Department of English

Last updated: July 12, 2018 at 3:39 p.m.

Undergraduate Major in English
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 acquire expressive and analytic skills that serve them well in many 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.

Graduate Program in English
The graduate program in English is designed to offer training in the interpretation and evaluation of literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.

Undergraduate Major in English

The Department of English is committed to the study of literature, broadly construed, 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.

After completing the full range of courses required for the major, we expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:

Core Skills
We expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:

  1. Close reading of literary and nonliterary texts with attention to their formal features.
  2. Ability to contextualize texts and arguments within, (a) relevant literary histories and movements, (b) relevant world cultures, and/or (c) the social and political situations in which they were written or read.
  3. Expertise in writing—including clear, convincing arguments, appropriate voice, and stylistic range.

Knowledge
Study of literary texts and criticism across different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographical, historical, generic traditions in the English-speaking world.

Social Justice
The study of English helps students participate as informed, articulate, and active citizens in a multilingual and multicultural society.

Undergraduate Major in Creative Writing

The primary goal for Creative Writing majors is developing a personal body of high caliber creative work—in fiction, poetry, or writing for the screen. In this pursuit, students will also gain a better grasp of the subtleties of language; develop an understanding of precision, logic, and attention to detail in writing; become more effective in editorial skills and communication; and become adept at close reading.

Students who major in Creative Writing take a combination of writing workshops, literature courses covering different periods and genres, at least one studio or performing art class, and, for honors students, work independently with professors. The Creative Writing Program is structured to allow flexible participation in its courses and activities by a diverse body of students with varying degrees of interest and commitment. This course of study builds a foundation for a lifetime of engagement with literature.

Upon graduation, students are prepared to continue their work as writers in graduate programs in literature and creative writing. Recent majors have gone on to publish work with national literary publications and presses and have used their degrees to secure positions in journalism, public relations, publishing, advertising, writing for television, online startups, and many other fields in which excellence in writing is required.

We expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:

Core Skills

  1. Skills to create their own works in fiction or poetry, as well as the ability to advance work through the stages of revision.
  2. The ability to give constructive feedback to other writers in written editorial comments and workshop discussion.
  3. Proficiency in close reading skills.

Knowledge

  1. Comprehensive understanding of the basic elements of the genres that were the primary focus of their studies. For example, scene writing, story arc, and conflict in fiction: the poetic line for poets. Nuances of words and syntax for both.
  2. An understanding of their literary influences and aesthetic values as writers.

Social Justice

  1. An awareness of how their own work is in conversation with larger, global literary traditions or movements/conversations.

Graduate Program in English

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Core Skills

  1. Close reading of literary and nonliterary texts with attention to their formal features.
  2. Ability to contextualize texts and arguments within (a) relevant literary histories and movements, (b) relevant world cultures, and/or (c) the social and political situations in which they were written or read.
  3. Expertise in writing and research—including clear, convincing arguments, appropriate voice, and stylistic range.
  4. Expertise in teaching.

Knowledge

  1. Understanding of a range of literary texts and criticism across different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographical, historical, generic traditions in the English-speaking world.
  2. Understanding of the history of the discipline of English and the development of major schools of criticism and theory.

Social Justice

  1. An understanding of literature’s relationship to questions of social justice.

English
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. Courses with numbers below 100 are especially suitable for beginning students.

Creative Writing
Students interested in the creative writing program may find more information below.
Candidates for admission should have a Bachelor's degree, preferably with a major in English and a reading knowledge a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments. They are required to submit a sample of their critical writing not to exceed thirty-five pages; the thirty-five-page maximum may consist of a single critical essay or two shorter essays of approximately equal length. All applicants are required to submit scores on the Graduate Record Examination general test. The general requirements for admission to the Graduate School, as specified in an earlier section of this Bulletin, apply to candidates for admission to this area of study.

Caren Irr, Chair
Twentieth-century American literature. Theory. Cultural studies.

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (on leave academic year 2018-2019)
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-American literature and culture. Gender, queer theory, and sexual politics. Critical race theory. Multiethnic feminisms.

Ulka Anjaria, Director of Graduate Studies
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asian literature and modernity. Postcolonial studies. Theories of the novel. Nationalism. Literature and the modern state. Cultural anthropology.

Elizabeth Bradfield, Associate Director of Creative Writing
Poetry.

John Burt (on leave spring 2019)
American literature. Romanticism. Composition. Philosophy of education. Literature of the American South. Poetry.

Emilie Diouf
Anglophone and Francophone African literature. Caribbean literature. Critical Theory. Film/Media. Gender and Sexuality studies. Postcolonial literature and theory.

William Flesch, Undergraduate Advising Head
Poetry. Renaissance. Theory.

Dorothy Kim
Medieval Literature. Drama. Digital Humanities.

Thomas King
Performance studies. Gender studies. Gay studies. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama.

Stephen McCauley, Associate Director of Creative Writing
Fiction.

Paul Morrison
Modernism. Literary criticism and theory. Film studies. Sexuality studies.

John Plotz (on leave spring 2019)
Victorian literature. The novel. Politics and aesthetics.

Laura Quinney
Romanticism. Literature and philosophy. Eighteenth-century literature.

David Sherman
Modernism. Contemporary British literature. Narrative theory. Ethical philosophy. Elegy.

Dawn Skorczewski, Director of University Writing (on leave fall 2018)
Twentieth-century poetry. Psychoanalysis and pedagogy. Composition studies.

Faith Smith
African and Afro-American literature. Caribbean literature.

Ramie Targoff
Renaissance literature. Shakespeare. Religion and literature.

Jerome Tharaud
Early American literature and culture; print culture and media; American religious history; art history and visual culture; theories of space and place; the American West.

Affiliated Faculty (contributing to the curriculum, advising and administration of the department or program)
Jerónimo Arellano (Romance Studies)
Patricia Johnston (Classical Studies)
Robin Feuer Miller (German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)
Cheryl Walker (Classical Studies)

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. Five ENG courses, with the following exception: only one creative writing workshop may count toward the minor.

