An introduction to early modern literary studies. Special attention will be paid both to the skills needed for all literary analysis, as well as to topics, genres, authors, and themes particularly resonant in English literature from 1500-1800. These topics may include (but are not limited to): the role of queer genders and sexualities across early modern English poetry; the relationship between history and theoretical approaches to literature; intertextuality in early modern poetry; the relationship between literature and coloniality, imperialism, and a burgeoning global perspective.

This course offers an introductory survey of the literature produced in England between 800 and 1485, from Anglo-Saxon poetry through the advent of print. Major texts include pre-Conquest poetry and prose (such as Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), early Middle English romance, post-Conquest lyric and narrative verse (including Chaucer), the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, Arthurian romance, drama, chronicles, and personal letters. Designed for nonmajors and prospective majors, the entry-level course provides a foundation in critical thinking about literary history.

This course examines a wide range of literature, film, and other art that represents the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Students consider the many ways in which ideas of national belonging intersect with practices of racial and other exclusions in the public cultures of mourning and memorialization that frame the idea of "9/11." Although the focus is on texts that engage with concepts of post-9/11 American culture, students also consider these events and their meanings in global contexts.

This course introduces students to the major genres, critical approaches, and topics in the field of literary study.

The novelist E. M. Forster distinguished between "the king died and then the queen died," which is a story, and "the king died, and then the queen died of grief," which is a plot. How does the causal meaning of "then" explain narrative? Narratology provides a theory of reading that crosses literary criticism, neuroscience, and philosophy of law. This course, in examining causality, agency, event, and temporality, also may pursue recent questions that ask what role narratives play in understanding self, consciousness, and cognition and emotion.

This introductory course traces the development of a distinct African American literary tradition from the Atlantic Slave Trade to 1910. Students examine music, orations, letters, poems, essays, slave narratives, autobiographies, fiction, and plays by Americans of African descent. The essential questions that shape this course include: What is the role of African American literature in the cultural identity and collective struggle of Black people? What themes, tropes, and forms connect these texts, authors, and movements into a coherent living tradition?

This introductory course traces the development of a distinct African American literary tradition from 1910 to the present. Students examine music, orations, letters, poems, essays, autobiographies, fiction, and plays by Americans of African descent. The essential questions that shape this course include: What is the role of African American literature in the cultural identity and collective struggle of Black people? What themes, tropes, and forms connect these texts, authors, and movements into a coherent living tradition? This course is a continuation of African American Literature I, which considers literary production before 1910.

This course explores poetry profoundly influenced by poets’ lived experiences as witnesses. Often the aesthetic of witness is one based in the traumatic: war, abuse, exile, and injustice. But this witnessing can also be the experience of observing kindness, joy, and beauty during times of inhumanity. The course examines how poets use what they have seen, what they have witnessed, to make poems. In effect, poetry preserves memories of the unmemorable. The course studies poems by Carolyn Forche, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others. Classes are discussion-based and include close readings of poems, group exercises, and short papers.

In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, American poets who explicitly wrote of the political and social anxieties of their country's moment, this course analyzes the work of contemporary poets responding to the current social and political moment in the United States. Students closely examine poetry that speaks from small-town America, environmental wreckage, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, the Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline movement as well as poetry that addresses our current political leadership. Readings include Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Layli Long Soldier. Students engage these discussions through the production of critical examinations of the texts and through their own creative writing.

Focusing on short stories published from 1945-2015, this discussion-based course examines the international phenomenon of postmodern short fiction both as a natural sequence of modernism, and an expression of a new kind of post-WWII cynicism. Students are introduced to central aspects of postmodern literature through close readings of short fictions by writers as diverse as Borges, Cortazar, Lispector, Paley, Barthelme, Brautigan, Calvino, Everett, Atwood, Morrison, Hempel, Wallace, Smith, Pynchon, Lessing, and Saunders. Students complete the semester by writing a postmodern short story of their own.

King Arthur is called the "once and future king," but this malleable, mythic figure in some sense always lives in the present time. Approaching Arthur as an idea as much as a man, students analyze the ways in which the Arthur story has been adapted for different literary, social, and political purposes according to the needs and desires of its changing audience. They explore the features of the Arthurian legend which make it universally compelling, including feudal loyalty and kinship, women and marriage, questing and adventure, magic and monsters, violence and warfare, and consider the fierce debate over Arthur's historical and mythical origins.

