AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Formerly offered as ENG 80a.

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.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Usually offered every fourth year.

AMST/ENG 16b Mark Twain’s World

Read major works by Mark Twain alongside several of his contemporaries as a lens through which to view key currents of American and global modernity, including race, colonialism, democracy, and secularization. Topics include the critical debate over the depiction of race and slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the role of humor in social and political change. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

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.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

COML/ENG 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

COML/ENG 70b Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
[ djw hum ]

Examines films that address nature, environmental crisis, and green activism. Asks how world cinema can best advance the goals of social and environmental justice. Includes films by major directors and festival award winners. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

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.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

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.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry--from primarily Asian and Pacific Islander writers in the United States--with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw 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.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 25b Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
[ hum ]

What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 26a Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ hum wi ]

Explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Explores literature's role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 30b American Film Auteurs of the 1970s
[ deis-us hum ]

Interrogates idea of cinematic style. Examines works by directors such as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 31a What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
[ hum ]

A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 32b Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Dream Visions
[ hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.

Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Troilus and Criseyde. Before Shakespeare’s cultural behemoth defined what it meant to be star-crossed lovers, the story of Troilus and Criseyde was the dominant and popular narrative of doomed love. So, what happened? Did Shakespeare’s treatment of it kill the story? Why has it dropped out of the canon? This class will evaluate Chaucer’s other major poem Troilus and Criseyde and contextualize it by examining its sources, philosophical underpinnings, and its impact on literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]

May be repeated once for credit.

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.

ENG 33b Shakespeare Now
[ hum oc ]

This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. Usually offered every year.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
[ hum ]

Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appealing 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.

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.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ djw hum oc ]

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.

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.

ENG 46a Native American Storytelling
[ hum ]

Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 46b American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[ hum wi ]

American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum oc ]

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.

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.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

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.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 53a Reading Shakespeare When the Globe is on Fire
[ djw hum ]

Examines the complex relationships between William Shakespeare’s plays and the radical ecological transformations occurring in and beyond England throughout the period in which he wrote. At the same time, we will consider how exploring the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare’s words and his world might help us better understand both the canon and the climate we’ve inherited. By pairing contemporary ecocritical scholarship alongside close readings of Shakespearean texts, we will grapple with the enduring challenges and possibilities of environmental justice and interrogate the “role” of art on a burning planet. Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

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.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 62a Documentary: Techniques and Controversies
[ hum ]

An introduction to documentary, covering major works of nonfiction prose and film. Focuses on the variety of documentary techniques in both media and controversies surrounding efforts to represent the real. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]

A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 68a Salvage Work: Reimagining in Caribbean Ruins
[ hum ]

How do we imagine alternative futures in a space of ruin? This course is imagined in relation to Angela Naimou’s term salvage work, which “requires the acceptance and incorporation of existing loss, ruin, and injury into the fragments that are nonetheless generative of something more than absence” (Naimou 11). It references a sort of recovery or possibility rooted in the imagination of what these remnants or ruins can be in the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.

“Salvage Work” offers one way in which the Caribbean engage with ruin, imagination, and worldbuilding through the works of Shani Mootoo, Maisy Card, Nala Hopkinson, Tessa Mars, and other writers, painters, and filmmakers who explore the archives, motherhood, kinship, queerness, intimacy, inheritance, and return. These twentieth/twenty-first-century texts return to various periods, like enslavement, indentureship, postcolonial independent movements, Windrush, and other moments in the past.

By considering how race, class, gender, and sexuality overlap and relate, this class will create a space to reflect on the relationships between identity and belonging, oppression and resistance, literature, place, and people across generations and geographies. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

ENG 70a The Birth of the Movies: From Silent Film to Hollywood
[ hum ]

Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance: From Scotland to Salem
[ hum oc ]

Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 96a Creative Writing Senior Honors I

Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the project option. Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the first semester of the thesis option. Usually offered every year.

ENG 96b Creative Writing Senior Honors II

Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the second semester of the thesis option. Usually offered every year.

ENG 98a Independent Study

Usually offered every year.

ENG 98b Independent Study

Yields half-course credit. Usually offered every year.

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.

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.

ENG 99d The Senior Honors Thesis

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.

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.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Representations
[ djw hum ]

Fifty years after it ended, the war in Vietnam seems marked for collective forgetting. Yet the war fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese diasporic literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 116b American Culture Across the Disciplines
[ hum ]

Explores the latest research on American culture by Brandeis faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each week a different faculty member will join us to discuss their latest book or article, the questions that animate their research, and the archives, methodologies, and theories they use to answer them. Usually offered every fourth year.

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

CLAS/ENG 140a Premodern Disability Studies Across the Mediterranean
[ djw hum ]

Charts disability in the Mediterranean literary tradition, particularly through the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods. Students will learn to identify the literary markers of the disabled body as well as the underlying philosophical and theological idea of the body and soul and their purpose. Students will engage with the figures of alterity through the lens of disability studies. We will consider the concept of disability from a feminist vantage, particularly through the writings of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Susan Wendell, and as a shifting theoretical framework through the social, cultural, medical, and religious models of disability. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

CLAS/ENG 148b Faking Disability: Gender, Identity, and Performance in the Premodern Mediterranean
[ djw hum ]

Analyzes the intersection between performance, gender, and disability in the premodern Mediterranean. Students will reflect on the cross-purpose between individual bodies and the social history of disability legislation, mendicancy, and literature. Students will analyze representations of “real” and “faked” disability and of perceived identity in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and contextualize his work with readings from Homer, Marie de France, Heldris de Cornuälle, Chaucer, 1001 Nights, Boiardo, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, and Arcangela Tarabotti. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

COML/ENG 106a The Lyric Imagination from Romanticism to the Present
[ hum ]

That the poetic imagination could be not merely a source of pleasure, instruction, and inspiration, but a source of insight into the meaning of being, a way of connecting the outer world of nature and the inner world of the spirit, a source of ontological, ethical, and political truth, was a conviction entertained by many poets in English and German from the Romantic period to the present day. The course will consider these ideas in the poetry of Blake, Novalis, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot and Celan. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

COML/ENG 140b Children's Literature and Constructions of Childhood
[ hum ]

Explores whether children's literature has sought to civilize or to subvert, to moralize or to enchant, forming a bedrock for adult sensibility. Childhood reading reflects the unresolved complexity of the experience of childhood itself as well as larger cultural shifts around the globe in values and beliefs. Usually offered every third year.
Robin Feuer Miller

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.