B. Students are encouraged to speak with the UAH or their faculty advisor about clustering or distributing courses counted toward the minor.

C. 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 creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9) which can focus on any genre. See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops. 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.

English Major
Ten semester courses are required, including the following:

A. 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.

B. 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.

C. One course from each 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.

D. 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. A maximum of three non-ENG courses may be counted toward the majors. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.

E. At least two courses in which students must write papers of 12+ pages (courses ending in 9 are excluded); these may fall into any of the above categories.

F. At least two of the courses that students take must be 100-level courses not ending in 9. We suggest these courses be taken in the junior and/or 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). By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution 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.

The undergraduate advising head (UAH) can assist the student in finding an appropriate director. In consultation with the director, the student should draft a proposal (two pages): outline the topic, methods, sources, texts the student plans to examine, questions to be asked and likely conclusions. The director will approve and sign the proposal. In the case of the thesis, the approved proposal should reach the UAH by the add deadline of the first thesis-writing semester. The UAH will assign a second reader by the beginning of second thesis-writing semester.

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/honorstrack.html.

A student majoring in English may double-major or minor in creative writing.

Creative Writing Major
This major may be declared upon the completion of three creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9) and a course focused on close reading. Ten semester courses are required, including the following:

A. One close reading course: ENG 10b (Poetry: A Basic Course), ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice), or ENG 11b (Fiction: A Basic Course), which should be taken as early as possible.

B. Four creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9). See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops. At least two of the required workshops must be from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 categories. At least one workshop in creative writing should 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 workshop can be taken in any semester in the same genre. Two such courses may be taken in different genres. All workshops are by instructor's signature, require a manuscript submission, and are offered on a credit/no credit basis. Having a declared major in Creative Writing does not guarantee admission to the workshops.

C. One course dealing primary with literature in English written before 1800. For specific information about whether a particular course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement, please see listing of courses below.

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. By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements.

E. Two semester elective courses, at least one of which must be offered by faculty in the English department. A maximum of three non-ENG courses may be counted toward the majors. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.

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.

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 creative writing workshop requirement is reduced to a minimum of three. Two of the 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). The poetry or fiction thesis option major also requires an essay discussing the student's literary influences and work assigned by their thesis advisor. 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 during the first semester of the junior 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 workshops and either ENG 10b, ENG 11a or ENG 11b. The deadline for admission is usually in November. The deadline for midyear students will be in April.

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 creative writing workshops (courses ending in 9) and a course focused on close reading. Fourteen semester courses are required; fifteen if pursuing honors in literature or the poetry or fiction thesis option, including the following:

A. One close reading course: ENG 10b (Poetry: A Basic Course), ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice), or ENG 11b (Fiction: A Basic Course), which should be taken as early as possible.

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 from each 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.

E. 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. A maximum of three non-ENG courses may be counted toward the majors. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.

F. An elective course in a studio or performing art.

G. At least two courses in which students must write papers of 12+ pages (English courses ending in 9 are excluded); these may fall into any of the above categories.

H. At least two of the courses that students take must be 100-level courses not ending in 9. We suggest these courses be taken in the junior and/or senior years.

I. A minimum of four creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9). See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops. At least two of the required workshops must be from the 19/39a/79b/109/119 categories. At least one workshop in creative 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.

For those students pursuing the poetry or fiction thesis option, these requirements are adjusted as follows: a minimum of three workshops. 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 discussing the student's literary influences and work assigned by their thesis advisor. The essay will be due at the end of the senior year. This option is by application only.

I. There is no double counting between course categories. (i.e., The Novel in India cannot count for both world literature and post-1800, etc.) By definition, film courses cannot fulfill the literature distribution requirements.

English Major/Creative Writing Minor
Thirteen semester courses are required, including the following:

A. All the requirements listed under the English major.

B. Three creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9). See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops.

Creative Writing Major/English Minor
Thirteen courses are required, including the following:

A. All the requirements listed under the Creative Writing major.

B. Three elective semester courses (in addition to the two listed in item E. of the Creative Writing major). 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. A maximum of three non-ENG courses may be counted toward the major/minor. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.

C. Students are encouraged to speak with the UAH or their faculty advisor about clustering or distributing courses counted toward the minor.

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. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.

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.

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.

To earn the 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. 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.) ENG 350a (Proseminar), a credit/no-credit course that does not count toward the eight course requirement, is optional but recommended.

Residence Requirement
Students may enroll on a full or part-time basis. There is a one-year minimum residence requirement for full-time students. Most full-time students will take an additional one or two semesters beyond the first year to complete the degree as Extended Master's students. Students who wish to enroll in the program on a part-time basis are strongly encouraged to complete all the requirements within four years.

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. 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.

Students admitted to the doctoral program are eligible to apply for an MA degree in passing upon completion of the following requirements. (For information about the stand-alone MA in English, see above. For information about the joint degree of Master of Arts in English & Women's and Gender Studies, see below).

Course Requirement
Eight courses, three of which must be 200-level seminars; a capstone project (this may be fulfilled by one of the eight required courses, or by other departmental work deemed suitable by the DGS, such as an independent study or directed research comparable to the MA paper); 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.

Program of Study
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 Research 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. 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.

G. The program may take an additional one or two semesters beyond the first year to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Note: ENG 350a (Proseminar), a credit/no-credit course that does not count toward the eight course requirement, is optional but recommended.

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. All first-year PhD students are also required to enroll in the Department Proseminar (ENG 350a), a yearlong pass/fail seminar for the development of research skills, the acquisition of new methodological tools, and training in professional development. The Proseminar is in addition to the twelve course requirement.

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. 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. 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
Students should meet with their prospectus committees one to three months after their field exam to discuss the prospectus. 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.

First-year students cannot enroll in a section of ENG 352a/b, Directed Research. Only one section of ENG 352a/b, Directed Research can count towards required coursework for a graduate degree.

Students should also consult the general degree requirements and academic regulations found in an earlier section of this Bulletin.