Speculative, skeptical, learned, and often aformal in its formality, the personal essay meditates on a single perspective or argument and is rich in contradiction and subjective nuance as it mines objective fact. From Michel De Montaigne to Zadie Smith, this course identifies the essential characteristics of the essay across centuries and cultures, focusing on both “classic” and contemporary texts by writers selected from among James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Donald Hall, Cathy Park Hong, Leslie Jamison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barry Lopez, Maggie Nelson, Wesley Morris, Cynthia Ozick, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Henry David Thoreau, Jesmyn Ward, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, and others. Students experiment with writing an essay of their own.

Reading a selection of fiction and poetry by the four Brontë siblings, including their childhood compositions, as well as critical and biographical studies of the authors and their work, students consider the writings of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne in relation to their family dynamics. They examine the ties between literature and history in the Victorian period, and discuss the Brontës' representations of British imperialism and class relations as well as their varied constructions of gender.

In this course, we will engage the “why?” and “what?” of poetry through introducing students to ways to close read an extensive variety of poems. Students will learn practices and literary terminology for poetic analysis. We will become knowledgeable of various poetic forms, traditions, and periods. We will read poems by John Clare, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jean Toomer, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Alexander, among others.

A study of the short story and novella as characteristic twentieth-century genres, with a brief introduction to works in the nineteenth century. The course focuses on both "classic" and contemporary texts by writers selected from among Anton Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, D. H. Lawrence, David Leavitt, W. S. Maugham, Katherine Mansfield, Susan Minot, Shani Mootoo, Susan Sontag, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Virginia Woolf. Students experiment with writing a short story.

This course explores the formal constraints, thematic conventions, historical contexts, and aesthetic and philosophical adaptations and reimaginations of a single poetic form: the sonnet. Beginning with the Italian Renaissance, students follow the form’s movement to Tudor England; its transformation during the sonnet "vogue" of the 1590s; its recuperation by the Romantics; its cooptation during the Harlem Renaissance; its tactical exploitation in feminist and queer poetry; and, its radical, digital, avant-garde, and political remediations by contemporary poets. In addition to writing and thinking critically about sonnet culture(s), students compose their own.

"Why does tragedy exist?" asks Anne Carson. The answer: "Because you are full of rage. And why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief." This course explores how dramatic tragedy expresses such rage and such grief through the medium of the embodied, dramatic voice. By probing the voice's place in tragedy, emotion, and politics, students seek to better understand tragedy as a genre. Students read selected classical and Shakespearean tragedies, alongside adaptations by modern artists who rethink how tragedy works and whom it serves.

In a 2013 interview, writer Jhumpa Lahiri rejected the term “immigrant fiction" as both marginalizing and overly general: “Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction." Ceding Lahiri's point about the pitfalls of "immigrant fiction" as a genre distinction, this introductory course takes a historical approach, tracing a modern literary tradition in relation to the politics and history of U.S. immigration law, from the 1882 passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act through the so-called "Muslim Ban" of 2017. Students examine how writings by and about diverse American immigrants' experiences of assimilation and alienation variously reflect and respond to this history. In shaping conversations about American identity, post-1882 immigrant narratives also reshaped American literary history, as seen in the emergence of Asian American, Arab American, and Latinx literatures, among other traditions.

Originality, varyingly described and likely socially constructed, is linked to creativity and defined as the first appearance of an idea. It is a term relevant to the arts, science, and cultural history and augmented by concepts both tied and in opposition to it: individuality, authority, imitation, genius, creativity, and plagiarism. “Inventing Originality” focuses on romanticism as the historical beginning of the concept. It examines originality expressed by imitation in classical and early modern texts, queries Baudrillard's simulacrum appearing in twenty-first century experiments in poetry and fiction, Dadaist poetry, and postmodernist efforts to randomize thought, and presents the impact of British imperialism, American immigration policy, and university gender preferences on the scientific discoveries of Ramanujan, Charles Steinmetz, and Rosalind Franklin. Finally, originality is seen in teamwork, especially by those practicing accessibility and inclusion.

A critical study of American literary history from the early national period through the Gilded Age. Students examine a wide range of texts in relation to key historical phenomena and events. These historical concerns provide a context for understanding the work of literature in constructions of the nation and of American identity. Special emphasis is placed on writing by African American and Native American authors working within and against dominant literary traditions. Texts, authors, and themes may differ across iterations of the course, but students consider--along with key genres and aesthetic impulses--racial formations in American literature; gender roles, "separate spheres" ideology, and nineteenth-century feminisms; dialectical relations of violence and civic belonging; and constructions of urban, rural, and frontier spaces.