COML/ENG 149a Hell: The Poetry
[ 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.

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 104b Psalms and Stories: Poetry of the Sacred, 1600-1900
[ hum ]

Studies a range of sacred poetry written in Britain and America during a long, contentious period in the history of Western Christianity, from the rise of radical Protestantism through the Enlightenment to the public airing of religious doubt in the 19th century. What were the subjects of contention, of anxiety, of misgiving? How did poets address them in poetic form? To address these questions, we will look at a number of uniquely powerful poems in English. Our goal will be to approach the poems with sympathy, appreciation and a discerning eye. No prior knowledge of Christian doctrine is required. Works include the Psalms from the King James Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and selected poems of Emily Dickinson. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 108a Literature and Heresy
[ hum ]

A study of major texts of British literature through the lens of religious heresy. Does literature provide a refuge for heresy? Or is there something about literature that encourages heretical thinking? These questions are considered in light of dissident works by Milton, Blake, Shelley, James Hogg, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

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.

ENG 112a The Fierce Urgency of Now: Some Poetry in English Since 1945
[ hum wi ]

An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 114a Enthusiasm, Disappointment, Recovery: British Literature and the French Revolution
[ hum ]

British radicals, including in their number the greatest poets of the age, responded joyously to the Fall of the Bastille and the early political reforms of the French Revolution. Like many European intellectuals, they saw in these developments the promise of major social change which would vindicate the ambitious optimism of the Enlightenment. The collapse of the French Revolution into violence and terror struck a blow to their hopes, their morale and their world-view. British literature of the Romantic age reflects this initial enthusiasm, the subsequent disappointment, and the painful effort of recovery. We will read 18th-century manifestos defending human rights by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of ardent support for the Revolution by first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; their later works grappling with the Revolution’s failure; and the reflections of the second-generation Romantics (Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley) as they struggle to find new grounds of political hope. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 116a Operation Shylock: Responding to Antisemitism in English and American Literature

Considers the theme of antisemitism in English and American literature: Does Judaism pose a challenge to non-Jewish literary culture? Is it an opportunity for asserting an allegedly enlightened nationalism? Does it help or hinder literary quality? How do Jewish writers treat this theme? What issues about intersectionality does the topic of antisemitism bring up, especially with respect to queer and Black literature? Usually offered every fourth year.

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.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ dl hum ]

Explores how 1930s Hollywood invented modern movies and their techniques -- Romcom, horror, suspense, crime, melodrama, feature-length animation, musicals -- responding to and profoundly altering social, political, industrial, cultural, and economic history, from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 121b Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[ deis-us hum ]

Investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 124a Renaissance Women’s Writing
[ hum ]

Explores the extraordinary writing done by women during the Renaissance, spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and including (among other works) theatrical plays, poems, diaries, religious treatises, Biblical translations, and proto-feminist diatribes. Although the primary focus will be on England, several French and Italian authors will be read in translation. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 126b Joyce's Ulysses
[ hum wi ]

An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ djw 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.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw 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.

ENG 128a Race and US Cinema
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the central role film plays in the construction and policing of racialized identities in the US. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Black/white binarism. The course is structured as a survey. US cinema originates in the white depiction of Blacks or in the white deployment of blackface, and racialized bodies continue to serve as a ubiquitous (if frequently unacknowledged) source of fascination and anxiety in contemporary cinema. We will begin with early 'whitewashing' films and D.W. Griffith's foundational epic, The Birth of a Nation, and conclude with new queer Black cinema and contemporary Black filmmakers. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]

Recommended 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.

ENG 136a Imagining Apocalypse
[ hum ]

Examines apocalypse as a literary genre and explores the modern apocalyptic imagination in diverse media including film, visual culture, and radio. Topics include slavery and race war, nuclear Armageddon, eco-apocalypse, evangelical rapture culture, and global pandemics. Authors include Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick, Ling Ma, Cormack McCarthy, Nat Turner, and H.G. Wells. Usually offered every year.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

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.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 141b Poetry and Myth
[ hum ]

Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]

How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl 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.

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.

ENG 148b Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[ hum ]

Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 149b Writing the Horror and Suspense Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Combining lectures, workshops, and screenings, this course introduces the principles and craft of screenwriting, specifically in the horror genre. Students develop confidence and critical thinking while honing their storytelling skills.

Class lectures cover the fundamentals of creative screenwriting: characterization, story structure, pacing, plot, and dialogue. Student participation includes discussions of the reading and viewing assignments, writing exercises, and critiques of their classmates’ original material.

Student work is informed by exploring horror films and their enduring appeal, dating from the earliest incarnations of the silent era through contemporary examples from Hollywood, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the indie film world. This course requires students to complete a polished first act and a detailed eight-to-ten-page outline of their feature-length screenplay. Usually offered every second year.

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.

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.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ dl 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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

ENG 156a The Modern Prometheus
[ hum ]

Studies the theme of Prometheanism. What is the fate of ambitious efforts to improve the lot of humankind? Texts include: poetry and prose by William Blake, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, as well as representative works from later periods. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets and outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]

Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 165b Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[ hum ]

Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ 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.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 170a Nigerian Movies in the World
[ 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.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw 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.

ENG 173a Spenser and Milton
[ hum ]

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.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
[ hum wi ]

Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction, as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond? Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ENG 188b Capitalism and Nature
[ hum oc ]

Investigates the vision of nature offered in pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist narratives from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 201a Gender and Sexuality Studies

Investigates sex assignment, genders, and sexualities as categories of social knowledge and modes of social production. Reading recent critical discussions and crossing disciplinary boundaries, this course explores gender, desire, and pleasure in everyday and formal performance, literary and other written texts, and visual representations. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 202a The Global Novel

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

Interrogates the term “global novel” as a way to describe 20th- and 21st-century fiction with global scope and scale. Structured around a series of primary texts and theoretical readings, the course will look at how fiction responds to globally-scaled phenomena such as war, migration and climate change, and how events and practices such as colonialism, translation, the publishing market and book clubs structure our understanding of global fiction. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 208a Poetry and Poetics Continuing Seminar

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

A study of poetry and poetics, this course will meet once weekly and continue from fall into spring. It is a 4-credit course spread over two semesters, offering 2 credits per semester. Students will have the option of taking one or both semesters. It will have the character of a reading course, but students taking it for credit will have writing assignments. Auditors, both faculty and advanced graduate students, will be encouraged to attend. The plan is to involve as much of the community as possible. The syllabus will be shaped by students’ interests. It will include close study of particular poets and poems as well as attention to the broader approaches offered by poetics and literary theory. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 209a Novels and Narrative

Yields half-course credit.

