, prose, or both). Two of the required workshops must be from the 109/119 categories. Also required is the satisfactory completion of two semesters of the Senior Creative Writing Thesis (ENG 96d).
ENG 96d (Senior Creative Writing Thesis). The student will produce, under the direction of his or her adviser, a distinguished body of writing (usually a book of poems 50-70 pages, or a collection of stories or a novel of 125-200 pages) of appropriate scope (two semesters). The poetry or fiction thesis option major also requires an essay on a tutorial bibliography: a list of eight to twelve books, chosen by the candidate in collaboration with the thesis adviser and/or the director of creative writing in the candidate’s genre. The essay will be due at the end of the senior year, along with the thesis.
Admission to the poetry or fiction thesis option in creative writing is by application only at the end of the sophomore year. Admission will be decided by the creative writing faculty on completion by the student of at least one course from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 directed writing courses and either ENG 1a or 11a. The deadline for admission is usually in April, depending on the academic calendar. Students are notified by the end of the spring examination period.
Recommendations for honors in the creative writing major will be made to the English department by the creative writing faculty, based on the student's work as exemplified by the senior thesis.
A student majoring in creative writing may double-major in English or minor in English.
English/Creative Writing Double Major
This major may be declared upon the completion of three courses in directed writing and of ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies) or ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice). Fourteen semester courses are required; fifteen if pursuing honors in literature or the poetry or fiction thesis option, including the following:
A. ENG 1a (Introduction to Literary Studies) or ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice), which should be taken as early as possible.
B. One course in foundational texts: ENG 10a, ENG 10b, ENG 11b, ENG 132b, or HUM 10a.
C. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written before 1800. For specific information about whether a particular course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement, please consult the instructor or the undergraduate advising head. See the listing of courses below.
D. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written after 1800. By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below.
E. One course in multicultural or world Anglophone literature. Multicultural literature courses are those that focus on texts written by ethnic or racial minorities within the United States or Great Britain; world Anglophone courses focus on texts written in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). Other courses may also be suitable; students with questions should consult the director of creative writing or the UAH. (There can be no double counting. i.e. The Novel in India cannot fulfill both the world Anglophone and the post-1800 requirements). See the listing of courses below.
F. One course from either the Literary Theory category or the Media/Film category. The media/film requirement and the theory requirement must be fulfilled in addition to the historical requirements: there can be no double counting. By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below.
G. One elective, which may be any course offered or cross-listed in the department with the following exception: this requirement cannot be fulfilled by a creative writing workshop. Cross-listed courses are considered to be outside the department and are subject to the restriction in special notes below.
H. An elective course in a studio or performing art.
I. At least two courses must be 100-level (courses ending in 9 are excluded); these may fall into any of the above categories. Normally 100-level courses will have prerequisites, such as ENG 1a plus one additional course in the department. We suggest 100-level courses be taken in the junior and senior years. (This suggestion does not apply to courses ending in 9.)
J. A minimum of four semester courses in directed writing. See course category breakdown for list of directed writing courses. At least two of the required workshops must be from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 categories. At least one course in directed writing must be completed before the end of the sophomore year. A student may take as many workshops as she or he might like, but three should be concluded before the beginning of the senior year. Such courses facilitate writing under direction in a creative and critical community and are offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. See "B" in the creative writing major description.
For those students pursuing the poetry or fiction thesis option, these requirements are adjusted as follows: a minimum of three semester courses in directed writing (poetry, prose, or both). At least two of the required workshops must be from the 109/119 categories. Also required is the satisfactory completion of two semesters of the Senior Creative Writing Thesis (ENG 96d) in which the student will produce, under the direction of his or her adviser, a body of writing (usually a book of poems, a collection of stories, or a novel) of appropriate scope. The poetry or fiction thesis option also requires an essay on a tutorial bibliography: a list of eight to twelve books, chosen by the candidate in collaboration with the thesis adviser and/or the director of creative writing in the candidate’s genre. The essay will be due at the end of the senior year. This option is by application only.
K. There is no double counting between course categories. (i.e., The Novel in India cannot count for both world literature and post-1800, etc.)
English Major/Creative Writing Minor
Thirteen semester courses are required, including the following:
A. ENG 1a. This is the gateway course for all students contemplating a major in English. It is a first encounter with the theories, critical methods, and forms of close attention to texts that the English major has to offer. The ENG 1a reading list posted on the English department Web site gives a sense of the authors covered.
B. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written before 1800. For specific information about whether a particular course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement, please consult the instructor or the undergraduate advising head. See the listing of courses below.
C. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written after 1800. By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements. See course listing below.
D. One course each from at least two of the following three categories:
- Literary Theory
- Media/Film
- Multicultural Literature/World Anglophone
Multicultural literature courses are those that focus on texts written by ethnic or racial minorities within the United States or Great Britain; world Anglophone courses focus on texts written in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). See course listing below.
The literary theory, media/film and multicultural literature/world Anglophone requirements must be fulfilled in addition to the historical requirements: there can be no double counting (i.e. The Novel in India cannot fulfill both the world Anglophone and the post-1800 requirements). By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements.
E. Three elective semester courses, which may include any course offered or cross-listed in the department, with the following exceptions: no more than one creative writing workshop may be counted as an elective. Cross-listed courses are considered to be outside the department and are subject to the restriction in special notes below.
F. At least two courses must be 100-level (courses ending in 9 are excluded); these may fall into any of the above categories. Normally 100-level courses will have pre-requisites, such as ENG 1a plus one additional course in the department. We suggest 100-level courses be taken in the junior and senior years. (This suggestion does not apply to courses ending in 9.)
G. Three semester courses in directed writing (poetry, prose, or both). See course category breakdown for list of directed writing courses. Such courses facilitate writing under direction in a creative and critical community and are offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
H. There is no double counting between course categories. (e.g., The Novel in India cannot count for both world literature and post-1800, etc.)
Creative Writing Major/English Minor
Thirteen courses are required, including the following:
A. ENG 1a or ENG 11a, which should be taken as early as possible.
B. One course in foundational texts: ENG 10a, ENG 10b, ENG 11b, ENG 132b, or HUM 10a.
C. One course in multicultural or world Anglophone literature. Multicultural literature courses are those that focus on texts written by ethnic or racial minorities within the United States or Great Britain; World Anglophone courses focus on texts written in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). Other courses may also be suitable; students with questions should consult the director of creative writing. See the listing of courses below.
D. An elective course in a studio or performing art.
E. A minimum of four semester courses in directed writing. See course category breakdown for list of directed writing courses. At least two of the required workshops must be from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 categories. At least one course in directed writing must be completed before the end of the sophomore year. A student may take as many workshops as she or he might like, but three should be concluded before the beginning of the senior year. No more than one course in directed writing can be taken in any semester in the same genre. Two such courses may be taken in different genres. Such courses facilitate writing under direction in a creative and critical community and are offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
For those students pursuing the poetry or fiction thesis option, these requirements are adjusted as follows: a minimum of three semester courses directed writing (poetry, prose, or both). At least two of the required workshops must be from the 109/119 categories. Also required is the satisfactory completion of two semesters of Senior Creative Writing Thesis (ENG 96d) in which the student will produce, under the direction of his or her adviser, a body of writing (usually a book of poems, a collection of stories, or a novel) of appropriate scope. The poetry or fiction thesis option also requires an essay on a tutorial bibliography: a list of eight to twelve books, chosen by the candidate in collaboration with the thesis adviser and/or the director of creative writing in the candidate’s genre. The essay will be due at the end of the senior year. This option is by application only.
F. Five elective semester courses. These may include any course offered or cross-listed in the department with the following exception: no more than one creative writing workshop may be counted as an elective. Cross-listed courses are considered to be outside the department and are subject to the restriction in special notes below.
G. For the English minor, students are encouraged to take courses on related topics; the undergraduate advising head can assist students in grouping courses appropriately. For instance, students may wish to take courses in one national literature: ENG 6a (American Literature in the Age of Lincoln), ENG 16a (Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature), ENG 7a (American Literature from 1900-2000), ENG 8a (Twenty-first-Century American Literature). Alternatively, students might elect to take a sequence of courses in a single genre: for example, ENG 63a (Renaissance Poetry), ENG 157a (Contemporary Poetry), and ENG 109a (Directed Writing: Poetry). Or, students might take courses clustered around a particular topic, such as gender: ENG 107a (Caribbean Women Writers). Students may also wish to select courses that concentrate on a particular historical period (such as the eighteenth century) or a methodological approach (such as postcolonial studies). These options are not exhaustive.
Courses numbered 89 and 92 do not count toward requirements for any major or minor offered by the department.
No course with a final grade below C- can count toward fulfilling the major or minor requirements in English and Creative Writing.
Advanced Placement credit and courses taken on the pass/fail option do not count toward the English and Creative Writing majors and minors.
A maximum of three non-ENG, cross-listed courses may be counted toward the majors. This restriction includes courses taken while on study abroad and approved as transfer credit.
The following policy is for students who transfer to Brandeis after one year or more at another postsecondary institution. Transfer credit toward the major: application for the use of transfer credit (awarded by the Office of the University Registrar) toward the major requirements must be accompanied by a Requirement Substitution Form and an External Transfer Credit Form. The student may be asked to provide a syllabus, a transcript of grades, and in some cases examples of written work for which credit is being sought. The number of major requirements that can be satisfied with transfer credit is at the discretion of the undergraduate advising committee but generally will follow these guidelines for the following tracks only: literature major, literature/creative writing double major, and the literature major/creative writing minor.
A student who transfers to Brandeis with sophomore standing can transfer up to two courses toward one of the aforementioned tracks.
A student who transfers to Brandeis with junior standing can transfer up to four courses toward one of the aforementioned tracks.
This department participates in the European cultural studies major and, in general, its courses are open to ECS majors.
USEM, COMP, and UWS courses do not count toward the major or minor requirements in English and Creative Writing.
More detailed descriptions of the courses offered each semester will be available on the English department website.
The terminal Master of Arts Degree in English is designed for completion in either two or three semesters for a full-time student. To earn the terminal Master of Arts in English (as distinct from the Master's in passing), students must complete the following requirements.
Course Requirement
Eight courses in the Department of English; at least three courses must be 200-level seminars and one course must be ENG 301a (Master's Directed Research). ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. Terminal Master's students are expected to take all eight required courses within the Department of English. A student must petition in writing to the department chair and director of graduate studies to be exempted from this rule. (ENG 301a and ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.)
Residence Requirement
Students may enroll on a full or part-time basis. Students must complete the MA program within four years; the department strongly encourages MA students to complete the program within two years. Full-time residency is two semesters.
Language Requirement
A reading knowledge of a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments must be demonstrated by passing a written translation examination. The completion of the language requirement at another university does not exempt the student from the Brandeis requirement. Terminal MA candidates who are native speakers of a language other than English are exempt from the requirement.
Master's Research Paper Requirement
This project must be twenty-five to thirty-five pages long. Papers written for course work, papers presented at conferences, and papers written specifically for the MA degree are all acceptable. Each paper will be evaluated by two faculty members, one of whom may be the faculty member for whom the paper was originally written. The second reader need not be from the English department. The paper must satisfy the reader's standard for excellence in MA degree-level work.
Course Requirement
Six courses, three of which must be 200-level seminars. ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. (ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.)
Residence Requirement
The minimum residence requirement is one year, though students with inadequate preparation may require more.