A study of ten to twelve American texts selected from the works of such writers as Dickinson, Twain, Gilman, Chesnutt, James, Adams, Dreiser, Hughes, Frost, Stein, Hemingway, Larsen, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Cullen, Wright, Stevens, Williams, Baldwin, Plath, Albee, Brooks, Walker, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.

This course explores selections from texts (poetry and prose) recorded before the fifteenth century. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: ENG 213 or 214.

Reading and interpretation of Chaucer's major works, including The Canterbury Tales. Students interrogate the many ways Chaucer’s texts challenge assumptions of fixity, including definitions of gender, class, territory, and time. All works are read in Middle English.

In what critic Martha Stoddard Holmes terms "fictions of affliction," nineteenth-century novelists construct stories of disability that dramatize the medical and social treatment of those deemed "impaired," and that consider a range of alleged limitations in relation to social and cultural norms, often to a critical end. Reading such titles as Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend as well as stories and memoirs written by members of disabled communities, students draw from the Medical Humanities and from Disability Studies in order to better understand the broad significance of Victorian literary works.

A study of the major plays, frequently taught under different themes, with some emphasis on the biography of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan milieu. ENG 213 is offered in the fall. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Not open to students who have received credit for ENG 215.

This course examines the historical, ideological, and discursive construction of race in early modern England. Through the lens of Shakespearean drama, we will also trace, interrogate, and consider the ways that our contemporary world has inherited and perpetuated such constructions. At stake in examining this relationship between our moment and Shakespeare’s moment, then, is the possibility that understanding the early formations of violent, racist ideologies and systems of thought (including anti-Blackness, antisemitism, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism), as well as ruptures in and resistances to such logics, may help us do the work of dismantling them in our own time and furthering the cause of anti-racist scholarship, pedagogy, and being. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

A survey of major literature – poetry, drama, and prose – written before 1700. Topics may include (but are not limited to): lyric poetry of the sacred and the profane; politics and the public stage; prose romance; colonialism and its entanglement with the literary; the history of identity formation; the ascension of James I, the English Civil War, and the Restoration of the monarchy; etc.

This course examines the literatures of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Some texts are drawn from Anglophone authors such as Lamming, Anthony, Walcott, Brodber, Danticat, Lovelace, Brathwaite, NourBese (Philip), Hopkinson, and Dionne Brand; others, from Francophone and Hispanophone writers, including Guillen, Carpentier, Condé, Chamoiseau, Depestre, Ferré, Santos-Febres, and Morejón. The course places each work in its historical, political, and anthropological contexts, and introduces students to to a number of critical theories and methodologies with which to analyze the works, including poststructural, Marxist, Pan-African, postcolonial, and feminist. Recommended background: AFR 100 or one 100-level English course.

Was the '50s woman a radical? By brazenly exploring taboo identities of family, race, class, religion, sexuality and gender in their work, how did women writers of the post-war era reject and/or ironically embrace the confines of social conservatism to advance their art? This discussion-based course reads expansively from women writers around the country during the post-war period, examining both individualized and shared characteristics of their disparate voices. Did women writers of the 1950s create a foundation for social justice movements to come, such as Women’s Lib, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter? Can or should we consider them to be a school as codified as, say, the Beat Poets? Readings may include Brooks, Childress, Hansberry, Jackson, McCullers, O’Connor, Paley, Plath, Porter. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

What poet does New York City make? Why has New York City been "the" place for poets to be, live, and converge? This course explores poems and poets emerging from the experience of either being a native New Yorker or influenced or inspired by this metropolis. Students examine poets including those from the New York School, a group of poets of the 1950s and 1960s allied with and interested in visual art and artists, urban wit, and casual address including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery. Students also examine Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Hettie Jones, Allen Ginsberg, and Federico Garcia Lorca, the lauded Spanish poet who lived in New York City for nine months, among others. The course includes a creative work.