(1-99) Primarily for Undergraduate Students

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.
Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

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 6a The American Renaissance
[ hum ]
Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts. Usually offered every second year.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
John Burt or Caren Irr

ENG 10b Poetry: A Basic Course
[ hum ]
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
[ 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 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.
Caren 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.
John 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.
Dawn Skorczewski

ENG 19a Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary forms such as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Other forms may also be explored. Usually offered every year.
Staff

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 20b The Art of Flirtation: Reading Romance from Pride and Prejudice to Harry Potter
[ hum wi ]
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.
Dawn 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 22a Filmi Fictions: From Page to Screen in India
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to filmic adaptations of Indian novels from Bollywood, Indian art cinema, and Hollywood. Readings include novels as well as theoretical approaches to adaptation. Films include Slumdog Millionaire, Pather Panchali, Devdas, Guide, Umrao Jaan, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 27a Fictions for a Warming World
[ hum ]
Offers an introduction to the emerging literary genre of climate fiction and explores this genre's historical roots. Topics include disaster narratives, environmental utopias, and eco-thrillers. Authors may include Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, Frank Herbert, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. Special one-time offering, spring 2018.
Kurt Cavender

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 28a Contemporary Environmental Writing
[ hum ]
Explores literary responses to the natural environment, concentrating on recent decades. Several genres will be discussed, such as dystopia, the thriller, climate fiction, natural history, exploration narrative, and realist exposé. Usually offered every fourth year.
Caren Irr

ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
[ hum ]
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 30a Introduction to Graphic Novels
[ hum ]
Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 30b New American Cinema of the 1960s and 70s
[ hum ]
Survey of the "new Hollywood" of the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Nicholas, Hopper, Scorcese, Polanski, Altman). Explores underground and international influences on this group's aesthetic. Investigates filmic responses to the dying studio system and the ideals of the counterculture. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ hum nw ]
Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 32b Chaucer I
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.
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.
Staff

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.
William Flesch or Ramie Targoff

ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
[ hum ]
Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appleaing to both young and old readers as few other genres do. We explore its historical roots in satires like Gulliver's Travels, its modern rebirth in Narnia, Middle Earth, Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as on film. Also explores recent participatory fantasy realms, including online gaming and live action role-playing. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 38b Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ hum wi ]
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.
John Burt

ENG 40a Coming of Age in Literature
[ hum wi ]
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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum ]
How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.
John Plotz

ENG 43a Pilgrims, Queens, and the Garden: English Literature from Chaucer to Milton
[ hum ]
Beginning with Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales and ending with Milton’s Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, this course explores the works of some of the major British authors from the late fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. From wandering pilgrims and powerful queens to fruitful gardens, this course surveys early modern English culture via its poetry and prose. Our course may include the works of authors such as Margery Kempe, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Donne, Amelia Lanyer, and George Herbert. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ hum ]
Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance. Usually offered every third year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 44b Jane Austen's Eighteenth Century
[ hum ]
Immerses students in the world of Enlightenment thought, art, and letters, and in the political and cultural ambiance of late-eighteenth-century England, with particular emphasis on developments that most shaped Austen's ideas and imagination. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 45b Romanticism: Gods, Nature, Loneliness, Dreams
[ hum ]
A study of Romantic poetry, from love lyrics to ballads about the supernatural to philosophical meditations on self and soul. Authors include: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats and Shelley. Usually offered every third year.
Laura Quinney

ENG 47b Literature Between Habit and Addiction
[ hum ]
In depictions of addiction, literature imagines ecstatic pleasure, intense suffering, and spiritual revelation. We will explore texts from the 19th century to today, considering how these representations develop and recur. Authors include DeQuincey, Eliot, Wharton, Baldwin, Gaitskill, Parks, and Burroughs. Special one-time offering, spring 2018.
Brenden O'Donnell

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.
Ramie Targoff

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.
Caren Irr

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 55a Smoke and Brick: Working Class Literature of the Mechanical Age
[ hum ]
Examines 19th and early 20th C. British and American fiction depicting labor, poverty, and economic inequality across various literary genre types within the context of contemporary economic theory and debates around poverty and labor. Special one-time offering, fall 2018.
Paige Eggebrecht

ENG 56a American Journeys
[ hum ]
Explores the ways American literature imagines a range of geographies and landscapes in the long nineteenth century, from the regional to the global, and frontier farms to urban tenements. Authors may include Olaudah Equiano, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. Usually offered every second year.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

ENG 60a Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]
This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories for live audiences at Brandeis and elsewhere in the Boston area. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of several kinds of stories, including autobiographies, fictions, folk tales, and local history. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth programs, open mics, and other public spaces. Usually offered every second year.
David Sherman

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, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ hum nw ]
What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 67a Cubicles and Side Hustles: Stories of America at Work
[ hum ]
Explores the narratives Americans tell about the work they do. Topics include creative labor, changing work ethics, and precarious workers. Authors include Don DeLillo, Paul Beatty, Lauren Groff, and the television shows Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Special one-time offering, fall 2018.
Matt Schratz

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]
A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 68a The Political Novel
[ hum wi ]
How do novels change and how are they changed by politics? From the satires of Eastern Europe (Kafka and Milan Kundera, Koestler's Darkness at Noon) to fiery American calls to action on racial issues (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man); from utopia to postcolonial disaster (Things Fall Apart). Film screenings included. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
John 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.
Faith 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 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.
David Sherman

ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God
[ hum ]
Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzsche'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.
David Sherman

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: 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.
Marc Weinberg

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.
Faith 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.
Staff

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.
Aliyyah 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.
Thomas King

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 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

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]
Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

COML/ENG 141b Literature and Time
[ hum ]
Explores the human experience of temporality and reflection upon it. Themes covered by this course include: memory, nostalgia, anxiety, ethics, eternity, and time travel. Usually offered every third year.
Laura Quinney

COML/ENG 148a Fiction of the Second World War
[ hum wi ]
Studies novels of the Second World War from Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan (all readings in English). Usually offered every fourth year.
John Burt