Language Requirement
A reading knowledge of a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments must be demonstrated by passing a written translation examination. The completion of the language requirement at another university does not exempt the student from the Brandeis requirement.
Requirements for the Joint Degree of Master of Arts in English & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Terminal Degree)
A. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
B. One course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies).
C. Five additional courses in the English department selected from 100-level courses and graduate seminars (200-level courses). At least three of these courses must be at the 200 level. One of these five courses must be listed as an elective with the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended.(ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.) Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course.
D. One Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course in a department other than the English department.
E. Language requirement: A reading knowledge of a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments must be demonstrated by passing a written translation examination. The completion of the language requirement at another university does not exempt the student from the Brandeis requirement. Terminal joint MA candidates who are native speakers of a language other than English are exempt from the requirement.
F. Joint MA paper requirement: Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, at least one of whom is a member of the English department, and at least one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master’s Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.
Requirements for the Joint Degree of Master Of Arts in English & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Earned in Passing, as Part of the PhD Program)
Students admitted to the doctoral program are eligible to earn the Joint MA degree in passing by completing the Requirements for the Joint Degree of Master of Arts in English & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, listed above. Doctoral students who want to earn the Joint MA in passing should declare their intentions as soon as possible by meeting with the WGS Program Liaison who will appoint an advisor for each student. Please note non-English courses taken for the joint degree (WMGS 205a, WMGS 208b, and the WMGS course in another department) will not count towards course credit for the Ph.D.
Each student must complete three years in residence as a full-time student and a minimum of twelve term courses. A student who comes to Brandeis with a BA degree is required to take twelve courses for the PhD degree, ten of which are normally taken within the English department. A student who comes to Brandeis with an MA degree in English may apply to the director of graduate studies, at the end of the first year of study, to transfer up to four graduate-level courses from the institution granting the MA. Of the eight additional courses required for the PhD degree, at least seven are normally taken within the department. The program reserves the right to require additional courses to assure thorough mastery of the area of study. A student who wishes to be exempted from these rules must petition in writing to the department chair and director of graduate studies.
Students may apply to the director of graduate studies for permission to take courses offered in other departments at Brandeis and by the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at Radcliffe College, but not taught by department faculty members, and through consortium arrangements with Boston College, Boston University, and Tufts University. Any course taught at the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at Radcliffe College by a faculty member in the department, and approved by the department, shall be deemed the equivalent of a 200-level course within the English department for the purposes of meeting degree requirements.
Program of Study: First-Year Students
First-year students normally take six courses in the English department. Each student (including those who entered with a master's degree) will take ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) in the fall semester; this seminar includes attention to methods of analysis and research. Students select other courses from departmental offerings at the 100- and 200-level, although at least three of these electives must be 200-level seminars. (ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.) In addition to satisfying these core requirements, each student will design a program of study in light of the strengths and weaknesses of his or her previous preparation and in accord with his or her own interests. First-year students are encouraged to meet with their faculty advisers to discuss curricular offerings, departmental expectations, and the nature of the academic career.
First-year students attend departmental events, such as guest lectures, and participate in monthly workshops on teaching and research methods and other career skills. First-year students should demonstrate a reading knowledge of a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments by passing a written translation examination. (See "Language Requirements.") The department meets at the end of every academic year to discuss the progress of its graduate students, particularly first- and second-year students. (See "Readmissions Criteria and Probation.")
Program of Study: Beyond the First Year
Students who come to Brandeis with a BA degree normally take two courses during each term of their second year and complete their course work during their third year. Students who come with a MA degree complete their course work during their second year. Students are encouraged to take or audit additional courses during their third year. Students have an obligation to review their preparation in the field with their advisers and to ensure that they are acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the various historical periods and genres of English and a deeper knowledge of the particular period or field they propose to offer as a specialty.
In the fall of their second year, students present a paper to an audience of graduate students and faculty at the Second-Year Symposium.
In their third year, students must generally pass a second foreign language examination if they have not done so earlier (see "Language Requirement" below). No later than the end of the third year, students should have prepared a reading list for the field examination and submitted it to a committee of three faculty members for approval. The examination must be taken no later than the first of October during the fourth year. The department encourages students to complete all requirements for the PhD, except the prospectus review and dissertation by the end of the third year.
Second- and third-year students continue to participate in monthly workshops on teaching and research methods and other career skills. Other workshops, targeted to third- and fourth-year students, focus on such topics as publication, the field exam, and the dissertation prospectus. The job placement officer offers annual workshops for doctoral candidates and recent graduates on the job search and serves as a mentor for job seekers. Advanced graduate students have opportunities to present their work to other scholars in their field by participating in various national and international conferences, for which some travel funds are available. Each year graduate students organize colloquia, at which they present their work, and invite faculty members to speak on their current research. The graduate students organize a student conference annually.
Teaching Requirements and Preparation
Teaching is a core requirement of the PhD program in English and is integral to the professional development of all graduate students. Training in teaching is provided through assistantships in department courses and participation in the Brandeis University Writing Program, which conducts instruction in the Brandeis Writing Center, and in a key first-year course, the University Writing Seminar (UWS). Together these programs train students in writing and rhetoric. UWS courses are topics courses in which instructors create their own syllabi.
During their years at Brandeis, doctoral candidates will participate in a broad range of instructional activities, all of which are preceded by extensive training. Many first- and second-year graduate students will start their professional instructional development when they receive training to serve as tutors in the Writing Center or in Brandeis's large English Language Program.
First-year graduate students have no teaching responsibilities; instead they devote themselves to course work. Teaching assignments after the first year vary according to the pedagogical needs of the individual student, the curricular needs of the department, and enrollments. In recent years, typical assignments have been as follows. Second-year students have had two teaching assignments, typically serving as a teaching fellow in two department courses, one each semester. Third-year students have had two teaching assignments; typically, two sections of first-year writing, one each semester. Fourth-year students have had two teaching assignments; typically serving as a teaching fellow in one department course and teaching one section of writing. The university reserves the right to change these assignments as necessary.
Residence Requirement
The minimum residence requirement is two years beyond the Master's degree or three years beyond the Bachelor's degree.
Language Requirement
In addition to the first language requirement (see Requirements for Degree of Master of Arts Earned in Passing, as Part of the PhD Program), the student must (1) demonstrate a reading knowledge of a second language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments; or (2) demonstrate an advanced competence in the first language other than English by taking a graduate-level literature course in a foreign language (not in translation) and writing the seminar paper using foreign language texts; or (3) take a graduate course, ordinarily a seminar, in a field closely related to research on the dissertation. Approval of the graduate committee must be sought before such a course is taken; the student must demonstrate the relevance of the proposed course to the dissertation. Students must have completed all language requirements in order to hold the field exam.
Field Examination
All candidates for the PhD are required to pass an oral examination in the historical period in which the candidate expects to write a dissertation. Beginning with the fall 2013 entering class, each student will submit a field essay of approximately 20 pages to the examining committee at least one week before the exam. The essay will identify topics of scholarly concern and critical debates in the field and explain their significance.
This examination is taken no later than the first of October during the fourth year and must be passed by the unanimous vote of the committee members. (PhD students enrolled before fall 2013 need to take the exam no later than the first of November.) At the discretion of the examiners, students taking the field exam may be asked to retake one portion of their exam. If a student is asked to retake a portion of the exam, the time frame for the second examination will be set by the examiners in consultation with the student.
Fourth-year students should allow sufficient time beyond the field exam to prepare a dissertation prospectus and hold the dissertation prospectus conference and defense (see below), which are necessary to establish eligibility for fifth-year funding. The department encourages students to complete all requirements for the PhD, except the prospectus review and dissertation, by the end of the third year.
Dissertation Prospectus Conference and Defense
No later than six months after passing the field exam, and in time to establish eligibility for fifth-year funding, students must hold a prospectus conference and defense, which both first and second readers will attend. The prospectus must be signed by both readers in order to be approved by the department. The specific length and design of the prospectus will be agreed upon by the doctoral candidate and her/his first and second readers. A prospectus typically describes the topic, the questions to be explored, the method of research, and reasons for believing the dissertation will be an original contribution to knowledge. The student's director and/or second reader may also require a chapter outline and/or bibliography.
Each student will submit a dissertation in a form approved by his/her dissertation director and by a committee appointed by the director of graduate studies. One member of this committee must be from a graduate department at Brandeis outside the department of English or from another university. The student will defend the dissertation at a final oral examination.
Readmission Criteria and Probation
Annual readmission to the doctoral program in English depends upon showing suitable academic progress. Because a career in the academy requires success as a scholar and teacher, service on administrative committees, and collegial participation in the life of the academy, suitable academic progress for students still completing coursework is judged principally by three criteria: grades, citizenship, timely completion of work. Grades: Students are expected to maintain an A- average. Citizenship: Students are expected to participate regularly in department activities, including the departmental proseminar and scheduled talks/events. Timely Completion: Students may normally take no more than one incomplete in any semester; in exceptional circumstances a second incomplete may be permitted by the DGS. All incompletes must be made up by the deadline set by the Office of the University Registrar each semester. Students who require incompletes must apply for them from the relevant instructor in advance. Incompletes will not be automatically granted.
At each end-of-year meeting, the department, using suitable academic progress as its guide, will vote to readmit, put on probation, or deny readmission to each student still in the coursework phase. Students will be informed of that decision by letter, and should feel free to meet with the DGS and their advisors to discuss it. Being readmitted in any given year does not guarantee future readmission. Students who are put on probation are required to meet with the DGS and to submit to the DGS a written plan to return to good standing--which might include completing missing work, meeting certain deadlines, and participating more robustly in the life of the department. Failure to return to good standing within one academic year will normally lead to denial of readmission in the subsequent end-of-year meeting.
Full-time doctoral students are expected to complete course requirements and pass all language exams no later than the end of the third year; pass the field exam no later than October 1 during the fourth year; and present the dissertation proposal for review and approval by the first and second readers within six months of the field exam and in time to establish eligibility for fifth-year funding. Students who do not establish candidacy according to these deadlines will be placed on probation automatically and may become ineligible for fifth-year funding. Students who do not demonstrate satisfactory academic progress during the probationary year will be withdrawn from the program. Failure to pass the field exam or defend the dissertation prospectus by the required deadlines may result in the student's being denied readmission to the program.
To qualify for ABD status, all doctoral students must satisfy the department's requirements for training in teaching. Accordingly, all doctoral students will be given a variety of teaching assignments and will be expected to attend the pedagogical workshops offered by the director of writing and the director of graduate studies.
Funding Opportunities for Advanced Graduate Students
Fifth-year graduate students who are ABD (all but dissertation) continue to receive fellowships and tuition scholarships. Doctoral candidates who have passed the field exam may apply for University Prize Instructorships; these competitive awards allow recipients to design and teach their own courses. Fifth and sixth-year students expecting to complete their dissertations in the next academic year may enter the university-wide competition for the Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowships while seventh and eighth-year students expecting to complete their dissertations in the next academic year may apply for the Redstone Dissertation Year Fellowships. Both groups may also enter the departmental competition for the Milton Hindus Memorial Endowed Dissertation Fellowship. Additional opportunities are available in the University Writing Center and in the program for teaching English as a Second Language.
Completion of Degree
Students entering the PhD program with a BA must earn the degree within eight years. Students entering the PhD program with an MA must earn the degree within seven years. A student requesting an extension must demonstrate significant progress toward completing the dissertation by submitting a prospectus (or equivalent, including a chapter outline) and at least one chapter to the student's adviser. If the student's adviser agrees to support the requested extension, the adviser will refer the case to the graduate committee for approval.