Students read Austen's six major works, investigate their relation to nineteenth-century history and culture, and consider the Austen revival in film adaptations and fictional continuations of her novels. The course highlights the various and conflicting ways in which critics represent Austen, and the cultural needs her stories now seem to fulfill. Readings include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

When Shakespeare began writing plays, England was ruled by a queen. Elizabeth I understood that her power was inextricable from her gender, and she developed intricate iconography and ideology to support her queenly rule-iconography and ideology which also made it into some of the greatest art of the age. This course considers the question of queenship in Shakespeare's poetry and plays. Centralizing concerns of gender-including those of sovereign rule, race, queerness, desire, religion, agency, performativity, and intersectionality-students work to understand forms of "queenship" in playful as well as serious ways. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

Freudian approaches to the mind, which influence literary ideas, have been supplanted by cognitive neuroscience. Can today's neurobiology explain literary imagination, and would eighteenth-century aestheticians understand such explanation? This course inquires how philosophers and scientists once defined imagination and next investigates what interdisciplinary overlap exists between contemporary studies and its past. Historically it frames imagination, and the Lockean language about the mind that accompanies it queries whether romantic writers advanced radically different ideas than these earlier efforts, and finally studies how today’s "Principles of Neural Science" understand consciousness and unconsciousness. Does the neurobiological picture of imagination, seen through the cross-neural nature of cerebral processes, cognitive historicism, neurobiological imaging techniques, and emotion processes as fluvial and dynamic stand at great distance from what was once thought?

Critical readings of a diverse selection of novels and shorter fictions, ranging from works by earlier writers such as Hawthorne, Howells, James, Wharton, Jewett, and Chesnutt, to more recent writing from James Baldwin, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Sherman Alexie, and David Foster Wallace, among others. In addition to major directions in the history of American fiction, more recent developments concerning postmodernism, multi-ethnic literature, and emergent forms--graphic novels and electronic texts--are considered. Class discussions and writing assignments also address critical terms and methods.

Some scholars of Romanticism contend that it cannot be defined. Others have insisted on maintaining national divides between the movement to preserve purist genealogies.Still others have argued that it can be viewed as a reaction against the way of life in capitalist societies. This course reexamines the origins and breadth of Romanticism, beginning first with the traditionally studied German Novelle and British poetry and then shifting to other national and transnational works that have not previously been associated with Romanticism as a movement, such as romantic racialized paintings of Native Americans, Frederick Douglass’ “The Heroic Slave,” and the Haitian rebellion. The course breaks down Romanticism past definitional monolith and asks how capitalism, nationalism, revolution, and transatlanticism revise past scholarly approaches to the movement and further contextualize it within the global world. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

This course studies Arab American literature from 1990 until the present. Students examine novels, short fiction, memoirs, or poetry in an effort to understand the major concerns of contemporary Arab American authors. Students are expected to engage theoretical material and literary criticism to supplement their understanding of the literature. In addition to a discussion of formal literary concerns, this course is animated by the way authors spotlight gender, sexual orientation, politics, and history. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level course in English.

In this course, students will learn how to write plays by…writing plays. The goal is for students to write boldly, quickly, and theatrically, and to begin to understand and manage their creative process. Students will read and discuss contemporary plays to understand the choices playwrights make about character, setting, plot, and theme. Time will be spent on learning how to give and receive feedback following the Liz Lerman critical response process. Students will turn in new pages of dialogue nearly every week, and over the course of the semester will structure their own revision process, resulting in a written piece of dramatic work. Previous playwriting experience is not required.

This course examines the popular genre of the dream vision in the later Middle Ages, including its sources and receptions, cultural contexts, and major authors. Texts will be read in Middle English.

Examining the tradition of African American novels, this course introduces students to the particular concerns of the novel form as it is shaped and as it shapes the depiction of Blackness in the United States. Depending on the year, the course may take an historical view or be focused on a specific topic. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

An introduction to the birth of modern British literature and its roots, with attention to its social and cultural history, its philosophical and cultural foundations, and some emphasis on its relationship to the previous century. Texts are selected from the works of writers such as Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Rushdie, and Lessing. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

How does the African American poetic tradition specifically contribute to the literary canon of African American literature and larger conceptions of American and global literature? This course is both an introduction to Black poetics and a deep exploration. The course considers so-called basic questions (e.g., What are Black poetics?) and more sophisticated questions (e.g., How do Black poetics transform the literary and cultural landscape?). Students read a variety of authors who maneuver between intra- and inter-racial politics, including such canonical authors as Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni, and less well-known authors such as Jayne Cortez and LL Cool J.