COML/ENG 149a Dante's Hell and Its Legacy
[ hum ]
Studies the Classical underworld and its reworking in English verse. Topics include the descent to the underworld, the ambiguous Satan, the myths of Orpheus and Penelope, and the psychological Hells of the modernists. Usually offered every second year.
Laura Quinney

ECS/ENG 110a Thinking about Infinity
[ hum ]
Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.
William 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.
Paul Morrison

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.
William Flesch

ENG 105b After Jane Austen: Sex, Death, and Fiction
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. Explores the relationship between the novel, the era's most popular culture, and our own popular culture. It examines desire, concealment, sex, and romance, as well as the role that literature plays in creating and upsetting communities, defining racial and ethnic categories. Film screenings. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

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.
Faith Smith

ENG 108b Second Language Writing Instruction: Theory and Practice
[ hum ]
Yields six semester-hour credits.
Explores current theory and research in second language (L2) writing and tutoring pedagogy. All students will work with English language learners in the Waltham community, tutoring them in their various English writers needs. Usually offered every year.
Joshua Lederman

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ 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.
Staff

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: 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.
Stephen McCauley or Visiting Writer

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ hum ]
Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 115b Fictions of Liberty: Europe in a Revolutionary Age
[ hum ]
The "Age of Enlightenment" fostered new notions of human rights that found their tumultuous proving ground in the French Revolution. Through writings from several genres and nations, this course explores some of the political, economic, religious, racial, and sexual "fictions of liberty" that have shaped our own time. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

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.
John Burt

ENG 118b Teaching Shakespeare Up Close and Personal
[ hum ]
Does not count towards the MA or PhD in English.
Examines two plays of Shakespeare from theoretical, historical, and practical viewpoints: the scholar's, actor's and the teacher's. These perspectives will open up a world of possibilities for sharing Shakespeare's plays in the classroom or on the stage. Usually offered every year.
William Flesch

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ 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 Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in 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 121a Sex and Culture
[ hum ]
An exploration of the virtually unlimited explanatory power attributed to sexuality in the modern world. "Texts" include examples from literature, film, television, pornography, sexology, and theory. Usually offered every second year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 125a Romanticism I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
[ hum ]
Examines the major poetry and some prose by the first generation of English Romantic poets who may be said to have defined Romanticism and set the tone for the last two centuries of English literature. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt or Laura Quinney

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.
John Burt, William Flesch, or Laura Quinney

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ hum nw ]
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.
Faith Smith

ENG 128a Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[ hum ]
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.
Staff

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction 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. May be repeated for credit.
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 130a Representing Poverty
[ hum ]
Explores influential theories of poverty and their impact on filmmakers. Compares cinematic tools and traditions for representing the lives of the world's poor. Includes neorealist classics and many contemporary variations. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
David Sherman

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]
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.
William Flesch and Thomas King

ENG 134a Going Public: Women Authors Before Austen
[ hum ]
Examines what was at stake for women to publish in the eighteenth century. We'll consider questions of love and marriage, sex, sexuality, and consent, class and money, and slavery and freedom in the work of women writers. Special one-time offering, spring 2018.
Jennifer Reed

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.
Laura Quinney

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: 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.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 140a American War Novels of the 20th Century
[ hum wi ]
Studies classic war novels of the 20th and 21st century, from Hemingway, Heller, and O'Brien through recent novels by Jin, Benedict and Vollman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 145a Poetry and the Supernatural
[ hum ]
Studies modern poetry and poetic theory of the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural phenomena? Figures include goblins, vampires, witches, ghosts and the goddess of the underworld. Texts include poetry by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Louise Gluck and Rita Dov. Usually offered every third year.
Laura Quinney

ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ hum ]
Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 148a Inventing Farewell: A Practicum on Elegy
[ hum ]
Every modern generation re-invents its relation to the dead. This course explores recent experiments in poetic elegy that construct the presence of the dead and work through loss. We'll approach this writing in close conversation with other sorts of innovations in mourning and memorial work, including emerging commemorative rituals, mortuary practices, funerary architecture, historical monuments, and cemetery design. In the experiential, creative component of this course, students will research local memorial acts and commemorative spaces in order to design their own. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing for Television
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre. Usually offered every second year.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 150b Out of This World: Science Fiction's Cyborgs, Time Travellers, and Space Invaders
[ hum ]
Charts four principal ways that SF over the past two centuries has imagined alternatives to ordinary reality: cyborgs, time travellers, dystopias and space invaders. It tests scholarly ideas about "cognitive estrangement," technological innovation ("novum") and self-contained "secondary worlds" and culminates in independent research projects. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

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.
Thomas 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.
Thomas King

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ hum ]
A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

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.
Thomas King

ENG 154b Spirit Worlds: Religion and Early American Literature
[ hum ]
Explores how the religious imagination shaped literary expression in colonial America and the early United States, and how early American religion is represented in contemporary culture. Authors may include Ann Bradstreet, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, and Nat Turner. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 157b American Women Poets
[ hum wi ]
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.
Dawn Skorczewski

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 digital revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 160b Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath
[ hum wi ]
Traces the trajectories of Sylvia Plath's and Anne Sexton's careers, their poetic achievements and cultural legacies. We read Plath's and Sexton's poems, prose, and journals and examine work by contemporaries to study what came to be called "confessional" poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Dawn Skorczewski

ENG 166a Writing Reconstruction: Race and Reaction after the Civil War
[ hum ]
Examines the struggle for racial equality during and after the Reconstruction period. What are the measures of social or political equality? What powers can public institutions use to secure them? What are the cultural conditions under which struggles about equality are waged? Includes texts from both sides of the political divide, and from different racial perspectives. Students will also gain some familiarity with the historical scholarship about the period. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 166b Slated Truths and Barbaric Yawps: American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson
[ hum wi ]
Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ hum nw ]
Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum ]
Surveys English-language drama and performance after the innovations of Beckett and Brecht, investigating theater and performance artists' engagement of human rights, identity politics, decolonization, state, and interpersonal violence, environmental justice and climate change, and performance after the Anthropocene. Usually offered every year.
Thomas King

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ hum nw ]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