Enrollment in all 200-level graduate seminars is by signature of the instructor or departmental representative. Enrollment in these courses by English department graduate students is guaranteed.
Students should also consult the general degree requirements and academic regulations found in an earlier section of this Bulletin.
Courses of Instruction
(1-99) Primarily for Undergraduate Students
ENG
1a
Introduction to Literary Studies
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hum
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This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.
Staff
ENG
4a
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
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hum
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1660-1800: The age of reason and contradiction, enlightenment, and xenophobia. Surveys literary, critical, philosophical, political, and life writing, investigating the emergence of a literary public sphere, a national canon, and the first professional women writers. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
5a
British Literature in the Age of Darwin and Dickens
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hum
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Offers general coverage of the major literary genres in the nineteenth century. The course studies the cultural context forged by the interaction of fiction, prose, and poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
6a
American Literature in the Age of Lincoln
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hum
]
The transformation of our literary culture: the literary marketplace, domestic fiction, transcendentalism, slavery and the problem of race. Authors will include Emerson, Fuller, Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, and Melville. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
7a
American Literature from 1900 to 2000
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hum
wi
]
Focuses on literature and cultural and historical politics of major authors. Prose and poetry. May include Eliot, Frost, Williams, Moore, Himes, Cather, and Faulkner as well as contemporary authors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burt or Ms. Irr
ENG
8a
Twenty-First-Century American Literature
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hum
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An introductory survey of trends in recent American literature with a focus on prose. Readings vary yearly but always include winners of major literary prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, or the Nobel Prize. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
10b
Poetry: A Basic Course
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hum
wi
]
Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the earliest period to the present. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff
ENG
11a
Close Reading: Theory and Practice
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hum
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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. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
11b
Fiction: A Basic Course
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hum
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Introduces moods, features, and forms of fiction. Explores a range of national literatures and historical periods. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
13b
Thinking About Shakespeare
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hum
]
Explores Shakespearean drama, eighteenth and nineteenth century responses, and the larger questions raised in both. We will read five plays alongside texts by Voltaire, Lessing, Goethe, A.W. Schlegel, Hegel, Heine, Marx and others. The course investigates how influential modern ideas about art, culture, subjectivity, and history took shape in encounters with Shakespeare, and explores the ways in which his works simultaneously allow us to query these ideas. Special one-time offering, spring 2014.
Mr. Moraw
ENG
16a
Slavery and Self-Making in African American Literature
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hum
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Critical investigation of African American writing as it engages slavery, freedom, and literary self-fashioning. We will read autobiographies, uplift novels, protest fiction and neo-slave narratives. Particular attention will be paid to issues of identity, sexuality, and social status; textual modes of representation and liberatory politics; the literary culture of sentiment; and African American constructions and contestations of race, gender, nation, and expressive culture since the antebellum period. Authors may include Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Gayl Jones, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Toni Morrison. Contemporary films may include Sankofa, Amistad, and Daughters of the Dust. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman or Ms. Smith
ENG
17a
Alternative and Underground Journalism
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hum
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A critical history of twentieth-century American journalism. Topics include the nature of journalistic objectivity, the style of underground and alternative periodicals, and the impact of new technologies on independent media. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
18a
Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues
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hum
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Explores Irish poetry, fiction, drama, and film in English. Begins with the tradition's roots among subjugated peasants and Anglo-Irish aristocracy and ends in the modern post-colonial state. Authors include Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Bowen, Joyce, O'Brien, and Heaney. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
18b
Writing the Holocaust
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hum
wi
]
Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonials, interviews, and historical records; explores written representations of the Holocaust. Considers the role second, third, and fourth generation responses to the Holocaust, including the responses of students, who will write their own post-Holocaust narratives. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
19a
Introduction to Creative Writing
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hum
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Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary and oral forms: lyric, poetry, the short story, tales, curses, spells. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Broumas or Ms. Campbell
ENG
19b
The Autobiographical Imagination
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hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Broumas
ENG
20a
Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
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hum
nw
]
An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
20b
The Art of Flirtation: Reading Romance from Pride and Prejudice to Harry Potter
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hum
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Introduces the history of flirtation in the romance novel and the debates that have surrounded this genre of popular literature. Starting with the emergence of the "modern" romance in the 18th century, we trace how Austen's heirs co-opted and adapted her themes. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
21a
Adolescent Literature
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hum
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Literature for adolescents can't afford any self-indulgences: its audience is too impatient. So it's a great place to see what's essential to storytelling. Authors may include Shelley, Twain, Salinger, Pullman, and Rowling, whom we'll use to test basic narrative theory. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
27b
Classic Hollywood Cinema
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hum
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A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
28a
Nature Writing
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hum
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Explores literary responses to the natural environment from Thoreau to the present. Several genres of creative nonfiction will be discussed, such as memoir, manifesto, science writing, natural history, exploration narratives, and disaster stories. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
33a
Shakespeare
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hum
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A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff
ENG
36a
America's First Bestsellers
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hum
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The first century of American bestsellers, what made these books so attractive to readers at the time? Explores themes of social mobility, racial and gender conflict, romance and seduction, and warfare. Authors include Cooper, Stowe, Alcott, and Crane. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
37b
Modern Drama: Theatres of Rupture, Resistance, and Engagement
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hum
]
How did theatre artists take “the modern” as a goal to be realized in the future and a crisis to be managed in the present? Playwrights include Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Glaspell, Brecht, Williams, Beckett, Pinter, Fugard, Fornes, Hwang, Churchill, Kushner, and Parks. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
38a
How to Be Human in the Mechanical Age
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hum
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A critical examination of contemporary and Victorian science fiction. Focuses on defining the roles science, technology, and nature in the depiction of the "human." Will feature technical and critical sources, fiction, and film. These include H.G. Wells, Norbert Wiener, Isaac Asimov, Katherine Hayles, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler and Philip Dick, among others. Special one-time offering, spring 2014.
Ms. Erhart
ENG
38b
Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
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hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
40a
Coming of Age in Literature
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hum
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May not be taken for credit by students who took FYS 13a in prior years.
What makes growing up such a compelling theme, even for adult readers? This seminar introduces students to several novels which feature characters who come of age. Authors include, Dickens, Salinger, Dangarembga, Diaz, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
43a
Major English Authors, Chaucer to Milton
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hum
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A survey of major English authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, including Chaucer, Wyatt, Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton. No prior experience in medieval or Renaissance literature is required. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff
ENG
46a
Rebelling in Print: Women, Reform, and the 19th-Century Novel
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hum
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Nineteenth-century novels by American women writers teach that a woman’s place is in the home; can these novels also be seen as radical? We'll focus on how these novels entered into the political and ideological debates of the time. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
46b
American Gothic Romantic Fiction
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hum
wi
]
American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
48b
Literature and Happiness
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hum
wi
]
Considers studies of happiness in economics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and history in relation to the American Novel. We analyze six novels to question how literary representations of happiness reflect and complicate ideas about happiness in other disciplines. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
49a
Scriptwriting for the Short Film
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hum
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Addresses many facets of writing screenplays for short films (under eight pages). Students develop two to three scripts through creative exercises, rewriting, and critiques. Supplementary screenings and reading focuses on the particulars of short fiction and cinematic writing.
Staff
ENG
50a
Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
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hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff
ENG
50b
American Independent Film
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hum
]
Explores non-studio filmmaking in the United States. Defines an indie aesthetic and alternative methods of financing, producing, and distributing films. Special attention given to adaptations of major film genres, such as noir thrillers, domestic comedy, and horror. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
55b
Romanticism and the Supernatural
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hum
]
Study of Romantic poetry and prose about the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural seduction, temptation and desire? Figures include Prometheus, Faust, Frankenstein and the vampire, Christabel. Texts include Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey, as well as poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Blake. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
57b
Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison
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hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
58a
Literature and Medicine
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hum
wi
]
How has literature grappled with illness, healing, and the patient-doctor encounter? How can poetry and storytelling communicate with experience of bodily pain--and how does the body seek to communicate its suffering without language? We examine literary responses to the body's biological vulnerabilities, and seek to contextualize the vulnerable body within the cultural and political fields that shape medical knowledge and practice. Readings in fiction, poetry, essay, and drama will suggest the art, or craftsmanship, involved in the healing sciences, as well as the diagnostic nature of literary criticism. Reading for new approaches, generated by the literary imagination, to controversial issues in medical ethics. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
58b
Women and Madness
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hum
]
Addresses literary representation of women and madness, from psychoanalytic and socio-cultural perspectives, from Medusa to the Bell Jar and beyond. Texts capture women's struggles with mental illness as well as the cultural institutions that define and regulate it. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
60b
The Films of Disney
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hum
]
Surveys Disney narratives from early shorts to recent features. Includes discussion of studio style, concept of the child viewer, social impact, and responses to changing world technologies. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
61b
Philosophical Approaches to Film Theory
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hum
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Studies a philosophical approach to film theory, examining both what philosophy has to say about film and what effects the existence and experience of film can have on philosophical thinking about reality, perception, judgement, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
63a
Renaissance Poetry
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hum
]
Examines lyric and narrative poetry by Wyatt, Surrey, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Herbert. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff
ENG
64b
From Libertinism to Sensibility: Pleasure and the Theater, 1660-1800
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hum
]
Investigates the exchange between performance texts and contemporaneous discussions of class, nationality, and political party. Emphasizes the emergence of modern gender and sexual roles and the impact of the first professional women actors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
65b
The Last Romantics: Themes of Modern Poetry
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hum
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Explores Romantic poetry and its legacy by looking closely at major poems of the late 19th centuries through the present in relation to their Romantic antecedents. Themes included: innocence, experience, quest, loss, poetry and the sublime. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
68b
The International Legacy of Anne Frank
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hum
wi
]
Explores how The Diary of Anne Frank has been represented in different media over time. Students participate in an international digital learning environment with students from Amsterdam. Includes short lectures, discussions, team projects, diary-writing, archival research and web tours. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
70a
Magic Lanterns to Movies: The Origins of Narrative Film
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hum
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Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
70b
Science Fiction
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hum
]
Surveys 20th-century science fiction, reading authors from Aldous Huxley to Octavia Butler. Charting the genre's major developments, we consider questions about societal development, technological advances, media and communication systems, distant pasts and possible futures, and what ultimately qualifies as human. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
75b
The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters
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hum
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The rhetorical strategies, themes, and objectives of Victorian realism. Texts may include Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Brontë's Villette, Gaskell's Mary Barton, Dickens' Bleak House, and Trollope's The Prime Minister. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
77a
Screening the Tropics
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hum
nw
]
How territories and modes of life are designated as "tropical," and how this is celebrated or "screened out" in film, photography, national policy, travelogues, and fiction. Films by Cozier, Cuaron, Duigan, Denis, Fung, Henzell, Ousmane, and Sissako. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
77b
Literatures of Global English
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hum
nw
]
Survey of world Anglophone literatures with attention to writers' literary responses to aspects of English as a global language with a colonial history. Focus on Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean, North America. Writers may include Rushdie, Coetzee, Kincaid, Atwood, Anzaldua. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
78a
Virginia Woolf
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hum
]
An immersion in Woolf's astonishing body of writing. How did her fiction and non-fiction re-imagine the self in the changing social worlds of the early twentieth century? How did her experiments with narrative open new understandings of gender, sexuality, war, the knowing subject, the dimensions of space and time> A chronological survey of her diverse forms of writing that energized, all at once, modernist aesthetics, feminist politics, and philosophical speculation. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
78b
Modernism, Atheism, God
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hum
]
Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "religion"? Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
79a
Directed Writing: Beginning Screenplay
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hum
wi
]
This course may not be repeated by students who have taken ENG 129b in previous years. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Weinberg
ENG
79b
Writing Workshop: From Memory to Craft
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hum
wi
]
Prerequisite: ENG 19b is recommended. This course may not be repeated by students who have taken ENG 129a in previous years. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
This combination workshop and contemporary literature course explores the process by which prose that engages with place moves from simple accounting into art. Texts include work by writers such as Christine Byl, James Galvin, Rebecca Solnit, Craig Childs, and Zadie Smith. Usually offered every second year.