This course introduces students to contemporary African American literature. They explore literature written after 1975, considering a range of patterns and literary techniques as well as consistent themes and motifs. Students read a mix of canonical and less well-known authors. This course requires a nuanced, complicated discussion about what encompasses the contemporary African American literary tradition. Prerequisites(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: course work in American studies, Africana, or English.

Focusing on a range of novels published from the nineteenth century to the present day, and on scholarship in the developing field of empathy studies, students consider the relationships among literature, medicine, and empathy. Students examine representations of medical practice and practitioners and of relations between physicians and patients. They explore claims that literature has the power to develop empathy and should be central to medical education. Authors include George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Abraham Verghese, and Ian McEwan. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

This course surveys the writing of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Texts are selected from her novels, essays, children's literature, and drama; they also include criticism written about her work. Recommended background: one 100-level English course or AFR 100.

This course explores folklore, myths, and literary texts of the African continent. These include works written by Anglophone authors such as Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Vera, Njau, Aidoo, Nwapa, Head, Cole, Mda, Abani, Okorafor, and Atta; those drawn from oral traditions of indigenous languages transcribed into English, such as The Mwindo Epic and The Sundiata; and those written by Lusophone and Francophone authors including Bâ, Senghor, Liking, Neto, Mahfouz, Ben Jelloun, and Kafunkeno. The course contextualizes each work historically, politically, and anthropologically. Students are introduced to a number of critical theories and methodologies with which to analyze the works, such as poststructural, Marxist, Pan-African, postcolonial, and feminist. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

This course examines selected autobiographical writings of ex-slaves; biographical accounts of the lives of former slaves written by abolitionists, relatives, or friends; the oral histories of ex-slaves collected in the early to mid-twentieth century; and the fiction, poems, and dramas about slaves and slavery (neo-slave narratives) of the last hundred years. Students consider these works as interventions in the discourses of freedom-religious, political, legal, and psychological-and as examples of a genre foundational to many literary works by descendants of Africans in diaspora. The course surveys early works written by slaves themselves, such as broadsides and books by Jupiter Hammond, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs; dictated biographies such as those by Esteban Montejo, Mary Prince, and Sor Teresa Chicaba; and fictional works inspired by the narratives, such as texts by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff, Sherley Ann Williams, and Colson Whitehead. Recommended background: one 100-level English course or AFR 100.

This course explores the relationship between law and literature from a variety of interpretive approaches, including the legal studies movement known as "Law and Literature." What role does literature play in judicial reasoning and how have literary techniques shaped norms and principles of justice in the law? What is "storytelling" in the law and is it similar to "narrative" literature? In focusing on the intersections of literature and law in the U.S. since the early nineteenth century, this course also asks how reading legal decisions and other law texts "as literature" helps to illuminate the role that social norms concerning gender, race, and nationality play in the conception of justice and the meaning of the law, as well as the source of its authority, at particular historical moments.

This course explores a variety of interpretations and appropriations of Shakespearean tragedies, comedies, romances spanning the past century. In the context of modern cinematic adaptation, Shakespearean plays transform beyond themselves, often distorted or reworked to represent anachronistic cultural concerns. Students analyze linguistic, social, and historical contexts in the Shakespearean original and then comparatively considers these readings against their modern remakings: Are there limits to adaptation? What relates the original to the later work? How do we assess the evolving discourse of film reception studies? The focus shifts between comedy and tragedy, tragedy and romance, often redefining set assumptions about these thematic categories in the Shakespearean context. Adaptations include Japanese epic cinema, Hollywood screwball comedies, prison performance, militaristic stagings, avant-garde experimental film, and formulaic romantic comedies.

This course critically compares four writers of the eighteenth-century European tradition who on first glance seem to have little in common: Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ann Radcliffe. Students consider these writers’ gender performance, satire, lexicography, political philosophy, confessional autobiography, Gothic novels, and painterly travelscapes. How does their choice of genre serve as social commentary, (a)moral exposé, or visual escapism? Does their work revise our definition of an eighteenth-century writer? Drawing on critical gender studies, political philosophy, literary criticism, and theories of the Baroque help make sense of how such unlikely comparisons allow us to read this eighteenth-century episteme as an example of moral "enforcement." Recommended background: ENG 232 and 243.

The Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) is the seminal moment to understand anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course studies the multiple differences in how Jews appear in European novels and examines Jewish assimilation among composers, authors, and painters such as Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg, Schnitzler, Pissarro, and Chagall. It investigates both positive Jewish images and anti-Semitism in such novels as Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, Melville’s epic poem Clarel, and Roth’s Goodbye Columbus.