A study of Novels and Narrative with a syllabus organized around both theory and primary texts. We meet biweekly and continue from fall into spring. It is a 4-credit course spread over two semesters, offering 2 credits per semester. Students have the option of taking one or both semesters. It will have the character of a reading course, but students taking it for credit will have writing assignments. Auditors, both faculty and advanced graduate students, will be encouraged to attend and present work in progress. The syllabus will be shaped by students’ interests. It will include close study of particular novelists and prose writers, and explore the broader approaches offered by various forms of cultural and narrative theory. Usually offered every three years.

ENG 211a Black Queer Literatures

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon varied attempts to create a shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we will also attend to important divisions brought about by various intersections of identity, as well as divergent perspectives on desire, aesthetics, and organizing. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 212a The Transpacific: Theory and Literature

Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

This graduate seminar introduces students to the emergent and fast-evolving field of Transpacific studies through an interdisciplinary, theoretical, and literary lens. We study the ways the U.S. has asserted its presence across the Pacific Ocean through colonialism, occupation, militarism, and financial domination. We examine how various countries and territories in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania have become contentious sites of political critique, anticolonial resistance, and global imagination. We also account for Latin America and its long but eclipsed history of exchanges with the Asia Pacific region. Other topics include Asian settler colonialism, the Black Pacific, and oceanic intimacies. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 215a Milton and the Shelleys

A graduate seminar on Milton, primarily Paradise Lost, and his reception in the work of Percy and Mary Shelley. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 220a Poetry and Philosophy

Studies the interrelations of poetry and philosophy, from Plato to the present day. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 221a Text, Translation, Ethics

Examines the impact of translation on the construction of cultural memory, identity, and historical narrative. Studies postmodern theories of translation alongside African and Caribbean writers to explore the ethics and politics of writing, reading, and interpreting across languages and cultures. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 223a Eros and Desire in the English Renaissance

Explores how English poets, playwrights, physicians, and philosophers thought about erotic desire. Topics will include: the literary investment in unrequited love; the emergence of carpe diem poetry; the medicalization of love sickness; conceptions of marital love and same-sex desire; celibacy and chastity; and posthumous love. Authors will include: Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Cary, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer; George Gascoigne, John Milton. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 240a Genre, Form, Mode: Realism and Its Others (Genre Trouble)

Realism, even at its 19th century apex in Great Britain, always had a vexed relationship with neighboring novelistic genres: “We have never been realist.” By way of present-day theoretical and critical debates on realism’s limits and affordances (Jameson, Ranciere, Gallagher, Moi, Woloch, et. al.), we explore, taxonomize, and theorize the contact zone where canonical realist fiction (Gaskell, Eliot) shapes and is shaped by sensation (Wilde), naturalism (Hardy), fantasy (Jefferies), horror, “scientific romance” (Wells), the “verse novel.” Culminates with realist-adjacent Modernism (Ford, Woolf). Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 248b Social Justice and Digital Humanities: Methods and Applications

Issues around accessibility–race, gender, disability, sexuality, etc.–are central to the digital humanities. This class will center these issues as we examine different method areas: archives, mapping, digital ethics, multimodality, digital pedagogy/digital praxis, data, labor, games, data visualization, new media. We will ask what methodological theories and praxis are necessary for a digital humanities that centers social justice. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 250b Film Theory

Provides an introduction to classical and contemporary film theory. Topics will depend, whenever possible, on the interests of students in the seminar, but the general focus will be on the relation of film to modernity. We will pay particular attention to issues of race, class, and sexuality. Students will be required to read broadly in film criticism and theory, and to watch a variety of movies from Birth of a Nation to Barbie. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 251b Political Fictions

Examines the role of collectivity in political fiction. Focuses on post-1960s narratives--especially representations of collectivities, narratives written from a collective point of view (we-narratives), and results of collaborative authorship. Includes experiments with collaborative learning. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 253b Medieval Women and the Book

Examines gender theory, queer theory, and critical race theory as it intersects in medieval women's literary cultures. It considers works about gender and medicine, the environment, race, and the law. Students will consider reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 275b Pedagogy

Required of all PhD students. Optional for MA students.

A broad-based course that will examine various methods and approaches to pedagogy. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 298a Independent Study

May be repeated once for credit.

Specific sections for individual faculty members, as requested. Permission of the director of graduate studies required.

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.

ENG 340b Graduate Pedagogy Proseminar

Credit/No Credit seminar. Open to all PhD/MA students. Instructor permission required.

Semester-long course that focuses on university pedagogy and especially antiracist pedagogy. We will discuss various methods and approaches to pedagogy (antiracist, digital, student-centered, etc.) while working through the creation of a college-level English class syllabus. May be repeated for credit. Usually offered every year.

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.

ENG 375c Field Exam Colloquium

Full year credit/no credit proseminar required of third-year PhD students. Yields two credits per semester. Does not count towards the twelve required courses for the degree.

Supports PhD students preparing for the field exam.

ENG 402d Dissertation Research

Specific sections for individual faculty members as requested.

GSAS 255b Writing in the Humanities

Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

A graduate seminar investigating the diverse genres, publics, and purposes of critical writing in the humanities, across academic and non-academic contexts, with an introduction to the relevant publishing landscapes. We will explore how writing informed by humanities scholarship can reach many audiences and make significant contributions to public life. Includes extensive reading of exemplary texts by humanities scholars across styles and genres. Also includes readings in public sphere and genre theory, in relation to ongoing attempts by humanities scholars to justify their work to non-academic sectors. Students will develop ideas for diverse projects, across genres, and explore several styles and voices in their own writing. Usually offered every second year.

GSAS 360c Article Publication Workshop

Full year course. Yields two credits per semester. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit. Students should check with their departments about whether or not the course will fulfill any degree requirements.