Staff
ENG
80a
Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
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hum
]
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
80b
The Tale
[
hum
wi
]
The oral form of the story; also a non-realist modern literary genre. Students study and create myths, ballads, folktales, ritual drama, and ethnographic approaches to the transmission of tales, including Genesis, Metamorphosis, fairy tales, pre-Columbian myths, Poe, Angela Carter. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
87a
Sex and Race in the American Novel
[
hum
]
Depictions of racial and sexual others abound in American literature of the twentieth century. Reading texts across racial, geographical, and temporal divides, this course investigates the representation of non-normative sexualities as signaled, haunted, or repaired by an appeal to race. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
87b
Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
[
hum
]
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
88b
Contemporary British Literature
[
hum
]
British fiction, poetry, drama, and film since WWII that tackles the changing politics of empire, sexuality, and social class, especially. A close look at the weird pleasure of British humor, includes Jean Rhys, Philip Larkin, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Harold Pinter, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
96a
Creating Writing Senior Honors Project
Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the project option. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
96d
Senior Creative Writing Thesis
Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the thesis option. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
97a
Senior Essay
For seniors interested in writing an essay outside of the honors track. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
97d
Senior Thesis
For seniors interested in writing a thesis outside of the honors track. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
98a
Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
98b
Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
99a
The Senior Honors Essay
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
99b
The Senior Honors Essay
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
99d
The Senior Honors Thesis
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.
Staff
HUM
10a
The Western Canon
[
hum
]
May not be taken by students who have taken ENG 10a or FYS 18a in prior years.
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.
Staff
(100-199) For Both Undergraduate and Graduate Students
ANTH/ENG
150a
Cases and Clues: Reading Novels and Ethnographies as Cultural Explorations
[
hum
ss
]
Compares novels and anthropological ethnographies: both are attempts to narrate human cultures, but the ways they do so are radically different. We compare the inside/outside role of the novelist and the anthropologist, and examine the different methodologies and assumptions of anthropological and literary studies. Authors include Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Johannes Fabian and Sidney Mintz. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Ferry and Mr. Plotz
COML/ENG
140b
Children's Literature and Constructions of Childhood
[
hum
]
Explores whether children's literature has sought to civilize or to subvert, to moralize or to enchant, forming a bedrock for adult sensibility. Childhood reading reflects the unresolved complexity of the experience of childhood itself as well as larger cultural shifts around the globe in values and beliefs. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Miller
COML/ENG
141b
Literature and Time
[
hum
]
Explores the human experience of temporality and reflection upon it. Texts include: Waiting for Godot, To the Lighthouse and Combray, along with philosophical speculation by Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as two films, La Jeteé and 12 Monkeys. Themes covered by this course include: memory, nostalgia, anxiety, ethics, eternity, and time travel. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
101a
Studies in Popular Culture
[
hum
]
A critical analysis of contemporary culture, including television, film, video, advertising, and popular literature. Combines applied criticism and theoretical readings. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
103a
Exploring the Self in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
[
hum
]
Examines the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries, including George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell. These "metaphysical poets" will be read alongside critical accounts by Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff
ENG
104a
Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[
hum
]
The major British poets of the eighteenth century, from Dryden to Blake, with an emphasis on the expressive experiments in form and content which set the terms and showed the possibilities available to all subsequent English poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
107a
Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[
hum
]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
108a
Literature and Heresy
[
hum
]
A study of major texts of British literature through the lens of religious heresy. Does literature provide a refuge for heresy? Or is there something about literature that encourages heretical thinking? These questions are considered in light of dissident works by Milton, Blake, Shelley, James Hogg, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
109a
Directed Writing: Poetry
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. 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. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Broumas or Visiting Poet
ENG
109b
Directed Writing: Short Fiction
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. 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. Usually offered every year.
Mr. McCauley or Visiting Writer
ENG
111a
How Fiction Works: Narrative in Theory and Practice
[
hum
]
We will explore the forms and functions of fictional narrative, emphasizing the workings of plot, narration, character, time and point of view, and studying the variety of effects produced by the diverse, historically shifting practices of short stories and novels. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser
ENG
111b
Postcolonial Theory
[
hum
]
Seminar in postcolonial theory with relevant background texts, with an emphasis on the specificity of its theoretical claims. Readings from Spivak, Said, Bhabha, Appiah, Mudimbe, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Derrida, Césaire, and Fanon, among others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
117b
Novels of William Faulkner
[
hum
wi
]
A study of the major novels and stories of William Faulkner, the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
119a
Directed Writing: Fiction
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. May be repeated for credit.
An advanced fiction workshop for students primarily interested in the short story. Students are expected to compose and revise three stories, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.
Visiting Writer
ENG
119b
Directed Writing: Poetry
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. 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. Usually offered every year.
Visiting Poet
ENG
120a
The Orlando Project
[
hum
]
Explores the uses of pastoral in queer literary history and for a queered understanding of selfhood. Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography guides a survey of English pastoral, queer and postcolonial literary criticism, and feminist and queer ecocriticism. Pondering the nature and capacities of poetry, gendered selfhood, erotic desire, and even Nature itself, Orlando canvasses the history of English literature and criticism from the age of Shakespeare to that of Freud. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
123a
Dream Visions: Genre, History, and the Mysterious
[
hum
]
A study of the mysterious function of imaginary dreams in medieval and Renaissance writing, along with actual dream dictionaries and dream transcriptions of the period. Visions of Hell, prophetic dreams, apocalypse, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Nashe, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
125b
Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
[
hum
]
The "younger generation" of Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats continue and react against poetic, political, and philosophical preoccupations and positions of their immediate elders. Examines their major works, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt, Mr. Flesch, or Ms. Quinney
ENG
126a
American Realism and Naturalism, 1865-1900
[
hum
]
Focuses on how some of the central American Realists and Naturalists set about representing and analyzing American social and political life. Topics include the changing status of individuals, classes, and genders, among others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
127a
The Novel in India
[
hum
nw
]
Survey of the novel and short story of the Indian subcontinent, their formal experiments in context of nationalism and postcolonial history. Authors may include Tagore, Anand, Manto, Desani, Narayan, Desai, Devi, Rushdie, Roy, Mistry, and Chaudhuri. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
127b
Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[
hum
]
Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
128a
Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 11a.
British, European, and American works depicting alternate, often "better" worlds, including More's Utopia, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Voltaire's Candide, Casanova's Icosameron, selections from Charles Fourier, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis: Dawn, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
129a
Writing Workshop
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Students will learn how to use a wide range of literary techniques to produce factual narratives drawn from their own perspectives and lives. Creative assignments and discussions will include the personal essay, the memoir essay and literary journalism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff
ENG
130b
Writing the American Self: American Lives From Franklin to Eggers
[
hum
]
As a genre inextricably intertwined with individualism, autobiography has developed as an expression of American identity since the inception of the republic. Setting iconic personal narratives in the context of history and theories of life-writing, we will study works from Ben Franklin's autobiography and Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of a Slave" to Mary McCarthy's "Memoir of a Catholic Girlhood" and Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lawrence
ENG
131a
Comedy: Literature, Film, and Theory
[
hum
]
Explores comedy as an enigma at the heart of social belonging, psychological coherence, and philosophical speculation. Investigates the strangeness of human laughter. Compares comic literary and film genres in different historical periods as a way to ask: what is the nature of comic pleasure? How does comedy organize desire and make sense of suffering? How are communities regulated by comedy, and how is comedy involved in social freedom? How are basic philosophical questions about minds and bodies illuminated by comedy? Texts by Chaplin, Shakespeare, Monty Python, Swift, Marx Brothers, Aristophanes, Wilde, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
132b
Chaucer I
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 10a or ENG 11a.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
133a
Advanced Shakespeare
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.
An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
134b
Subjectivity
[
hum
]
Studies how the experience of subjectivity and selfhood is represented in literature and philosophy of the early modern period, primarily in Britain. Authors include Renaissance lyric poets, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake, with philosophical texts by Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Usually offered third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
135a
Major British Novelists: Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot
[
hum
]
Examines classic works from the nineteenth century, when the novel was at once popular entertainment and moral/spiritual guide. How do they reach us today? The heart of the course is intense, close, reading, coupled with comparisons to visual art and other literature of the period, including short works by Dostoevsky and Melville. Film screenings help trace how these texts resonate with contemporary aesthetic forms. Novels: Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, and Middlemarch. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
135b
Novel Horizons: Victorian Fiction and the Global Imagination
[
hum
oc
]
Explores how Victorian novels like "Dracula," "Jane Eyre," and "Kim" reflected on aspects of nineteenth-century globalization, including emigration, the establishment of mercantile and settler empires, and the circulation of objects and texts. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
137a
Postimperial Fictions
[
hum
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 37a in prior years.
In what ways, and for what purposes, has postcolonial Britain sought imaginatively to recreate its imperial past? Discusses recent literary and cinematic representations of empire, in which critique, fascination, and nostalgia are, often problematically, blended. Authors include Paul Scott, Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff
ENG
138a
Making Modern Subjects: Empire, Citizenship, Intimacy
[
hum
]
Considers inflections of "the modern" across the Americas, allowing us to compare models and strategies at a historical moment when shifts from slavery to "freedom" and from Europe to the U.S.A., frame anxieties about empire, citizenship, technology, vernaculars, and aesthetics. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
139b
Intermediate Screenwriting
[
hum
wi
]
Prerequisites: ENG 129b or ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
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). Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Weinberg
ENG
140b
Hipsters on Trial: Irony, Meaning, and Style in the Digital Age
[
hum
]
Examines "the hipster" as a case study for thinking about irony, humor, and the circulation of values in the contemporary digital culture. Authors studied range from Jean-Paul Sartre and Susan Sontag to Childish Gambino and Lena Dunham. Special one-time offering, fall 2014.
Mr. Stevens
ENG
144b
The Body as Text
[
hum
]
How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
145b
Just Jane Austen: Gender, Justice, and the Art of Fiction
[
hum
]
Explores the novels of Jane Austen in historical context, with particular attention to the ways in which they engage ethical questions, address the economic and social implications of gender, and negotiate tensions between social justice and narrative form. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser
ENG
147a
Film Noir
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
147b
20th-Century American Bestsellers
[
hum
]
Bestselling fiction opens a window on publishing, narrative production, and popular culture in 20th-century America. Students will contribute five original research assignments on one bestseller to an online database; midterm and final exams are based on assigned reading. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Unsworth
ENG
148b
Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[
hum
]
Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
150a
Sex and Cinema
[
hum
]
Studies the construction and representation of sexuality, both normative and deviant, in film from the 1930's to the present day. We will pay particular attention to evolving strategies of censorship and resistance to it. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
151a
Queer Studies
[
hum
]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
151b
Performance Studies
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: A course in dramatic literature and familiarity with theatrical production.