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.
William 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.
Paul 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 180b Romantic Comedy / Matrimonial Tragedy
[ hum ]
A genre study of romantic comedy, from early to recent cinema. How does its narrative machinery work and what social functions does it serve? An exploration of comedic pleasure as strategy for fashioning gender identities, sexualities, marriages, and anti-marriages. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 183b Gods and Humans in the Renaissance
[ ca hum ]
Examines the relationship between gods and humans in literature and art from the Renaissance, exploring how classical gods and goddesses, as well as biblical figures of the divine, are represented by major European artists and authors. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ramie Targoff and Jonathan Unglaub

ENG 197b Within the Veil: African-American and Muslim Women's Writing
[ hum ]
In twentieth-century United States culture, the veil has become a powerful metaphor, signifying initially the interior of African-American community and the lives of Muslims globally. This course investigates issues of identity, imperialism, cultural loyalty, and spirituality by looking at and linking contemporary writing by African-American and Muslim women. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

(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 207a Race, Desire, and the Literary Imagination
An examination of the interlocking constructions of race, sexuality, and gender in United States culture. Probes the relation among embodiment, racial and sexual ideologies, the formation of identity, and U.S. literary production. Readings include critical works of African American studies, performance studies, queer theory and gender studies alongside key texts of twentieth-century U.S. literature. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

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.
William Flesch or Ramie 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.
William Flesch

ENG 220a Poetry and Philosophy
Studies the interrelations of poetry and philosophy, from Plato to the present day. Usually offered every fourth year.
Laura 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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 229a The Orlando Project
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 120a in prior years.
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.
Thomas King

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 231a Performing the Early Modern Self
Examines contemporary performance theory against everyday and formal performances of the Restoration and eighteenth-century England. Investigates agents' negotiations of social and personal space in plays, diaries, novels, and treatises. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

ENG 233a Shakespeare Seminar
An intensive reading of Shakespeare's work from a theoretical and historical viewpoint. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

ENG 237a Reading the Black Transnation
Fiction, theory, film of what is variously termed the African Diaspora or the Black Atlantic. Acquaints students with major and lesser-known figures, concepts, and strategies. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 238a Capitalism and the American Novel
How does American fiction envision the processes, conflicts, and ideologies associated with capitalism? These topics have had a major presence in the American novel since before independence, but they took hold with particular force during the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century as well as the crises of the 1930s and the turn to financial capitalism in the 1970s and 80s, and they continue to preoccupy many of the most important American novelists today. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 243a Women and the Renaissance
Explores women's writing in the Renaissance. Although the primary focus will be on England, texts will also be read in translation from Italy and France. Both published works and private diaries and letters will be examined. Usually offered every third year.
Ramie Targoff

ENG 245a Naturalism between Realism and Modernism
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.
John Plotz

ENG 246a Race and Reaction: Writing Reconstruction after the Civil War
The struggle for racial equality during and after the Reconstruction period. What are the measures of social or political equality? What powers can public institutions use to secure them? What are the cultural conditions under which struggles about equality are waged? Studies texts from both sides of the political divide, and from different racial perspectives. Students will also gain some familiarity with the historical scholarship about the period. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 247a American Literary Geographies
Explores the spatial frameworks developed by scholars to study American Literature and culture in recent decades, from micro-geographies like the plantation and the region to transnational spaces such as hemisphere and the planet. Readings include foundational literary texts from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 248a Environmental Humanities
How do humanists contribute to knowledge of the natural environment? How do environmental questions disrupt conventional understandings of the human? These paired questions form the spine of this seminar, although we will also build outward to topic such as the history of the nature concept, critical science studies, and animal rights, relations between environmental justice and deep ecology, and other related themes. Usually offered every fourth year.
Caren Irr

ENG 250a Religion and Literature
Surveys issues and methods in the interdisciplinary study of literature and religion, focusing on American literary and cultural studies. Key themes include lived religion, theories of sacred space, secularization theory, and literary apocalypticism. Authors include Cather, Black Elk, John Marrant, Stowe, Nat Turner, Thoreau, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 250b Film Theory
Introduces the theoretical principles that structure the production and reception of film. We will pay particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 254a Gender and the Genealogy of the Novel
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.
Staff

ENG 257b Modernism's Broken Worlds
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.
David 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.
John Burt

ENG 298a Independent Study
Staff

ENG 299b Classroom Pedagogy and the Teaching of Writing
An introduction to the theory and practice of teaching college-level writing courses. Usually offered every second year.
Dawn Skorczewski

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
Yields half-course credit. Offered exclusively on a credit/no-credit basis. Required of all first-year PhD students. Optional for 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

Close Reading Courses for the Creative Writing Major

ENG 10b Poetry: A Basic Course
[ hum ]
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
[ 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

Literary Theory / Criticism Courses

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]
Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

COML/ENG 141b Literature and Time
[ hum ]
Explores the human experience of temporality and reflection upon it. Themes covered by this course include: memory, nostalgia, anxiety, ethics, eternity, and time travel. Usually offered every third year.
Laura 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, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.
William 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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ hum ]
Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 121a Sex and Culture
[ hum ]
An exploration of the virtually unlimited explanatory power attributed to sexuality in the modern world. "Texts" include examples from literature, film, television, pornography, sexology, and theory. Usually offered every second year.
Paul Morrison

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.
David 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.
Thomas 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.
Thomas King

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 digital revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ hum nw ]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

Media and Film Courses

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.
Caren Irr

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 22a Filmi Fictions: From Page to Screen in India
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to filmic adaptations of Indian novels from Bollywood, Indian art cinema, and Hollywood. Readings include novels as well as theoretical approaches to adaptation. Films include Slumdog Millionaire, Pather Panchali, Devdas, Guide, Umrao Jaan, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka 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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 30a Introduction to Graphic Novels
[ hum ]
Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 30b New American Cinema of the 1960s and 70s
[ hum ]
Survey of the "new Hollywood" of the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Nicholas, Hopper, Scorcese, Polanski, Altman). Explores underground and international influences on this group's aesthetic. Investigates filmic responses to the dying studio system and the ideals of the counterculture. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
Caren Irr

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, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