Open to PhD, including ABD, and MA students in all Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences graduate programs.

This proseminar/workshop will meet every other week and introduce graduate students to the larger philosophy, as well as the nuts and bolts, of academic publication. Each student should come to the class with an academic journal article project in mind and aim to send out the article to a journal by the end of the year (or earlier!). We will workshop the papers in class, and peer review will be an essential component of coursework. Discussions will be general as well as field-specific.

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ dl hum oc ]

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.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Explores literature's role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

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.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ dl hum ]

Explores how 1930s Hollywood invented modern movies and their techniques -- Romcom, horror, suspense, crime, melodrama, feature-length animation, musicals -- responding to and profoundly altering social, political, industrial, cultural, and economic history, from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

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.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl 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.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ dl 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.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

HISP 85a Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Offered in English.

Introduces students to U.S. Latinx cultural productions and to the interdisciplinary questions that concern U.S. Latinx communities. Latinxs have played a vital role in the history, politics, and cultures of the United States. U.S. Latinx literary works, in particular, have established important socio-historical and aesthetic networks that highlight Latinx expression and lived experiences, engaging with issues including biculturalism, language, citizenship, systems of value, and intersectional identity. Though the Latinx literary tradition spans more than 400 years, this course will focus on 20th and 21st century texts that decolonize nationalist approaches to Latinidad(es) and therefore challenge existing Latinx literary "canons." Usually offered every year.

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]

Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

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.

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.

COML/ENG 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ dl hum oc ]

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.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

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.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 33b Shakespeare Now
[ hum oc ]

This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. Usually offered every year.

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ djw hum oc ]

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.

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum oc ]

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.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

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.

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.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance: From Scotland to Salem
[ hum oc ]

Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

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.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 188b Capitalism and Nature
[ hum oc ]

Investigates the vision of nature offered in pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist narratives from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

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 topics including: 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 second year.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss wi ]

An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize African 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.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Formerly offered as ENG 80a.

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.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]

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.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry--from primarily Asian and Pacific Islander writers in the United States--with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 26a Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ hum wi ]

Explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 46b American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[ hum wi ]

American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

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.

ENG 112a The Fierce Urgency of Now: Some Poetry in English Since 1945
[ hum wi ]

An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 126b Joyce's Ulysses
[ hum wi ]

An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]

Recommended 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.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]

How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 149b Writing the Horror and Suspense Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Combining lectures, workshops, and screenings, this course introduces the principles and craft of screenwriting, specifically in the horror genre. Students develop confidence and critical thinking while honing their storytelling skills.

Class lectures cover the fundamentals of creative screenwriting: characterization, story structure, pacing, plot, and dialogue. Student participation includes discussions of the reading and viewing assignments, writing exercises, and critiques of their classmates’ original material.

Student work is informed by exploring horror films and their enduring appeal, dating from the earliest incarnations of the silent era through contemporary examples from Hollywood, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the indie film world. This course requires students to complete a polished first act and a detailed eight-to-ten-page outline of their feature-length screenplay. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets and outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ 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.

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
[ hum wi ]

Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction, as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond? Usually offered every third year.

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.

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]

Introduces the world of women playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by women 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.

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.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

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.

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.

CLAS/ENG 148b Faking Disability: Gender, Identity, and Performance in the Premodern Mediterranean
[ djw hum ]

Analyzes the intersection between performance, gender, and disability in the premodern Mediterranean. Students will reflect on the cross-purpose between individual bodies and the social history of disability legislation, mendicancy, and literature. Students will analyze representations of “real” and “faked” disability and of perceived identity in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and contextualize his work with readings from Homer, Marie de France, Heldris de Cornuälle, Chaucer, 1001 Nights, Boiardo, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, and Arcangela Tarabotti. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

COML 132b Poetry and Philosophy
[ hum ]

Plato called the relationship between poetry and philosophy an "ancient quarrel." But within the last century some thinkers have attempted to effect a rapprochement. After considering the Platonic argument and its legacy, this course will explore the marriage of poetry and philosophy in later times, looking particularly at the experiments of German romantic aesthetics and its legacy in 20th-century Continental literary philosophy. What is the nature of the "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy? In what sense do they compete for the same space? Can poetry be a kind of philosophy, or vice versa? Can philosophy help us to understand the nature of poetry, and vice versa? Usually offered every third year.

COML/ENG 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

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.

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

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.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 25b Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
[ hum ]

What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 31a What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
[ hum ]

A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 53a Reading Shakespeare When the Globe is on Fire
[ djw hum ]

Examines the complex relationships between William Shakespeare’s plays and the radical ecological transformations occurring in and beyond England throughout the period in which he wrote. At the same time, we will consider how exploring the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare’s words and his world might help us better understand both the canon and the climate we’ve inherited. By pairing contemporary ecocritical scholarship alongside close readings of Shakespearean texts, we will grapple with the enduring challenges and possibilities of environmental justice and interrogate the “role” of art on a burning planet. Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 68a Salvage Work: Reimagining in Caribbean Ruins
[ hum ]

How do we imagine alternative futures in a space of ruin? This course is imagined in relation to Angela Naimou’s term salvage work, which “requires the acceptance and incorporation of existing loss, ruin, and injury into the fragments that are nonetheless generative of something more than absence” (Naimou 11). It references a sort of recovery or possibility rooted in the imagination of what these remnants or ruins can be in the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.

“Salvage Work” offers one way in which the Caribbean engage with ruin, imagination, and worldbuilding through the works of Shani Mootoo, Maisy Card, Nala Hopkinson, Tessa Mars, and other writers, painters, and filmmakers who explore the archives, motherhood, kinship, queerness, intimacy, inheritance, and return. These twentieth/twenty-first-century texts return to various periods, like enslavement, indentureship, postcolonial independent movements, Windrush, and other moments in the past.

By considering how race, class, gender, and sexuality overlap and relate, this class will create a space to reflect on the relationships between identity and belonging, oppression and resistance, literature, place, and people across generations and geographies. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

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.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

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.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 116a Operation Shylock: Responding to Antisemitism in English and American Literature

Considers the theme of antisemitism in English and American literature: Does Judaism pose a challenge to non-Jewish literary culture? Is it an opportunity for asserting an allegedly enlightened nationalism? Does it help or hinder literary quality? How do Jewish writers treat this theme? What issues about intersectionality does the topic of antisemitism bring up, especially with respect to queer and Black literature? Usually offered every fourth year.