The theater, etymologically, is a place for viewing. Theory, etymologically, begins with a spectator and a viewing. Reading theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance, speculation, and spectatorship are reviewed. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
153a
Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[
hum
]
Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
156b
When Genius is a Family Affair: Henry, William, and Alice James
[
hum
]
Focuses on William, Henry, and Alice James, and on the different ways they approach the representation of human interaction, thought, perception, and suffering in their novels, philosophical essays, and diary. Pays particular attention to their intellectual and aesthetic contexts. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Lawrence
ENG
157a
Contemporary Poetry
[
hum
]
An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
157b
American Women Poets
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a, ENG 10a, HUM 10a or ENG 11a.
Students imagine meanings for terms like "American" and "women" in relation to poetry. After introductory study of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Emily Dickinson, readings of (and about) women whose work was circulated widely, especially among other women poets, will be selected from mainly twentieth-century writers. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell or Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
158b
Digital Humanities
[
hum
]
Introduces students to the history and range of digital humanities, from its beginnings in the 1940s until the present, with a focus on literary studies. Along the way, we will consider particular digital humanities projects, and students will do some hands-on work with the tools and standards used in such projects. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Unsworth
ENG
160a
Digital Media and Culture
[
hum
]
Studies the history and development of digital media, with an emphasis on modes of literature and entertainment. We will examine the digitial revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Stevens
ENG
161b
The Death and Life of the Subject
[
hum
]
Studies the disintegration of the unified self in modern philosophy, literature and critical theory, primarily of the twentieth century. Topics include empiricist, existential and psychoanalytic accounts of the self. Literary works by Woolf, Proust, Beckett, Blanchot and Duras. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
162a
Totalitarian Fictions
[
hum
]
Investigates global dictator novels, with attention to formal issues surrounding the novel's ability to represent illiberal arrangements of power. Authors include Garcia Marquez, Achebe, and Junot Diaz. Films include "The Last King of Scotland" and Oliver Stone's "W". Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
165b
Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff
ENG
166b
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville
[
hum
]
Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
167a
Decolonizing Fictions
[
hum
nw
]
An introduction to basic concepts in postcolonial studies using selected literary works from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Specific themes covered include the colonial encounter; colonial education and the use of English; nationalism; gender, violence, and the body; and postcolonial diasporas. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
167b
20th-Century Black Fiction
[
hum
]
A study of experimental fiction of prominent twentieth-century African-American authors. Investigates features of the postmodern novel including disruptive chronologies, the representation of fragmented identities, intertextual play and parody, and the critique of Western modernity as long-standing practices in black writing. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
171a
The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
[
hum
wi
]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison or Ms. Quinney
ENG
173a
Spenser and Milton
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 10a, 11a, or HUM 10a (may be taken concurrently) or by permission of the instructor.
A course on poetic authority: the poetry of authority and the authority of poetry. Spenser and Milton will be treated individually, but the era they bound will be examined in terms of the tensions within and between their works. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
177a
Hitchcock's Movies
[
hum
]
A study of thirteen films covering the whole trajectory of Hitchcock's career, as well as interviews and critical responses. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
180a
The Modern American Short Story
[
hum
]
Close study of American short-fiction masterworks. Students read as writers write, discussing solutions to narrative obstacles, examining the consequences of alternate points of view. Studies words and syntax to understand and articulate how technical decisions have moral and emotional weight. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
181a
Making Sex, Performing Gender
[
hum
]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
187a
American Fiction since 1945
[
hum
]
Readings of contemporary postrealist and postmodernist fiction. Authors and themes vary but always include major figures such as Nabokov, Pynchon, DeLillo. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
187b
The International Novel
[
hum
wi
]
Studies twentieth- and twenty-first century English-language fiction on the international experience. Authors are exiles, expatriates, tourists and refugees—mainly but not exclusively those crossing the US border. Authors may include James, Hemingway, Nabokov, and/or Eggers. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
188b
Capitalism and Culture
[
hum
]
What characterizes literary accounts of capitalism processes? How do authors from different periods or regions narrate the history of capitalism? What do they describe as the central conflicts between capitalism and other pre-, post-, or non-capitalist economic systems? Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG/HIST
118b
London from Restoration to Regency: People, Culture, City
[
hum
ss
]
Sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities as part of its thematic focus on 'The Human and the Inhuman'.
Explores the history and culture of London from the Great Plague of 1665 to the onset of the industrial age. Topics include the natural and built environments, the city's changing population, and its literary, visual, and musical cultures. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kamensky and Ms. Lanser
(200 and above) Primarily for Graduate Students
ENG
200a
Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
Required of all first-year Ph.D. graduate students. Optional for MA students. Can be repeated for credit with permission from advisor (if applicable) and the Director of Graduate Studies.
A broad-based theory course that will include a unit on research methods. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
201a
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Investigates sex assignment, genders, and sexualities as categories of social knowledge and modes of social production. Reading recent critical discussions and crossing disciplinary boundaries, this course explores gender, desire, and pleasure in everyday and formal performance, literary and other written texts, and visual representations. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. King
ENG
202a
Thomas Malory: Fiction before Novels
Reading of the complete Works of Malory, also known as the Morte D'Arthur, as the postponed climax of high and late medieval romance and the early triumph of a nascent English fiction in the modern vernacular. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
207b
Fiction of the American South
Examines fiction of the era of modernization and desegregation. Readings include novels by Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Ernest Gaines, Margaret Walker, Caroline Gordon, Ellen Glasgow, and William Faulkner. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
213a
Milton
Considers the writings of John Milton in terms of the revolutionary world of mid-seventeenth century England. We will focus on Milton's active engagement in political and religious controversy, as well as his extraordinary innovations as a poet. Works to be read include major poems and prose. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff
ENG
216b
The James Siblings
Focuses on the powerful and competing ideas of human nature and social interaction that Henry, William and Alice James articulated and embodied, in their writing considered on its own and in the intense familial interaction that so affected their thinking. Works may include Ivy Tower and Sacred Font. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
218b
The Modern Novel: Public, Private, and Social
Traces the shifting relationship between ideas of intimacy, sociability, solidarity, and publicity in the Anglo-American novel, 1850-1950. Explores how the novel reacts to crises in the relationship between the individual an such larger groupings as society, nation, gender, race, or species. Marxist, psychoanalytic, Frankfort School, deconstructive, and New Historicist theory are examined. Authors include Melville, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, James, Stein, Cather, and Beckett. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
225a
Romantic Poetry
A study of the canon of romantic poetry, with attention to the critical heritage. Topics include: the French Revolution and Napoleon; the lyric, epic, and drama; the philosophy of subjectivity. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
227a
Studies in Modernism
An exploration of the concept of the modern through an intensive reading of The Waste Land, Ulysses, Between the Acts, and Endgame. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
227b
American Encounters: Faulkner, Baldwin, Roth, Morrison
Crossing race, region, and religion, this course studies four of the most formidable, prolific, acclaimed American authors of the twentieth century. Probing interlocking constructions of narrative and nation, texts are analyzed in light of shifting paradigms in American thought, politics, and expressive culture. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
230a
Realism
An intensive study of literary realism. Students will trace how critics and authors have defined realism, and explore its vexed history in relation to naturalism and modernism. Readings will consider contemporary debates around peripheral realisms and the future of realism. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
233a
Shakespeare Seminar
An intensive reading of Shakespeare's work from a theoretical and historical viewpoint. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
233b
Early Modern Knowledges
Examines early modern transatlantic societies that were transformed by questions of what and whether one might (or should) know, as was their writing. Readings in mostly English drama, lyric, essays, travels, and prose fiction in relation to revolutionary instances of natural philosophy, magia and theology. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
236a
American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century
A graduate seminar on American poetry of the nineteenth century, including Dickinson, Whitman, Emerson, Melville, Tuckerman, the "Fireside poets" (Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Bryant), the "Nightingales" (Sigourney and Oakes-Smith), religious and patriotic lyrics, and much more. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
240a
Sexualities
Studies in the cultural construction and representation of the self and its sexuality; focuses primarily on the various technologies of self-knowledge and self-fashioning (literary and otherwise) in the modern West. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
241b
Theory of Poetry
Studies the most important and exciting works of 2,000-year old history of the theory of poetry. Readings include works by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Shelley, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Stein, Pound and Kristeva. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
245a
Naturalism between Realism and Modernism, 1880-1930
Attempts a genealogy of Naturalism in the wake of Marx, Darwin and Zola's "experimental novel," drawing on Toril Moi's account of Idealism's decline and Jameson's account of Naturalist pessimism. Authors include Hardy, Gissing, Crane, Norris, James, and Lawrence. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
254a
Gender and the Genealogy of the Novel: 1680-1800
Explores the form, functions, and focal interests of the eighteenth-century novel with particular attention to the significance of gender to this "rising" genre that was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the social, political, and cultural changes that characterize the period. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Lanser
ENG
257b
Modernism's Broken World
Seminar on literary modernism as it imagines experiences of brokenness and reparation, involving questions of trauma, collective memory, secularization, and historical justice. Work by Woolf, Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Stein, Barnes, Beckett are studied, as well as theoretical writing by Benjamin, Adorno, Freud, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
266a
Slavery and the American Imagination
Examines slavery in both a historical and literary way, including some of the most important histories of slavery, a selection of classic slave narratives, accounts by masters of slaves, and a selection of some of the important political oratory about slavery in the antebellum era. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
267a
Imagining Freedom in the Caribbean
Explores notions of freedom in recent fiction, popular culture, political theory; violence in slavery and today's "failed state"; coercion, consent, agency, eroticism, matriarchy -- in postcolonial, feminist, queer theorizing. Comparisons with postcolonial, African-American, and other related contexts. Usually offered every fourth year.
ENG
277b
Childhood and the Modern Novel
Considers depictions of children and childhood in fiction for adults. Explores modern Anglophone fiction from the UK, the US, Africa, India, the Caribbean, Canada and Australia. Special one-time offering, Spring 2015.
Ms. Irr
ENG
301a
Master's Directed Research
This course entails the creation of a research paper under the direction of a faculty member. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
350a
Proseminar
Offered exclusively on a credit/no-credit basis. Required of all PhD and MA students.
Focuses on professional development, including teaching competency. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
352a
Directed Research
Specific sections for individual faculty members as requested. Permission of the director of graduate studies required.
Staff
ENG
352b
Directed Research
Staff
ENG
402d
Dissertation Research
Specific sections for individual faculty members as requested.
Staff
Core Course for the English Major and Minor
ENG
1a
Introduction to Literary Studies
[
hum
]
This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.
Staff
Core Courses for the Creative Writing Major
ENG
1a
Introduction to Literary Studies
[
hum
]
This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.