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.
Faith 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.
Faith Smith

ENG 130a Representing Poverty
[ hum ]
Explores influential theories of poverty and their impact on filmmakers. Compares cinematic tools and traditions for representing the lives of the world's poor. Includes neorealist classics and many contemporary variations. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Thomas King

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 digital revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ hum nw ]
Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 180b Romantic Comedy / Matrimonial Tragedy
[ hum ]
A genre study of romantic comedy, from early to recent cinema. How does its narrative machinery work and what social functions does it serve? An exploration of comedic pleasure as strategy for fashioning gender identities, sexualities, marriages, and anti-marriages. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

Multicultural Literature/World Anglophone Courses

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.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman or Faith Smith

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.
Faith 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.
Faith 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.
Faith Smith

AAAS 164b Afrofuturism
[ ss ]
Analyzes the various ways in which African Diaspora cultural producers - writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers - use Afrofuturism to critique racial asymmetries in the present and to imagine as-yet-unrealized, free black futures. Usually offered every second year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]
Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

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 Columbia, India, Nigeria, the United States, England, and elsewhere. Authors include Ben Okri, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Pan's Labyrinth and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Usually offered every second year.
David Sherman

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 22a Filmi Fictions: From Page to Screen in India
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to filmic adaptations of Indian novels from Bollywood, Indian art cinema, and Hollywood. Readings include novels as well as theoretical approaches to adaptation. Films include Slumdog Millionaire, Pather Panchali, Devdas, Guide, Umrao Jaan, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ hum nw ]
Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ hum nw ]
What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
Faith 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.
Faith 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.
Aliyyah 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.
Faith Smith

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ hum ]
Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ hum nw ]
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.
Faith Smith

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ hum nw ]
Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ hum nw ]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 197b Within the Veil: African-American and Muslim Women's Writing
[ hum ]
In twentieth-century United States culture, the veil has become a powerful metaphor, signifying initially the interior of African-American community and the lives of Muslims globally. This course investigates issues of identity, imperialism, cultural loyalty, and spirituality by looking at and linking contemporary writing by African-American and Muslim women. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

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 second year.
Harleen Singh

Pre-1800 Courses

COML/ENG 149a Dante's Hell and Its Legacy
[ hum ]
Studies the Classical underworld and its reworking in English verse. Topics include the descent to the underworld, the ambiguous Satan, the myths of Orpheus and Penelope, and the psychological Hells of the modernists. Usually offered every second year.
Laura Quinney

COML/HUM 21a Renaissance Literary Masterpieces
[ hum ]
Introduces students to some of the greatest works written in Europe during the Renaissance. Readings will include works by Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Luther, Erasmus, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Rabelais, and Cervantes. All readings will be in English. Usually taught every third year.
Ramie Targoff

ECS/ENG 110a Thinking about Infinity
[ hum ]
Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
[ hum ]
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 32b Chaucer I
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.
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.
Staff

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.
William Flesch or Ramie Targoff

ENG 43a Pilgrims, Queens, and the Garden: English Literature from Chaucer to Milton
[ hum ]
Beginning with Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales and ending with Milton’s Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, this course explores the works of some of the major British authors from the late fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. From wandering pilgrims and powerful queens to fruitful gardens, this course surveys early modern English culture via its poetry and prose. Our course may include the works of authors such as Margery Kempe, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Donne, Amelia Lanyer, and George Herbert. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ hum ]
Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance. Usually offered every third year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 44b Jane Austen's Eighteenth Century
[ hum ]
Immerses students in the world of Enlightenment thought, art, and letters, and in the political and cultural ambiance of late-eighteenth-century England, with particular emphasis on developments that most shaped Austen's ideas and imagination. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

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.
Ramie Targoff

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.
Staff

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.
William Flesch

ENG 115b Fictions of Liberty: Europe in a Revolutionary Age
[ hum ]
The "Age of Enlightenment" fostered new notions of human rights that found their tumultuous proving ground in the French Revolution. Through writings from several genres and nations, this course explores some of the political, economic, religious, racial, and sexual "fictions of liberty" that have shaped our own time. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 118b Teaching Shakespeare Up Close and Personal
[ hum ]
Does not count towards the MA or PhD in English.
Examines two plays of Shakespeare from theoretical, historical, and practical viewpoints: the scholar's, actor's and the teacher's. These perspectives will open up a world of possibilities for sharing Shakespeare's plays in the classroom or on the stage. Usually offered every year.
William Flesch

ENG 128a Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[ hum ]
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.
Staff

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]
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.
William Flesch and Thomas King

ENG 134a Going Public: Women Authors Before Austen
[ hum ]
Examines what was at stake for women to publish in the eighteenth century. We'll consider questions of love and marriage, sex, sexuality, and consent, class and money, and slavery and freedom in the work of women writers. Special one-time offering, spring 2018.
Jennifer Reed

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.
Laura Quinney

ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ hum ]
Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ hum ]
A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

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.
Thomas King

ENG 154b Spirit Worlds: Religion and Early American Literature
[ hum ]
Explores how the religious imagination shaped literary expression in colonial America and the early United States, and how early American religion is represented in contemporary culture. Authors may include Ann Bradstreet, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, and Nat Turner. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
William Flesch

ENG 183b Gods and Humans in the Renaissance
[ ca hum ]
Examines the relationship between gods and humans in literature and art from the Renaissance, exploring how classical gods and goddesses, as well as biblical figures of the divine, are represented by major European artists and authors. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ramie Targoff and Jonathan Unglaub

Post-1800 Courses

AAAS 164b Afrofuturism
[ ss ]
Analyzes the various ways in which African Diaspora cultural producers - writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers - use Afrofuturism to critique racial asymmetries in the present and to imagine as-yet-unrealized, free black futures. Usually offered every second year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.
Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

COML/ENG 148a Fiction of the Second World War
[ hum wi ]
Studies novels of the Second World War from Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan (all readings in English). Usually offered every fourth year.
John Burt

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 6a The American Renaissance
[ hum ]
Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts. Usually offered every second year.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
John Burt or Caren 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.
Caren 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.
John 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.
Dawn Skorczewski