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.

ENG 121b Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[ deis-us hum ]

Investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.

ENG 141b Poetry and Myth
[ hum ]

Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.

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.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]

Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw 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.

ENG 188b Capitalism and Nature
[ hum oc ]

Investigates the vision of nature offered in pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist narratives from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

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.

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ djw 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.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Formerly offered as ENG 80a.

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.

COML/ENG 70b Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
[ djw hum ]

Examines films that address nature, environmental crisis, and green activism. Asks how world cinema can best advance the goals of social and environmental justice. Includes films by major directors and festival award winners. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw 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.

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.

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.

ENG 30b American Film Auteurs of the 1970s
[ deis-us hum ]

Interrogates idea of cinematic style. Examines works by directors such as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

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.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 62a Documentary: Techniques and Controversies
[ hum ]

An introduction to documentary, covering major works of nonfiction prose and film. Focuses on the variety of documentary techniques in both media and controversies surrounding efforts to represent the real. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 70a The Birth of the Movies: From Silent Film to Hollywood
[ hum ]

Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ dl hum ]

Explores how 1930s Hollywood invented modern movies and their techniques -- Romcom, horror, suspense, crime, melodrama, feature-length animation, musicals -- responding to and profoundly altering social, political, industrial, cultural, and economic history, from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 128a Race and US Cinema
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the central role film plays in the construction and policing of racialized identities in the US. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Black/white binarism. The course is structured as a survey. US cinema originates in the white depiction of Blacks or in the white deployment of blackface, and racialized bodies continue to serve as a ubiquitous (if frequently unacknowledged) source of fascination and anxiety in contemporary cinema. We will begin with early 'whitewashing' films and D.W. Griffith's foundational epic, The Birth of a Nation, and conclude with new queer Black cinema and contemporary Black filmmakers. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170a Nigerian Movies in the World
[ 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.

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.

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.

FILM 100a Introduction to the Moving Image
[ hum ]

An interdisciplinary course surveying the history of moving image media from 1895 to the present, from the earliest silent cinema to the age of streaming media. Open to all undergraduates as an elective, it is the introductory course for the major and minor in film, television and interactive media. Usually offered every year.

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss wi ]

An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize African 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.

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]

Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ djw 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.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Formerly offered as ENG 80a.

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.

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.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Usually offered every fourth year.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Representations
[ djw hum ]

Fifty years after it ended, the war in Vietnam seems marked for collective forgetting. Yet the war fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese diasporic literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

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.

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

EAS 120b Southeast Asian Literature in English
[ djw hum ]

Explores a range of Southeast Asian literary productions presented in English from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Materials include influential texts by Western observers (W. Somerset Maugham, Marguerite Duras) during the colonial period as well as major works by prominent postcolonial writers (Tash Aw, Eka Kurniawan, Mai Der Vang). We will consider the complex questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, twentieth-century wars, and regional identity formation under late capitalism through intersectional textual analysis. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw 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.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 46a Native American Storytelling
[ hum ]

Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

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.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 68a Salvage Work: Reimagining in Caribbean Ruins
[ hum ]

How do we imagine alternative futures in a space of ruin? This course is imagined in relation to Angela Naimou’s term salvage work, which “requires the acceptance and incorporation of existing loss, ruin, and injury into the fragments that are nonetheless generative of something more than absence” (Naimou 11). It references a sort of recovery or possibility rooted in the imagination of what these remnants or ruins can be in the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.

“Salvage Work” offers one way in which the Caribbean engage with ruin, imagination, and worldbuilding through the works of Shani Mootoo, Maisy Card, Nala Hopkinson, Tessa Mars, and other writers, painters, and filmmakers who explore the archives, motherhood, kinship, queerness, intimacy, inheritance, and return. These twentieth/twenty-first-century texts return to various periods, like enslavement, indentureship, postcolonial independent movements, Windrush, and other moments in the past.

By considering how race, class, gender, and sexuality overlap and relate, this class will create a space to reflect on the relationships between identity and belonging, oppression and resistance, literature, place, and people across generations and geographies. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

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.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ djw 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.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw 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.

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170a Nigerian Movies in the World
[ 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.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw 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.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

CLAS/ENG 148b Faking Disability: Gender, Identity, and Performance in the Premodern Mediterranean
[ djw hum ]

Analyzes the intersection between performance, gender, and disability in the premodern Mediterranean. Students will reflect on the cross-purpose between individual bodies and the social history of disability legislation, mendicancy, and literature. Students will analyze representations of “real” and “faked” disability and of perceived identity in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and contextualize his work with readings from Homer, Marie de France, Heldris de Cornuälle, Chaucer, 1001 Nights, Boiardo, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, and Arcangela Tarabotti. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

COML/ENG 149a Hell: The Poetry
[ 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.

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.

ENG 32b Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Dream Visions
[ hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.

Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Troilus and Criseyde. Before Shakespeare’s cultural behemoth defined what it meant to be star-crossed lovers, the story of Troilus and Criseyde was the dominant and popular narrative of doomed love. So, what happened? Did Shakespeare’s treatment of it kill the story? Why has it dropped out of the canon? This class will evaluate Chaucer’s other major poem Troilus and Criseyde and contextualize it by examining its sources, philosophical underpinnings, and its impact on literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]

May be repeated once for credit.

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.

ENG 33b Shakespeare Now
[ hum oc ]

This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. Usually offered every year.

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.

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ djw hum oc ]

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.

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum oc ]

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.