Staff
ENG
11a
Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
English: Literary Theory / Criticism Courses
COML/ENG
141b
Literature and Time
[
hum
]
Explores the human experience of temporality and reflection upon it. Texts include: Waiting for Godot, To the Lighthouse and Combray, along with philosophical speculation by Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as two films, La Jeteé and 12 Monkeys. Themes covered by this course include: memory, nostalgia, anxiety, ethics, eternity, and time travel. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
11a
Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
61b
Philosophical Approaches to Film Theory
[
hum
]
Studies a philosophical approach to film theory, examining both what philosophy has to say about film and what effects the existence and experience of film can have on philosophical thinking about reality, perception, judgement, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
101a
Studies in Popular Culture
[
hum
]
A critical analysis of contemporary culture, including television, film, video, advertising, and popular literature. Combines applied criticism and theoretical readings. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
111a
How Fiction Works: Narrative in Theory and Practice
[
hum
]
We will explore the forms and functions of fictional narrative, emphasizing the workings of plot, narration, character, time and point of view, and studying the variety of effects produced by the diverse, historically shifting practices of short stories and novels. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser
ENG
111b
Postcolonial Theory
[
hum
]
Seminar in postcolonial theory with relevant background texts, with an emphasis on the specificity of its theoretical claims. Readings from Spivak, Said, Bhabha, Appiah, Mudimbe, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Derrida, Césaire, and Fanon, among others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
131a
Comedy: Literature, Film, and Theory
[
hum
]
Explores comedy as an enigma at the heart of social belonging, psychological coherence, and philosophical speculation. Investigates the strangeness of human laughter. Compares comic literary and film genres in different historical periods as a way to ask: what is the nature of comic pleasure? How does comedy organize desire and make sense of suffering? How are communities regulated by comedy, and how is comedy involved in social freedom? How are basic philosophical questions about minds and bodies illuminated by comedy? Texts by Chaplin, Shakespeare, Monty Python, Swift, Marx Brothers, Aristophanes, Wilde, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
151a
Queer Studies
[
hum
]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
151b
Performance Studies
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: A course in dramatic literature and familiarity with theatrical production.
The theater, etymologically, is a place for viewing. Theory, etymologically, begins with a spectator and a viewing. Reading theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance, speculation, and spectatorship are reviewed. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
161b
The Death and Life of the Subject
[
hum
]
Studies the disintegration of the unified self in modern philosophy, literature and critical theory, primarily of the twentieth century. Topics include empiricist, existential and psychoanalytic accounts of the self. Literary works by Woolf, Proust, Beckett, Blanchot and Duras. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
171a
The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
[
hum
wi
]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison or Ms. Quinney
ENG
181a
Making Sex, Performing Gender
[
hum
]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
English: Media and Film Courses
ENG
20a
Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[
hum
nw
]
An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
27b
Classic Hollywood Cinema
[
hum
]
A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
50b
American Independent Film
[
hum
]
Explores non-studio filmmaking in the United States. Defines an indie aesthetic and alternative methods of financing, producing, and distributing films. Special attention given to adaptations of major film genres, such as noir thrillers, domestic comedy, and horror. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
60b
The Films of Disney
[
hum
]
Surveys Disney narratives from early shorts to recent features. Includes discussion of studio style, concept of the child viewer, social impact, and responses to changing world technologies. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
70a
Magic Lanterns to Movies: The Origins of Narrative Film
[
hum
]
Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
77a
Screening the Tropics
[
hum
nw
]
How territories and modes of life are designated as "tropical," and how this is celebrated or "screened out" in film, photography, national policy, travelogues, and fiction. Films by Cozier, Cuaron, Duigan, Denis, Fung, Henzell, Ousmane, and Sissako. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
80a
Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[
hum
]
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
140b
Hipsters on Trial: Irony, Meaning, and Style in the Digital Age
[
hum
]
Examines "the hipster" as a case study for thinking about irony, humor, and the circulation of values in the contemporary digital culture. Authors studied range from Jean-Paul Sartre and Susan Sontag to Childish Gambino and Lena Dunham. Special one-time offering, fall 2014.
Mr. Stevens
ENG
147a
Film Noir
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
150a
Sex and Cinema
[
hum
]
Studies the construction and representation of sexuality, both normative and deviant, in film from the 1930's to the present day. We will pay particular attention to evolving strategies of censorship and resistance to it. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
158b
Digital Humanities
[
hum
]
Introduces students to the history and range of digital humanities, from its beginnings in the 1940s until the present, with a focus on literary studies. Along the way, we will consider particular digital humanities projects, and students will do some hands-on work with the tools and standards used in such projects. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Unsworth
ENG
160a
Digital Media and Culture
[
hum
]
Studies the history and development of digital media, with an emphasis on modes of literature and entertainment. We will examine the digitial revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Stevens
ENG
177a
Hitchcock's Movies
[
hum
]
A study of thirteen films covering the whole trajectory of Hitchcock's career, as well as interviews and critical responses. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
English: Multicultural Literature/World Anglophone Courses
ENG
16a
Slavery and Self-Making in African American Literature
[
hum
]
Critical investigation of African American writing as it engages slavery, freedom, and literary self-fashioning. We will read autobiographies, uplift novels, protest fiction and neo-slave narratives. Particular attention will be paid to issues of identity, sexuality, and social status; textual modes of representation and liberatory politics; the literary culture of sentiment; and African American constructions and contestations of race, gender, nation, and expressive culture since the antebellum period. Authors may include Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Gayl Jones, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Toni Morrison. Contemporary films may include Sankofa, Amistad, and Daughters of the Dust. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman or Ms. Smith
ENG
20a
Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[
hum
nw
]
An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
57b
Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
77a
Screening the Tropics
[
hum
nw
]
How territories and modes of life are designated as "tropical," and how this is celebrated or "screened out" in film, photography, national policy, travelogues, and fiction. Films by Cozier, Cuaron, Duigan, Denis, Fung, Henzell, Ousmane, and Sissako. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
77b
Literatures of Global English
[
hum
nw
]
Survey of world Anglophone literatures with attention to writers' literary responses to aspects of English as a global language with a colonial history. Focus on Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean, North America. Writers may include Rushdie, Coetzee, Kincaid, Atwood, Anzaldua. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
80a
Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[
hum
]
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
87a
Sex and Race in the American Novel
[
hum
]
Depictions of racial and sexual others abound in American literature of the twentieth century. Reading texts across racial, geographical, and temporal divides, this course investigates the representation of non-normative sexualities as signaled, haunted, or repaired by an appeal to race. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
107a
Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[
hum
]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
127a
The Novel in India
[
hum
nw
]
Survey of the novel and short story of the Indian subcontinent, their formal experiments in context of nationalism and postcolonial history. Authors may include Tagore, Anand, Manto, Desani, Narayan, Desai, Devi, Rushdie, Roy, Mistry, and Chaudhuri. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
127b
Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[
hum
]
Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
138a
Making Modern Subjects: Empire, Citizenship, Intimacy
[
hum
]
Considers inflections of "the modern" across the Americas, allowing us to compare models and strategies at a historical moment when shifts from slavery to "freedom" and from Europe to the U.S.A., frame anxieties about empire, citizenship, technology, vernaculars, and aesthetics. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
162a
Totalitarian Fictions
[
hum
]
Investigates global dictator novels, with attention to formal issues surrounding the novel's ability to represent illiberal arrangements of power. Authors include Garcia Marquez, Achebe, and Junot Diaz. Films include "The Last King of Scotland" and Oliver Stone's "W". Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
167a
Decolonizing Fictions
[
hum
nw
]
An introduction to basic concepts in postcolonial studies using selected literary works from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Specific themes covered include the colonial encounter; colonial education and the use of English; nationalism; gender, violence, and the body; and postcolonial diasporas. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
167b
20th-Century Black Fiction
[
hum
]
A study of experimental fiction of prominent twentieth-century African-American authors. Investigates features of the postmodern novel including disruptive chronologies, the representation of fragmented identities, intertextual play and parody, and the critique of Western modernity as long-standing practices in black writing. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
English: Pre-1800 Courses
ENG
4a
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
[
hum
]
1660-1800: The age of reason and contradiction, enlightenment, and xenophobia. Surveys literary, critical, philosophical, political, and life writing, investigating the emergence of a literary public sphere, a national canon, and the first professional women writers. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
13b
Thinking About Shakespeare
[
hum
]
Explores Shakespearean drama, eighteenth and nineteenth century responses, and the larger questions raised in both. We will read five plays alongside texts by Voltaire, Lessing, Goethe, A.W. Schlegel, Hegel, Heine, Marx and others. The course investigates how influential modern ideas about art, culture, subjectivity, and history took shape in encounters with Shakespeare, and explores the ways in which his works simultaneously allow us to query these ideas. Special one-time offering, spring 2014.
Mr. Moraw
ENG
33a
Shakespeare
[
hum
]
A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff
ENG
43a
Major English Authors, Chaucer to Milton
[
hum
]
A survey of major English authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, including Chaucer, Wyatt, Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton. No prior experience in medieval or Renaissance literature is required. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff
ENG
50a
Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff
ENG
63a
Renaissance Poetry
[
hum
]
Examines lyric and narrative poetry by Wyatt, Surrey, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Herbert. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff
ENG
64b
From Libertinism to Sensibility: Pleasure and the Theater, 1660-1800
[
hum
]
Investigates the exchange between performance texts and contemporaneous discussions of class, nationality, and political party. Emphasizes the emergence of modern gender and sexual roles and the impact of the first professional women actors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
80b
The Tale
[
hum
wi
]
The oral form of the story; also a non-realist modern literary genre. Students study and create myths, ballads, folktales, ritual drama, and ethnographic approaches to the transmission of tales, including Genesis, Metamorphosis, fairy tales, pre-Columbian myths, Poe, Angela Carter. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
103a
Exploring the Self in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
[
hum
]
Examines the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries, including George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell. These "metaphysical poets" will be read alongside critical accounts by Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff
ENG
104a
Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[
hum
]
The major British poets of the eighteenth century, from Dryden to Blake, with an emphasis on the expressive experiments in form and content which set the terms and showed the possibilities available to all subsequent English poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
108a
Literature and Heresy
[
hum
]
A study of major texts of British literature through the lens of religious heresy. Does literature provide a refuge for heresy? Or is there something about literature that encourages heretical thinking? These questions are considered in light of dissident works by Milton, Blake, Shelley, James Hogg, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
120a
The Orlando Project
[
hum
]
Explores the uses of pastoral in queer literary history and for a queered understanding of selfhood. Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography guides a survey of English pastoral, queer and postcolonial literary criticism, and feminist and queer ecocriticism. Pondering the nature and capacities of poetry, gendered selfhood, erotic desire, and even Nature itself, Orlando canvasses the history of English literature and criticism from the age of Shakespeare to that of Freud. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
123a
Dream Visions: Genre, History, and the Mysterious
[
hum
]
A study of the mysterious function of imaginary dreams in medieval and Renaissance writing, along with actual dream dictionaries and dream transcriptions of the period. Visions of Hell, prophetic dreams, apocalypse, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Nashe, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
128a
Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 11a.
British, European, and American works depicting alternate, often "better" worlds, including More's Utopia, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Voltaire's Candide, Casanova's Icosameron, selections from Charles Fourier, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis: Dawn, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
132b
Chaucer I
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 10a or ENG 11a.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell
ENG
133a
Advanced Shakespeare
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.
An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG
134b
Subjectivity
[
hum
]
Studies how the experience of subjectivity and selfhood is represented in literature and philosophy of the early modern period, primarily in Britain. Authors include Renaissance lyric poets, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake, with philosophical texts by Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Usually offered third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
144b
The Body as Text
[
hum
]
How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
148b
Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[
hum
]
Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
153a
Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[
hum
]
Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
173a
Spenser and Milton
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 10a, 11a, or HUM 10a (may be taken concurrently) or by permission of the instructor.
A course on poetic authority: the poetry of authority and the authority of poetry. Spenser and Milton will be treated individually, but the era they bound will be examined in terms of the tensions within and between their works. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch
ENG/HIST
118b
London from Restoration to Regency: People, Culture, City
[
hum
ss
]
Sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities as part of its thematic focus on 'The Human and the Inhuman'.