ENG 20b The Art of Flirtation: Reading Romance from Pride and Prejudice to Harry Potter
[ hum wi ]
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.
Dawn 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 27a Fictions for a Warming World
[ hum ]
Offers an introduction to the emerging literary genre of climate fiction and explores this genre's historical roots. Topics include disaster narratives, environmental utopias, and eco-thrillers. Authors may include Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, Frank Herbert, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. Special one-time offering, spring 2018.
Kurt Cavender

ENG 28a Contemporary Environmental Writing
[ hum ]
Explores literary responses to the natural environment, concentrating on recent decades. Several genres will be discussed, such as dystopia, the thriller, climate fiction, natural history, exploration narrative, and realist exposé. Usually offered every fourth year.
Caren Irr

ENG 30a Introduction to Graphic Novels
[ hum ]
Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ hum nw ]
Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
[ hum ]
Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appleaing to both young and old readers as few other genres do. We explore its historical roots in satires like Gulliver's Travels, its modern rebirth in Narnia, Middle Earth, Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as on film. Also explores recent participatory fantasy realms, including online gaming and live action role-playing. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 38b Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ hum wi ]
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.
John Burt

ENG 40a Coming of Age in Literature
[ hum wi ]
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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum ]
How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.
John Plotz

ENG 45b Romanticism: Gods, Nature, Loneliness, Dreams
[ hum ]
A study of Romantic poetry, from love lyrics to ballads about the supernatural to philosophical meditations on self and soul. Authors include: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats and Shelley. Usually offered every third year.
Laura Quinney

ENG 47b Literature Between Habit and Addiction
[ hum ]
In depictions of addiction, literature imagines ecstatic pleasure, intense suffering, and spiritual revelation. We will explore texts from the 19th century to today, considering how these representations develop and recur. Authors include DeQuincey, Eliot, Wharton, Baldwin, Gaitskill, Parks, and Burroughs. Special one-time offering, spring 2018.
Brenden O'Donnell

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 55a Smoke and Brick: Working Class Literature of the Mechanical Age
[ hum ]
Examines 19th and early 20th C. British and American fiction depicting labor, poverty, and economic inequality across various literary genre types within the context of contemporary economic theory and debates around poverty and labor. Special one-time offering, fall 2018.
Paige Eggebrecht

ENG 56a American Journeys
[ hum ]
Explores the ways American literature imagines a range of geographies and landscapes in the long nineteenth century, from the regional to the global, and frontier farms to urban tenements. Authors may include Olaudah Equiano, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. Usually offered every second year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 60a Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]
This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories for live audiences at Brandeis and elsewhere in the Boston area. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of several kinds of stories, including autobiographies, fictions, folk tales, and local history. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth programs, open mics, and other public spaces. Usually offered every second year.
David Sherman

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ hum nw ]
What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 67a Cubicles and Side Hustles: Stories of America at Work
[ hum ]
Explores the narratives Americans tell about the work they do. Topics include creative labor, changing work ethics, and precarious workers. Authors include Don DeLillo, Paul Beatty, Lauren Groff, and the television shows Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Special one-time offering, fall 2018.
Matt Schratz

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]
A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 68a The Political Novel
[ hum wi ]
How do novels change and how are they changed by politics? From the satires of Eastern Europe (Kafka and Milan Kundera, Koestler's Darkness at Noon) to fiery American calls to action on racial issues (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man); from utopia to postcolonial disaster (Things Fall Apart). Film screenings included. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
John 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.
David Sherman

ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God
[ hum ]
Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzsche'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.
David Sherman

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.
Faith Smith

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.
Thomas King

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 105b After Jane Austen: Sex, Death, and Fiction
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. Explores the relationship between the novel, the era's most popular culture, and our own popular culture. It examines desire, concealment, sex, and romance, as well as the role that literature plays in creating and upsetting communities, defining racial and ethnic categories. Film screenings. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

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.
Faith Smith

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ hum ]
Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka 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.
John Burt

ENG 125a Romanticism I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
[ hum ]
Examines the major poetry and some prose by the first generation of English Romantic poets who may be said to have defined Romanticism and set the tone for the last two centuries of English literature. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt or Laura Quinney

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.
John Burt, William Flesch, or Laura Quinney

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

ENG 140a American War Novels of the 20th Century
[ hum wi ]
Studies classic war novels of the 20th and 21st century, from Hemingway, Heller, and O'Brien through recent novels by Jin, Benedict and Vollman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 145a Poetry and the Supernatural
[ hum ]
Studies modern poetry and poetic theory of the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural phenomena? Figures include goblins, vampires, witches, ghosts and the goddess of the underworld. Texts include poetry by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Louise Gluck and Rita Dov. Usually offered every third year.
Laura Quinney

ENG 148a Inventing Farewell: A Practicum on Elegy
[ hum ]
Every modern generation re-invents its relation to the dead. This course explores recent experiments in poetic elegy that construct the presence of the dead and work through loss. We'll approach this writing in close conversation with other sorts of innovations in mourning and memorial work, including emerging commemorative rituals, mortuary practices, funerary architecture, historical monuments, and cemetery design. In the experiential, creative component of this course, students will research local memorial acts and commemorative spaces in order to design their own. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 150b Out of This World: Science Fiction's Cyborgs, Time Travellers, and Space Invaders
[ hum ]
Charts four principal ways that SF over the past two centuries has imagined alternatives to ordinary reality: cyborgs, time travellers, dystopias and space invaders. It tests scholarly ideas about "cognitive estrangement," technological innovation ("novum") and self-contained "secondary worlds" and culminates in independent research projects. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 157b American Women Poets
[ hum wi ]
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.
Dawn Skorczewski

ENG 160b Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath
[ hum wi ]
Traces the trajectories of Sylvia Plath's and Anne Sexton's careers, their poetic achievements and cultural legacies. We read Plath's and Sexton's poems, prose, and journals and examine work by contemporaries to study what came to be called "confessional" poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Dawn Skorczewski