ENG 53a Reading Shakespeare When the Globe is on Fire
[ djw hum ]

Examines the complex relationships between William Shakespeare’s plays and the radical ecological transformations occurring in and beyond England throughout the period in which he wrote. At the same time, we will consider how exploring the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare’s words and his world might help us better understand both the canon and the climate we’ve inherited. By pairing contemporary ecocritical scholarship alongside close readings of Shakespearean texts, we will grapple with the enduring challenges and possibilities of environmental justice and interrogate the “role” of art on a burning planet. Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance: From Scotland to Salem
[ hum oc ]

Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 104b Psalms and Stories: Poetry of the Sacred, 1600-1900
[ hum ]

Studies a range of sacred poetry written in Britain and America during a long, contentious period in the history of Western Christianity, from the rise of radical Protestantism through the Enlightenment to the public airing of religious doubt in the 19th century. What were the subjects of contention, of anxiety, of misgiving? How did poets address them in poetic form? To address these questions, we will look at a number of uniquely powerful poems in English. Our goal will be to approach the poems with sympathy, appreciation and a discerning eye. No prior knowledge of Christian doctrine is required. Works include the Psalms from the King James Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and selected poems of Emily Dickinson. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 108a Literature and Heresy
[ hum ]

A study of major texts of British literature through the lens of religious heresy. Does literature provide a refuge for heresy? Or is there something about literature that encourages heretical thinking? These questions are considered in light of dissident works by Milton, Blake, Shelley, James Hogg, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 114a Enthusiasm, Disappointment, Recovery: British Literature and the French Revolution
[ hum ]

British radicals, including in their number the greatest poets of the age, responded joyously to the Fall of the Bastille and the early political reforms of the French Revolution. Like many European intellectuals, they saw in these developments the promise of major social change which would vindicate the ambitious optimism of the Enlightenment. The collapse of the French Revolution into violence and terror struck a blow to their hopes, their morale and their world-view. British literature of the Romantic age reflects this initial enthusiasm, the subsequent disappointment, and the painful effort of recovery. We will read 18th-century manifestos defending human rights by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of ardent support for the Revolution by first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; their later works grappling with the Revolution’s failure; and the reflections of the second-generation Romantics (Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley) as they struggle to find new grounds of political hope. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 124a Renaissance Women’s Writing
[ hum ]

Explores the extraordinary writing done by women during the Renaissance, spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and including (among other works) theatrical plays, poems, diaries, religious treatises, Biblical translations, and proto-feminist diatribes. Although the primary focus will be on England, several French and Italian authors will be read in translation. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]

Recommended 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.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]

How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl 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.

ENG 148b Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[ hum ]

Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ dl 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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

ENG 173a Spenser and Milton
[ hum ]

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.

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.

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]

Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Formerly offered as ENG 80a.

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.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Usually offered every fourth year.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Representations
[ djw hum ]

Fifty years after it ended, the war in Vietnam seems marked for collective forgetting. Yet the war fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese diasporic literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 16b Mark Twain’s World

Read major works by Mark Twain alongside several of his contemporaries as a lens through which to view key currents of American and global modernity, including race, colonialism, democracy, and secularization. Topics include the critical debate over the depiction of race and slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the role of humor in social and political change. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

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.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 116b American Culture Across the Disciplines
[ hum ]

Explores the latest research on American culture by Brandeis faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each week a different faculty member will join us to discuss their latest book or article, the questions that animate their research, and the archives, methodologies, and theories they use to answer them. Usually offered every fourth year.

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

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.

COML/ENG 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

COML/ENG 106a The Lyric Imagination from Romanticism to the Present
[ hum ]

That the poetic imagination could be not merely a source of pleasure, instruction, and inspiration, but a source of insight into the meaning of being, a way of connecting the outer world of nature and the inner world of the spirit, a source of ontological, ethical, and political truth, was a conviction entertained by many poets in English and German from the Romantic period to the present day. The course will consider these ideas in the poetry of Blake, Novalis, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot and Celan. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

EAS 120b Southeast Asian Literature in English
[ djw hum ]

Explores a range of Southeast Asian literary productions presented in English from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Materials include influential texts by Western observers (W. Somerset Maugham, Marguerite Duras) during the colonial period as well as major works by prominent postcolonial writers (Tash Aw, Eka Kurniawan, Mai Der Vang). We will consider the complex questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, twentieth-century wars, and regional identity formation under late capitalism through intersectional textual analysis. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 25b Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
[ hum ]

What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 26a Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ hum wi ]

Explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Explores literature's role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 31a What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
[ hum ]

A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
[ hum ]

Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appealing 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.

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.

ENG 46a Native American Storytelling
[ hum ]

Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 46b American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[ hum wi ]

American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

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.

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.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

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.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]

A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

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.

ENG 112a The Fierce Urgency of Now: Some Poetry in English Since 1945
[ hum wi ]

An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 116a Operation Shylock: Responding to Antisemitism in English and American Literature

Considers the theme of antisemitism in English and American literature: Does Judaism pose a challenge to non-Jewish literary culture? Is it an opportunity for asserting an allegedly enlightened nationalism? Does it help or hinder literary quality? How do Jewish writers treat this theme? What issues about intersectionality does the topic of antisemitism bring up, especially with respect to queer and Black literature? Usually offered every fourth year.

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.

ENG 126b Joyce's Ulysses
[ hum wi ]

An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ djw 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.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw 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.

ENG 136a Imagining Apocalypse
[ hum ]

Examines apocalypse as a literary genre and explores the modern apocalyptic imagination in diverse media including film, visual culture, and radio. Topics include slavery and race war, nuclear Armageddon, eco-apocalypse, evangelical rapture culture, and global pandemics. Authors include Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick, Ling Ma, Cormack McCarthy, Nat Turner, and H.G. Wells. Usually offered every year.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 141b Poetry and Myth
[ hum ]

Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 156a The Modern Prometheus
[ hum ]

Studies the theme of Prometheanism. What is the fate of ambitious efforts to improve the lot of humankind? Texts include: poetry and prose by William Blake, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, as well as representative works from later periods. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]

Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 165b Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[ hum ]

Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ 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.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw 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.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
[ hum wi ]

Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction, as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond? Usually offered every third year.

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.

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.

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.

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry--from primarily Asian and Pacific Islander writers in the United States--with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. 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.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

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.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

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 year.

ENG 149b Writing the Horror and Suspense Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Combining lectures, workshops, and screenings, this course introduces the principles and craft of screenwriting, specifically in the horror genre. Students develop confidence and critical thinking while honing their storytelling skills.

Class lectures cover the fundamentals of creative screenwriting: characterization, story structure, pacing, plot, and dialogue. Student participation includes discussions of the reading and viewing assignments, writing exercises, and critiques of their classmates’ original material.