Explores the history and culture of London from the Great Plague of 1665 to the onset of the industrial age. Topics include the natural and built environments, the city's changing population, and its literary, visual, and musical cultures. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kamensky and Ms. Lanser
English: Post-1800 Courses
ENG
5a
British Literature in the Age of Darwin and Dickens
[
hum
]
Offers general coverage of the major literary genres in the nineteenth century. The course studies the cultural context forged by the interaction of fiction, prose, and poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
6a
American Literature in the Age of Lincoln
[
hum
]
The transformation of our literary culture: the literary marketplace, domestic fiction, transcendentalism, slavery and the problem of race. Authors will include Emerson, Fuller, Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, and Melville. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
7a
American Literature from 1900 to 2000
[
hum
wi
]
Focuses on literature and cultural and historical politics of major authors. Prose and poetry. May include Eliot, Frost, Williams, Moore, Himes, Cather, and Faulkner as well as contemporary authors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burt or Ms. Irr
ENG
8a
Twenty-First-Century American Literature
[
hum
]
An introductory survey of trends in recent American literature with a focus on prose. Readings vary yearly but always include winners of major literary prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, or the Nobel Prize. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
17a
Alternative and Underground Journalism
[
hum
]
A critical history of twentieth-century American journalism. Topics include the nature of journalistic objectivity, the style of underground and alternative periodicals, and the impact of new technologies on independent media. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
18a
Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues
[
hum
]
Explores Irish poetry, fiction, drama, and film in English. Begins with the tradition's roots among subjugated peasants and Anglo-Irish aristocracy and ends in the modern post-colonial state. Authors include Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Bowen, Joyce, O'Brien, and Heaney. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
18b
Writing the Holocaust
[
hum
wi
]
Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonials, interviews, and historical records; explores written representations of the Holocaust. Considers the role second, third, and fourth generation responses to the Holocaust, including the responses of students, who will write their own post-Holocaust narratives. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
20b
The Art of Flirtation: Reading Romance from Pride and Prejudice to Harry Potter
[
hum
]
Introduces the history of flirtation in the romance novel and the debates that have surrounded this genre of popular literature. Starting with the emergence of the "modern" romance in the 18th century, we trace how Austen's heirs co-opted and adapted her themes. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
21a
Adolescent Literature
[
hum
]
Literature for adolescents can't afford any self-indulgences: its audience is too impatient. So it's a great place to see what's essential to storytelling. Authors may include Shelley, Twain, Salinger, Pullman, and Rowling, whom we'll use to test basic narrative theory. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
28a
Nature Writing
[
hum
]
Explores literary responses to the natural environment from Thoreau to the present. Several genres of creative nonfiction will be discussed, such as memoir, manifesto, science writing, natural history, exploration narratives, and disaster stories. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
36a
America's First Bestsellers
[
hum
]
The first century of American bestsellers, what made these books so attractive to readers at the time? Explores themes of social mobility, racial and gender conflict, romance and seduction, and warfare. Authors include Cooper, Stowe, Alcott, and Crane. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
37b
Modern Drama: Theatres of Rupture, Resistance, and Engagement
[
hum
]
How did theatre artists take “the modern” as a goal to be realized in the future and a crisis to be managed in the present? Playwrights include Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Glaspell, Brecht, Williams, Beckett, Pinter, Fugard, Fornes, Hwang, Churchill, Kushner, and Parks. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
38a
How to Be Human in the Mechanical Age
[
hum
]
A critical examination of contemporary and Victorian science fiction. Focuses on defining the roles science, technology, and nature in the depiction of the "human." Will feature technical and critical sources, fiction, and film. These include H.G. Wells, Norbert Wiener, Isaac Asimov, Katherine Hayles, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler and Philip Dick, among others. Special one-time offering, spring 2014.
Ms. Erhart
ENG
38b
Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
40a
Coming of Age in Literature
[
hum
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FYS 13a in prior years.
What makes growing up such a compelling theme, even for adult readers? This seminar introduces students to several novels which feature characters who come of age. Authors include, Dickens, Salinger, Dangarembga, Diaz, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria
ENG
46a
Rebelling in Print: Women, Reform, and the 19th-Century Novel
[
hum
]
Nineteenth-century novels by American women writers teach that a woman’s place is in the home; can these novels also be seen as radical? We'll focus on how these novels entered into the political and ideological debates of the time. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
46b
American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[
hum
wi
]
American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
55b
Romanticism and the Supernatural
[
hum
]
Study of Romantic poetry and prose about the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural seduction, temptation and desire? Figures include Prometheus, Faust, Frankenstein and the vampire, Christabel. Texts include Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey, as well as poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Blake. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
58a
Literature and Medicine
[
hum
wi
]
How has literature grappled with illness, healing, and the patient-doctor encounter? How can poetry and storytelling communicate with experience of bodily pain--and how does the body seek to communicate its suffering without language? We examine literary responses to the body's biological vulnerabilities, and seek to contextualize the vulnerable body within the cultural and political fields that shape medical knowledge and practice. Readings in fiction, poetry, essay, and drama will suggest the art, or craftsmanship, involved in the healing sciences, as well as the diagnostic nature of literary criticism. Reading for new approaches, generated by the literary imagination, to controversial issues in medical ethics. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
58b
Women and Madness
[
hum
]
Addresses literary representation of women and madness, from psychoanalytic and socio-cultural perspectives, from Medusa to the Bell Jar and beyond. Texts capture women's struggles with mental illness as well as the cultural institutions that define and regulate it. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
65b
The Last Romantics: Themes of Modern Poetry
[
hum
]
Explores Romantic poetry and its legacy by looking closely at major poems of the late 19th centuries through the present in relation to their Romantic antecedents. Themes included: innocence, experience, quest, loss, poetry and the sublime. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
70b
Science Fiction
[
hum
]
Surveys 20th-century science fiction, reading authors from Aldous Huxley to Octavia Butler. Charting the genre's major developments, we consider questions about societal development, technological advances, media and communication systems, distant pasts and possible futures, and what ultimately qualifies as human. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
75b
The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters
[
hum
]
The rhetorical strategies, themes, and objectives of Victorian realism. Texts may include Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Brontë's Villette, Gaskell's Mary Barton, Dickens' Bleak House, and Trollope's The Prime Minister. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
78a
Virginia Woolf
[
hum
]
An immersion in Woolf's astonishing body of writing. How did her fiction and non-fiction re-imagine the self in the changing social worlds of the early twentieth century? How did her experiments with narrative open new understandings of gender, sexuality, war, the knowing subject, the dimensions of space and time> A chronological survey of her diverse forms of writing that energized, all at once, modernist aesthetics, feminist politics, and philosophical speculation. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
78b
Modernism, Atheism, God
[
hum
]
Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "religion"? Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
87b
Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
[
hum
]
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
88b
Contemporary British Literature
[
hum
]
British fiction, poetry, drama, and film since WWII that tackles the changing politics of empire, sexuality, and social class, especially. A close look at the weird pleasure of British humor, includes Jean Rhys, Philip Larkin, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Harold Pinter, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman
ENG
117b
Novels of William Faulkner
[
hum
wi
]
A study of the major novels and stories of William Faulkner, the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
125b
Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
[
hum
]
The "younger generation" of Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats continue and react against poetic, political, and philosophical preoccupations and positions of their immediate elders. Examines their major works, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt, Mr. Flesch, or Ms. Quinney
ENG
126a
American Realism and Naturalism, 1865-1900
[
hum
]
Focuses on how some of the central American Realists and Naturalists set about representing and analyzing American social and political life. Topics include the changing status of individuals, classes, and genders, among others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
130b
Writing the American Self: American Lives From Franklin to Eggers
[
hum
]
As a genre inextricably intertwined with individualism, autobiography has developed as an expression of American identity since the inception of the republic. Setting iconic personal narratives in the context of history and theories of life-writing, we will study works from Ben Franklin's autobiography and Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of a Slave" to Mary McCarthy's "Memoir of a Catholic Girlhood" and Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lawrence
ENG
135a
Major British Novelists: Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot
[
hum
]
Examines classic works from the nineteenth century, when the novel was at once popular entertainment and moral/spiritual guide. How do they reach us today? The heart of the course is intense, close, reading, coupled with comparisons to visual art and other literature of the period, including short works by Dostoevsky and Melville. Film screenings help trace how these texts resonate with contemporary aesthetic forms. Novels: Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, and Middlemarch. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz
ENG
135b
Novel Horizons: Victorian Fiction and the Global Imagination
[
hum
oc
]
Explores how Victorian novels like "Dracula," "Jane Eyre," and "Kim" reflected on aspects of nineteenth-century globalization, including emigration, the establishment of mercantile and settler empires, and the circulation of objects and texts. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
137a
Postimperial Fictions
[
hum
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 37a in prior years.
In what ways, and for what purposes, has postcolonial Britain sought imaginatively to recreate its imperial past? Discusses recent literary and cinematic representations of empire, in which critique, fascination, and nostalgia are, often problematically, blended. Authors include Paul Scott, Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff
ENG
145b
Just Jane Austen: Gender, Justice, and the Art of Fiction
[
hum
]
Explores the novels of Jane Austen in historical context, with particular attention to the ways in which they engage ethical questions, address the economic and social implications of gender, and negotiate tensions between social justice and narrative form. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser
ENG
147b
20th-Century American Bestsellers
[
hum
]
Bestselling fiction opens a window on publishing, narrative production, and popular culture in 20th-century America. Students will contribute five original research assignments on one bestseller to an online database; midterm and final exams are based on assigned reading. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Unsworth
ENG
156b
When Genius is a Family Affair: Henry, William, and Alice James
[
hum
]
Focuses on William, Henry, and Alice James, and on the different ways they approach the representation of human interaction, thought, perception, and suffering in their novels, philosophical essays, and diary. Pays particular attention to their intellectual and aesthetic contexts. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Lawrence
ENG
157a
Contemporary Poetry
[
hum
]
An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney
ENG
157b
American Women Poets
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a, ENG 10a, HUM 10a or ENG 11a.
Students imagine meanings for terms like "American" and "women" in relation to poetry. After introductory study of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Emily Dickinson, readings of (and about) women whose work was circulated widely, especially among other women poets, will be selected from mainly twentieth-century writers. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell or Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
165b
Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[
hum
]
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. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff
ENG
166b
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville
[
hum
]
Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt
ENG
180a
The Modern American Short Story
[
hum
]
Close study of American short-fiction masterworks. Students read as writers write, discussing solutions to narrative obstacles, examining the consequences of alternate points of view. Studies words and syntax to understand and articulate how technical decisions have moral and emotional weight. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
ENG
187a
American Fiction since 1945
[
hum
]
Readings of contemporary postrealist and postmodernist fiction. Authors and themes vary but always include major figures such as Nabokov, Pynchon, DeLillo. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
187b
The International Novel
[
hum
wi
]
Studies twentieth- and twenty-first century English-language fiction on the international experience. Authors are exiles, expatriates, tourists and refugees—mainly but not exclusively those crossing the US border. Authors may include James, Hemingway, Nabokov, and/or Eggers. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
188b
Capitalism and Culture
[
hum
]
What characterizes literary accounts of capitalism processes? How do authors from different periods or regions narrate the history of capitalism? What do they describe as the central conflicts between capitalism and other pre-, post-, or non-capitalist economic systems? Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr
FYS
50b
JustBooks: Trash
[
hum
]
What can we do with trash and garbage? What have we done to living beings in their name? Examines films, novels. poems, installations, essays, and critical theory to examine the matrix of possibility and reuse, its physical and biological dimensions, and its metaphoric reaches. Students will produce discussion questions, short papers, and a major project that will include artwork, poetry, fiction, short film, problem-solving and an analytical essay. Offered as part of the JustBooks program.