ENG 166a Writing Reconstruction: Race and Reaction after the Civil War
[ hum ]
Examines the struggle for racial equality during and after the Reconstruction period. What are the measures of social or political equality? What powers can public institutions use to secure them? What are the cultural conditions under which struggles about equality are waged? Includes texts from both sides of the political divide, and from different racial perspectives. Students will also gain some familiarity with the historical scholarship about the period. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 166b Slated Truths and Barbaric Yawps: American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson
[ hum wi ]
Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum ]
Surveys English-language drama and performance after the innovations of Beckett and Brecht, investigating theater and performance artists' engagement of human rights, identity politics, decolonization, state, and interpersonal violence, environmental justice and climate change, and performance after the Anthropocene. Usually offered every year.
Thomas King

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ hum nw ]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

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

Directed Writing Courses

ENG 19a Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary forms such as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Other forms may also be explored. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: 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.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ 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.
Staff

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: 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.
Stephen McCauley or Visiting Writer

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ 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 Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in 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 Creative Nonfiction 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. May be repeated for credit.
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 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: 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.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing for Television
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre. Usually offered every second year.
Marc Weinberg

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

Other Elective Courses

ENG 108b Second Language Writing Instruction: Theory and Practice
[ hum ]
Yields six semester-hour credits.
Explores current theory and research in second language (L2) writing and tutoring pedagogy. All students will work with English language learners in the Waltham community, tutoring them in their various English writers needs. Usually offered every year.
Joshua Lederman

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.
William Flesch and Eli Hirsch

Cross-listed in English

AMST 177b True Crime and American Culture
[ ss ]
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.
Thomas Doherty

COML 164b Reading Screenplays: Script Analysis and Development
[ hum ]
How do you read a screenplay? Are screenplays artworks in their own right, independent from the film they were turned into or might become? Why do creative industries value the work of screenplay readers? This course serves as an introduction to the emergent field of screenwriting studies and demonstrates the professional application of screenplay analysis in the contemporary media industry. A professional script reader and development executive will feature as guest speaker. Materials include Hollywood screenplays, foreign language scripts in translation, and unproduced screenplays under consideration with production companies. Usually offered every third year.
Jerónimo Arellano

COML 185a Dickens and Dostoevsky
[ hum ]
Considers such issues as narrative, literary realism, and the manipulation of the grotesque and the sublime in representative works of Dickens and Dostoevsky. Because Dostoevsky was an avid reader of Dickens, class addresses questions of influence, particularly with regard to their shared thematic interests. Usually offered every second year.
Robin Feuer Miller

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.
Stephen Dowden

GECS 130b The Princess and the Golem: Fairy Tales
[ hum wi ]
Conducted in English.
Compares Walt Disney’s films with German and other European fairy tales from the nineteenth and twentieth century, focusing on feminist and psychoanalytic readings. Usually offered every second year.
Sabine von Mering

HISP 120b Don Quixote
[ hum ]
Taught in English.
Don Quixote is: a) a compendium of prior literary genres; b) the first modern novel; c) a funny book; d) a deep meditation on the human condition; e) the best novel ever written; f) all of the above. Usually offered every second year.
James Mandrell

HISP 167b Twice-Told Tales: Colonial Encounters and Postcolonial Fiction in the Americas
[ hum nw wi ]
Taught in English.
A wide range of modern and contemporary writers and artists in the Americas have examined the legacies of European colonialism in the continent. This course explores this persistent engagement with colonialism in narrative fiction and cinema from Latin American and the United States. The first part of the course introduces key texts from the colonial period, written by European and indigenous chroniclers of the colonization of the New World. In the second part of the course we look at fiction, film, and visual art by Latin American, African American and Native American artists who set out to retell colonial histories in the present, oftentimes in controversial ways. Materials discussed include works by Juan José Saer, Octavia Butler, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Gerald Vizenor, Peter Greenaway, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, among others. Usually offered every second year.
Jerónimo Arellano

HOID 102b Knowledge and Power
[ hum ]
What is the relationship between knowledge and power? Using the work of Michel Foucault as a foundation, this course will explore the interweaving effects of power and knowledge in institutions and their systems of thought. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HSSP 118b Viewing Medicine and Health Policy Through the Lens of Literature
[ oc ss ]
Literature – fiction, memoir, poetry and drama – offers a powerful lens for studying key health policy issues. By harnessing the power of authors’ imaginations, insights and compelling stories, students can gain deeper insight into patient centered care, ethics in research, access to healthcare, obesity and hunger, role of the pharmaceutical and tobacco, aging policy, disability, and clinicians’ roles and training. Usually offered every third year.
Deborah Garnick

NEJS 176b Jewish Graphic Novels
[ hum ]
Examines the complex genre of the Jewish graphic novel. Explores Jewish artists' use of graphic narratives to grapple with issues of acculturation, trauma, and identity. Special focus on the reconfiguration of Jewish gender identities. Structured around primary texts. Secondary readings provide historical context and theoretical analysis. Usually offered every second year.
Ellen Kellman

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.
David Powelstock

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.
Harleen Singh

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.
Arthur 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 66a The American Drama since 1945
[ ca ]
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.
Arthur Holmberg

THA 71a Playwriting
[ ca wi ]
Prerequisite: THA 10a or permission of the instructor.
Introduces students to the fundamentals of playwriting. Attention will be given to dramatic structure, the development of character, and stage dialogue. In addition to completing a number of playwriting exercises, students will write one ten-minute play and one one-act play. Work will be shared with the class and read aloud. Usually offered every year.
Ryan McKittrick

THA 76a British, Irish, and Postcolonial Theater
[ ca wi ]
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.
Arthur 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.
Arthur 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 explored by female playwrights: motherhood (and daughterhood), reproduction, sexuality, family relationships, etc. Students will participate in writing or performance exercises based on these themes. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

THA 145a Queer Theater
[ ca ]
Explores significant plays that have shaped and defined gay identity during the past 100 years. Playwrights span Wilde to Kushner. Examining texts as literature, history, and performance, we will explore religion, poiltics, gender, the AIDS epidemic, and coming out. Usually offered every third year.
Dmitry Troyanovksy