Student work is informed by exploring horror films and their enduring appeal, dating from the earliest incarnations of the silent era through contemporary examples from Hollywood, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the indie film world. This course requires students to complete a polished first act and a detailed eight-to-ten-page outline of their feature-length screenplay. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets and outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.

JOUR 114b Arts Journalism, Pop Culture, and Digital Innovation
[ ss wi ]

How do journalists cover the arts in a world of ever-expanding online options, and where artists are increasingly telling their own stories through social media? This course explores the evolution of arts and entertainment coverage, from its earliest days to its current digital incarnation. Students will develop skills using new tools and innovative approaches to deliver meaningful pop culture coverage and cultural criticism. Usually offered every second year.

THA 71a Playwriting
[ ca wi ]

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.

ENG 98a Independent Study

Usually offered every year.

ENG 98b Independent Study

Yields half-course credit. Usually offered every year.

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.

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.

ENG 99d The Senior Honors Thesis

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.

AMST 149a The Future as History
[ ss ]

What does art have to say about the future? What new ways of conceiving of, and caring for, the future have literary and visual texts devised over the past two centuries? In exploring the art of the future of the past two centuries, you will read sci-fi & fantasy by authors like Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N.K. Jemisin, and Ursula Le Guin, as well as texts like Invisible Man and Velvet Goldmine that set the future not in worlds to come but in the narrative potential of the present and times gone by. By attending to alternative temporalities and their genres—queer, spectral, cyborg, planetary, and many more—we will engage topics of major importance like reparations, environmental catastrophe, and liberation theology. By the end of the semester, we will develop a new understanding of time and its relation to history. Usually offered every second year.

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.

COML/REC 136a All in the Family: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the English Novel
[ hum ]

Selected novels and writings of Austen, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Woolf will be read to trace both the evolution of the novel and the meanings, contexts and depictions of the family. The family novel encompasses such larger questions as how we regard the pain of others and how we define community. Usually offered every second year.

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ dl hum oc ]

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.

ECS 101b Romanticism: The Shock of the New
[ hum ]

A survey of the innovative political, intellectual, and cultural movement, which excited and dismayed Europe from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Broad changes and challenges in aesthetic values, social thought, and literary form will be addressed through study of major authors from Great Britain, France, and Germany, including important precursors such as Goethe and Rousseau, as well as representative Romantic poets (Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire) and representative novels (The Sorrows of Young Werther, Corinne, Frankenstein). Usually offered every second year.

FYS 3b Evil and Tragedy
[ fys uws ]

Designed to instill and enhance flexible writing and research skills. A selection of readings stimulates discussion, deepens understanding, and serves as foundation for writing assignments. Students will recognize the role of writing in fostering critical thinking and learn to identify conventions of disciplinary writing.

What is the relationship between evil and tragedy? Does a tragedy necessarily involve evildoing or an evil agent? Or does tragedy occur (always? sometimes?) in the way Hegel said, not as a conflict between right and wrong, but as a conflict between right and right? This class will consider and debate the question in the course of studying three tragic literary works (Antigone, King Lear, and Uncle Vanya) and major critical statements about them. Usually offered every year.

FYS 13a Asian American Films
[ fys uws ]

Designed to instill and enhance flexible writing and research skills. A selection of readings stimulates discussion, deepens understanding, and serves as foundation for writing assignments. Students will recognize the role of writing in fostering critical thinking and learn to identify conventions of disciplinary writing.

Takes a critical look at a century of Asian American representations in film. We study prime examples of how Asian Americans have been scripted and portrayed through major eras and genres of American cinema: the silent era’s love for Anna May Wong, the noir genre’s obsession with Chinatown, mid-century song and dance over devastating wars, social and memoiristic documentaries, all through the halting embrace of multiculturalism and globalism of the past three decades. Along the way, we scrutinize various difficult subjects lurking behind the silver screen: fear of the yellow peril, racialized labor strife, war legacies, racist violence, family and community crises, among others. Usually offered every year.

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.

HISP 85a Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Offered in English.

Introduces students to U.S. Latinx cultural productions and to the interdisciplinary questions that concern U.S. Latinx communities. Latinxs have played a vital role in the history, politics, and cultures of the United States. U.S. Latinx literary works, in particular, have established important socio-historical and aesthetic networks that highlight Latinx expression and lived experiences, engaging with issues including biculturalism, language, citizenship, systems of value, and intersectional identity. Though the Latinx literary tradition spans more than 400 years, this course will focus on 20th and 21st century texts that decolonize nationalist approaches to Latinidad(es) and therefore challenge existing Latinx literary "canons." Usually offered every year.

HISP 158a Latina Feminisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Offered in English.

Explores the theoretical frameworks and literary productions of feminisms developed by Latina/xs. It introduces students to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences (Chicana, Dominican American, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, and Puerto Rican authors) as well as a variety of genres (i.e. novel, poetry, short stories, drama). Using intersectionality as a theoretical tool for analyzing oppressions, students will explore the complex politics of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and race in the lives of Latina/xs. They will also explore Latina/x feminists' theoretical and/or practical attempts to transcend socially-constructed categories of identity, while acknowledging existing material inequalities. Usually offered every third year.

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 topics including: 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 second year.

HUM 1a Tragedy: Love and Death in the Creative Imagination
[ fys hum uws ]

Enrollment limited to first-year Humanities Fellows. Satisfies the First-Year Seminar core requirement.
 

Our seminar concerns elemental experiences, above all love and death. The medium through which we will explore them is tragedy, an ancient literary form closely allied with myth. Consider this remark by philosopher Simone Weil: Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound and full of charm. (S.W., On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, 160)

Hence, the appeal of the tragic, which directly addresses evil. There will be abundant, and sometimes horrifying evil in the plays, fiction, and poetry we read this term. We begin with Cormac McCarthy’s shocking Blood Meridian, a tragic tale of the American West, much as the Iliad is a tragic tale of ancient Greece. But why belabor the tragic, the mythic? Because in myth and tragedy we find not merely the self-confident moral posturing so common in modern writing but instead an attempt to get at that which underlies morality: good and evil, love and death. They are more fundamental, possibly divine, and therefore the remit of myth and tragedy rather than science and law. Usually offered every year.

HUM 10a The Western Canon
[ hum ]

May not be taken by students who have taken NEJS 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.

HUM 12a Writing the Self
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.