Ms. Campbell (English)
English: Directed Writing Courses
ENG
19a
Introduction to Creative Writing
[
hum
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary and oral forms: lyric, poetry, the short story, tales, curses, spells. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Broumas or Ms. Campbell
ENG
19b
The Autobiographical Imagination
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Broumas
ENG
49a
Scriptwriting for the Short Film
[
hum
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Addresses many facets of writing screenplays for short films (under eight pages). Students develop two to three scripts through creative exercises, rewriting, and critiques. Supplementary screenings and reading focuses on the particulars of short fiction and cinematic writing.
Staff
ENG
79a
Directed Writing: Beginning Screenplay
[
hum
wi
]
This course may not be repeated by students who have taken ENG 129b in previous years. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Weinberg
ENG
79b
Writing Workshop: From Memory to Craft
[
hum
wi
]
Prerequisite: ENG 19b is recommended. This course may not be repeated by students who have taken ENG 129a in previous years. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
This combination workshop and contemporary literature course explores the process by which prose that engages with place moves from simple accounting into art. Texts include work by writers such as Christine Byl, James Galvin, Rebecca Solnit, Craig Childs, and Zadie Smith. Usually offered every second year.
Staff
ENG
109a
Directed Writing: Poetry
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. 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. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Broumas or Visiting Poet
ENG
109b
Directed Writing: Short Fiction
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. 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. Usually offered every year.
Mr. McCauley or Visiting Writer
ENG
119a
Directed Writing: Fiction
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. May be repeated for credit.
An advanced fiction workshop for students primarily interested in the short story. Students are expected to compose and revise three stories, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.
Visiting Writer
ENG
119b
Directed Writing: Poetry
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods. 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. Usually offered every year.
Visiting Poet
ENG
129a
Writing Workshop
[
hum
wi
]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Students will learn how to use a wide range of literary techniques to produce factual narratives drawn from their own perspectives and lives. Creative assignments and discussions will include the personal essay, the memoir essay and literary journalism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff
ENG
139b
Intermediate Screenwriting
[
hum
wi
]
Prerequisites: ENG 129b or ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
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). Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Weinberg
Foundational Courses for the Creative Writing Major
ENG
10b
Poetry: A Basic Course
[
hum
wi
]
Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the earliest period to the present. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff
ENG
11b
Fiction: A Basic Course
[
hum
]
Introduces moods, features, and forms of fiction. Explores a range of national literatures and historical periods. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Irr
ENG
132b
Chaucer I
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 10a or ENG 11a.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell
HUM
10a
The Western Canon
[
hum
]
May not be taken by students who have taken ENG 10a or FYS 18a in prior years.
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.
Staff
English: Independent Instructional Courses
ENG
96d
Senior Creative Writing Thesis
Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the thesis option. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
97a
Senior Essay
For seniors interested in writing an essay outside of the honors track. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
97d
Senior Thesis
For seniors interested in writing a thesis outside of the honors track. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
98a
Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
98b
Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
99a
The Senior Honors Essay
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
99b
The Senior Honors Essay
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.
Staff
ENG
99d
The Senior Honors Thesis
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.
Staff
English: Other Elective Courses
ANTH/ENG
150a
Cases and Clues: Reading Novels and Ethnographies as Cultural Explorations
[
hum
ss
]
Compares novels and anthropological ethnographies: both are attempts to narrate human cultures, but the ways they do so are radically different. We compare the inside/outside role of the novelist and the anthropologist, and examine the different methodologies and assumptions of anthropological and literary studies. Authors include Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Johannes Fabian and Sidney Mintz. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Ferry and Mr. Plotz
COML/ENG
140b
Children's Literature and Constructions of Childhood
[
hum
]
Explores whether children's literature has sought to civilize or to subvert, to moralize or to enchant, forming a bedrock for adult sensibility. Childhood reading reflects the unresolved complexity of the experience of childhood itself as well as larger cultural shifts around the globe in values and beliefs. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Miller
ENG
48b
Literature and Happiness
[
hum
wi
]
Considers studies of happiness in economics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and history in relation to the American Novel. We analyze six novels to question how literary representations of happiness reflect and complicate ideas about happiness in other disciplines. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski
ENG
68b
The International Legacy of Anne Frank
[
hum
wi
]
Explores how The Diary of Anne Frank has been represented in different media over time. Students participate in an international digital learning environment with students from Amsterdam. Includes short lectures, discussions, team projects, diary-writing, archival research and web tours. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Skorczewski
Cross-Listed in English: Media/Film
SAS
130a
Film and Fiction of Crisis
[
hum
nw
]
Examines novels and films as a response to some pivotal crisis in South Asia: Independence and Partition, Communal Riots, Insurgency and Terrorism. We will read and analyze texts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in an effort to examine how these moments of crisis have affected literary and cinematic form while also paying close attention to how they contest or support the narrative of the unified nation. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh
Cross-Listed in English: Multicult/World Anglo. Lit
AAAS
79b
Afro-American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[
hum
ss
wi
]
An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize Afro-American writing of this century. Examines those influences that have shaped the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of representative writers. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
AAAS
132b
Introduction to African Literature
[
hum
nw
ss
wi
]
Examines the cultural production of African writers and filmmakers and their critiques of the postcolonial state. Topics include their exploration of gender, sexuality, language choice, the pressures placed on "authentic" identities by diasporic communities, and the conflicting claims of tradition and modernity. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
AAAS
133b
The Literature of the Caribbean
[
hum
nw
ss
wi
]
An exploration of the narrative strategies and themes of writers of the region who grapple with issues of colonialism, class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a context of often-conflicting allegiances to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith
AAAS
134b
Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[
hum
nw
]
Writers and filmmakers, who are usually examined separately under national or regional canonical categories such as "(North) American," "Latin American," "African," "British," or "Caribbean," are brought together here to examine transnational identities and investments in "authentic," "African," or "black" identities. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
COML
117a
Magical Realism and Modern Myth
[
hum
]
An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from the United States, Latin American, and beyond. authors include Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Wings of Desire and Hero. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman
SAS
101a
South Asian Women Writers
[
hum
nw
]
Includes literature by South Asian women writers such as Amrita Pritam, Ismat Chugtai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmina Anam, and Chandini Lokuge. Some of the works were originally written in English, while others have been translated from the vernacular. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Singh
SAS
110b
South Asian Postcolonial Writers
[
hum
nw
]
Examines the postcolonial novel written in English within the shared history of colonialism, specifically British imperialism, for South Asia. Writers include R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Mohsin Hamid, Romesh Gunesekera and Daniyal Mueenudin. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Singh
SAS
140a
We Who Are at Home Everywhere: Narratives from the South Asian Diaspora
[
hum
]
Looks at narratives from various locations of the South Asian Diaspora, while paying close attention to the emergence of an immigrant South Asian public culture. Examines novels, poetry, short stories, film, and music in order to further an understanding of South Asian immigrant culture. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh
Cross-Listed in English: Pre-1800
COML
103b
Madness and Folly in Renaissance Literature
[
hum
wi
]
A study of the theme of madness and folly as exemplified by the major writers of the Renaissance, including Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Cervantes. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Lansing
Cross-Listed in English: Post-1800
RECS
154a
The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
[
hum
]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.
A concentrated study of Vladimir Nabokov, the most noted Russian author living in emigration and one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Focuses on the major Russian- and English-language novels. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock
THA
66a
The American Drama since 1945
[
ca
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took THA 150a in prior years.
Examines the major plays and playwrights representing styles from social realism to avant-garde performance groups and the theater of images. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg
THA
76a
British, Irish, and Postcolonial Theater
[
ca
wi
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took THA 106a in prior years.
An exploration of the playwrights, political struggles, and aesthetic movements that shaped the evolution of British, Irish, and post-colonial drama in the twentieth century. Attention paid to race, class, gender, sexuality, and theater in performance. Playwrights include: Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, Orton, and Churchill. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg
Cross-Listed in English: Theory
HOID
100a
Introduction to Critical Theory
[
hum
]
How should we understand the cultural contradictions of modern society? This course will explore the evolution of Critical Theory as developed by the early Frankfurt School, with a specific focus on the works of Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. Special one-time offering, fall 2014.
Mr. Gamsby
Cross-Listed in English: Other Elective Courses
AMST
177b
True Crime and American Culture
[
ss
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took USEM 64a in previous years.
Explores a series of enduringly fascinating cases from the true crime files of American culture. Our crime scene investigations range from 1692 Salem to 1994 Brentwood; our line-up includes witches, outlaws, kidnappers, gangsters, murderers, and serial killers; and our evidence is drawn from literature, film, and television. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Doherty
ECS
100a
European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[
hum
wi
]
Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.
Mr. Dowden
FYS
44a
JustBooks: Tragedy, Right vs. Right?
[
hum
]
Most stories are about good vs. evil. Even if they end unhappily, we know what the happy alternative would be. But tragedy often seems about elemental, irresolvable conflict. Is such conflict inevitable? Can there be just solutions to tragic situations? Offered as part of the JustBooks program.
Ms. Quinney (English)
GECS
130b
The Princess and the Golem: Fairy Tales
[
hum
wi
]
Open to all students. Conducted in English.
An introduction to the genre of fairy tale in German literature, focusing especially on the narratives collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, but also exploring the Kunstmärchen and calendar stories composed by German writers from Romanticism into the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering
HSSP
118b
Viewing Health Policy Through the Lens of Literature
[
ss
]
Enriches students' understanding of health policy through the lens of literature—fiction, memoir, poetry, and drama. Studying American literature will enhance their understanding of health policy issues by harnessing the power of authors' imaginations, insights and compelling stories. Students will also read related research or health policy articles. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Garnick
NEJS
176b
Jewish Graphic Novels
[
hum
]
Examines the complex genre of the Jewish graphic novel. Explores how Jews have used graphic narratives to grapple with issues of acculturation, trauma, and identity. A historical survey accompanies readings of contemporary works by American, Israeli and European authors. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kellman
PHIL
182a
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
[
hum
]
An intensive study of Ludwig Wittgenstein's seminal work, Philosophical Investigations. This course should be of interest to philosophy and literature students who want to learn about this great philosopher's influential views on the nature of language and interpretation. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch and Mr. Hirsch
THA
11a
Theater Texts and Theory I
[
ca
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took THA 100a in prior years.
The evolution of Western drama from its ritual origins through the mid-eighteenth century. Greek tragedy, Roman comedy, medieval drama, Italian humanism, Spanish Golden Age comedias, and French neoclassicism. Attention paid to theater history, dramatic theory, and performance. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Holmberg
THA
11b
Theater Texts and Theory II
[
ca
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took THA 100b in prior years.
A continuation of THA 100a, covering plays, history, and political theory. Romanticism to the present, including realism and the avant-garde. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Holmberg
THA
102b
Shakespeare: On Stage and Screen
[
ca
]
Shakespeare wrote his plays to be seen and heard, not read. This course approaches Shakespeare as a man of the theater who thought visually as well as verbally. Explores Shakespeare's scripts in their original theatrical context, subsequent production history, and migration to film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg
THA
142b
Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[
ca
wi
]
Introduces the world of female playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes: motherhood (and daughterhood), reproduction, sexuality, abuse, family relationships, etc. Usually Offered every second year.
Staff