Explores the long history of self-writing, from antiquity through the present. We will read works from a wide range of traditions and genres, but which have in common an exploration of how people think and write about their own lives. From daily diaries to confessional narratives to graphic novels, the texts in the course will help us to consider how the inner life is constructed in relation to the outer world, including questions of religion, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation, among others. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

HUM 13a Timeloops and Co-presence: Indigenous Temporalities and Speculative Fiction
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.

Explores profoundly divergent ways of grasping the nature of time and temporality by way of anthropological and literary approaches, with a particular focus on the indigenous Americas and the genre of speculative fiction. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

HUM 14a Evil and Human Destiny: The Western Canon from Genesis to Milton
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.

Introduces the student to the Western classics from Antiquity to the Renaissance and how they explore the perennially urgent issues of evil and human destiny. The relationships among the divine, the world, and history will be explored through the prisms of justice, suffering, and death. The focus is on how the formative cultures of our civilization – the Hebrew and the Greek – which merged in the Renaissance, wrestled with these problems and how their various resolutions endeavored to endow human life with meaning. Usually offered every year.

HUM 15a Truth in Fiction
[ fys hum uws ]

Enrollment limited to first-year Humanities Fellows. Satisfies the First-Year Seminar core requirement.
 

The fundamental question we’ll be asking is a question about truth in fiction. What is truth? At a minimum, we think that if a sentence is true, there’s something that makes it true. Much of our ordinary discourse is rendered true or false by how the actual world is. If I tell you that it is raining when it is in fact sunny outside, the world renders my utterance false. If you say that the tallest person in the world is Turkish, your utterance is made true by the fact that the current record holder was born in a village in the Mardin Province of Turkey. But what makes something true in fiction? What makes it true that Cordelia dies at the end of Lear or that Jacob has died in the Great War in Jacob’s Room or that the Governess is or is not hallucinating in The Turn of the Screw? It cannot be a fact about how the world actually is, but might it be a fact about how the world might have been? Or is it socially constructed facts agreed upon by the creators or the readers of fiction? Do reflections on truth in fiction make us reconsider our view of how we should think about everyday truth? What should we say about contexts in which people cannot agree on a single truth? Are all of our observations of the world ultimately theory-laden?

We won’t so much be trying to answer these questions once and for all as trying to make them exciting and real. We’ll do this by looking at literary texts that are particularly insightful about questions pertaining to truth in fiction, fictional entities and the nature of evidence, coupled with classical and contemporary readings in philosophy. Usually offered every year.

LGLS 144a Law in Shakespeare
[ ss ]

Explores the array of insights about law and legal institutions to be found in the plays of William Shakespeare. As the semester goes on, we will read and critically engage with such works as Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear, with a view towards discerning the legal themes that drive the plays’ plots and motivate their characters, and at the same time, suggesting how these inquiries can inform our understandings of the nature and workings of those themes in contemporary life. Examples include the venerable problem of how best to interpret contracts, as displayed in The Merchant of Venice, and the conflicts between natural and positive law that frame the action in King Lear. Assessment will be based on the quality and consistency of participation in class discussion, as well as performance on two short papers and a final project. Usually offered every second year.

RECS 134b Literature and Medicine: Chekhov and the Healing Arts
[ hum wi ]

Open to all students. Conducted in English. Most students will choose to read the works in English translation, but students who know Russian may do the readings in Russian.

Explores Chekhov as a fiction writer, a dramatist, and a devoted physician. Many of his artistic works, including a number where doctors figure as primary characters, read as case studies of particular diseases, mental illnesses, and conditions induced by poverty. Chekhov practiced the healing arts in all aspects of his professional and creative life, as well as in his courageous efforts on the remote penal-colony island of Sakhalin and in his dangerous public work during a terrible cholera epidemic. Reading both Chekhov and the works of several other modern and contemporary writers who were deeply influenced by him, this course emphasizes the skills of close looking—techniques equally valuable to the writer, the dramatist, and the physician. We read works about children and the nature of childhood, about students, about “the woman question,” about peasants, about religion, about marriage and adultery, as well as two plays: The Seagull and Uncle Vanya (and adaptations of each of them). Students will consider the ebb and flow between Chekhov’s efforts as a dramatist and a story-teller and engage with Chekhov’s most vivid, candid, and intriguing letters about medicine and art. Usually offered every second year.

RECS 154a Vladimir Nabokov: Art and Ethics
[ 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, with special attention to the interplay within them of Nabokov’s philosophy of art and his views on ethics and morality. Usually offered every third year.

THA 11a European Theater Texts and Theory I
[ ca ]

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.

THA 11b European Theater Texts and Theory II
[ ca ]

A continuation of THA 11a, covering plays, history, and political theory. Romanticism to the present, including realism and the avant-garde. Usually offered every year.

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.

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.

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]

Introduces the world of women playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by women 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.

THA 143b The Color Purple: Novel, Film, Musical, Manifesto
[ ca deis-us ]

Traces the evolution of Alice Walker’s 1985 novel The Color Purple from its original publication through its adaptations as a film, a stage musical, and a musical film. Beginning in the 1970s and stretching into the present, the course explores The Color Purple’s significance as a seminal text in African American literature, women’s writing, contemporary cinema, American musical theater, and queer representation. Usually offered every second year.

THA 145a Queer Theater
[ ca deis-us ]

Explores significant plays that have shaped and defined gay identity during the past 100 years. Playwrights span Wilde to Taylor Mac. Examining texts as literature, history, and performance, we will explore cultural change, politics, gender, the AIDS epidemic, camp, and coming out. Usually offered every third year.

THA 150a Global Theater: Voices from Asia, Africa, and the Americas
[ ca djw nw wi ]

Explores dramatic literature and performance traditions from across the globe. Examines the ways various artists have engaged theater to express, represent, and interrogate diversity and complexity of the human condition. Usually offered every year.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.

WLIT 178a Cult Books
[ hum ]

Explores novels on the fringe of literary respectability, books that have won passionate, if not necessarily large followings (hence the ambivalent praise implied in the term 'cult book'). Works by Renate Adler, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, Wei Hui, Chester Himes, Fleur Jaeggy, Anna Kavan, William Kotzwinkle, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Georges Perec, Hunter Thompson, Robert Walser, Shuo Wang and others. Usually offered every third year.