This course offers students an introduction to Arab American poetry from the early works of Khalil Gibran to the present. The course develops an appreciation of Arab American poetic forms, craft, voice, and vision within a transnational and diasporic framework. Surveying the poems and critical work of an expansive array of poets such as Lauren Camp, Hayan Charara, Suheir Hammad, Marwa Helal, Mohja Kahf, Philip Metres, Naomi Shihab Nye, Deema Shehabi, students examine the complex, personal, communal, national, cultural, historical, political, and religious realities that manifest themselves at home and elsewhere in the Arab American literary imagination. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, English, or gender and sexuality studies.

This course studies the historical contexts and artistic afterlives of Paradise Lost. Milton's epic was greatly influenced by the tensions of its own moment - the English Civil War, the Protestant Reformation, and the imperial projects of Britain and Europe, to name but a few. So too, has the poem greatly influenced art and literature concerned with revolution and revolt, imperial power, religious freedom and/or persecution, gender politics, and humanity's relationship to nature and "fall" from an "Edenic" world. Students study Paradise Lost alongside its influences and some of the texts it has influenced, considering both how the poem creates meaning in its own context, and how it has come to signify far beyond that context. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

An examination of the poetry and prose produced in England before the Norman Conquest. Texts include historical accounts of conflict and settlement, runic inscriptions, riddles, elegies, visions, medicinal recipes, and songs. Most texts will be read in Modern English translation, with some additional instruction in Old English. Prerequisite(s): at least one previous course in English.

The medieval period is often wrongly perceived as a time that existed before the idea of race: before the Atlantic slave trade and before European colonialism, the Middle Ages might seem to be free of racial bias, and free of difference itself. Such fantasies of a preracial or hegemonic past also have given rise to white supremacist ideologies of racialized nationalism, including the mythic construction of "Anglo-Saxon" heritage. This course addresses these errors by examining how racial categories of human difference were articulated in specific cultural contexts between 1150 and 1415, arguably inventing many of the dehumanizing tropes of racial discourse that persist today.

A course for students who wish to have practice and guidance in the writing of prose. Admission by writing sample. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

A course for students who wish to have practice and guidance in the writing of poetry. Admission by writing sample. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

A creative nonfiction writer tells a true story in an inventive and original manner. Or as John McPhee says, "Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have." In this course students write four creative nonfiction essays in the following genres: memoir, lyric, travelogue, and art review. Students learn to see writing as an act, not as a product. To that end, the course includes workshops in which ideas and critiques of writing assignments are thoughtfully offered. To further fuel the writing assignments and workshops students read a wide-ranging selection of creative nonfiction essays, studying figurative language, character and setting development, and dramatic structure.

This course introduces students to major trends, methodologies, and modes of inquiry in the field of literary study. Students identify and discuss the continuing significance of the formation of the Western canon (including counter responses to that formation), identify and demonstrate knowledge of the meaning of different literary genres, perform close readings of a given text, appreciate poetic form and experimentation, critically analyze a given text with reference to its historical significance, deploy theoretical concepts in relation to a given text, identify appropriate theoretical or digital methodologies to apply in different textual circumstances, and conduct research in the field.

This course examines the debates among authors, politicians, religious leaders, social scientists, and artists in Africa, the African Americas, and Afro-Europe about non-normative sexualities, throughout the diaspora. While the course analyzes histories of sexualities, legal documents, manifestos by dissident organizations, and anthropological and sociological treatises, it focuses primarily on textual and cinematic representations, and proposes methods of reading cultural productions at the intersection of sexualities, race, ethnicities, and gender. Recommended background: at least one course offered by the Program in Africana, the Program in gender and sexuality studies, or one course in literary analysis.

This seminar examines literary theories that address the representation and construction of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly, but not exclusively, theories formulated and articulated by Afra-diasporic women such as Spillers, Ogunyemi, Carby, Christian, Cobham, Valerie Smith, Busia, Lubiano, and Davies. Students not only analyze theoretical essays but also use the theories as lenses through which to explore literary productions of women writers of Africa and the African diaspora in Europe and in the Americas, including Philip, Dangarembga, Morrison, Gayl Jones, Head, Condé, Brodber, Brand, Evariston, Zadie Smith and Harriet Wilson. Cross-listed in Africana, English, and gender and sexuality studies. Strongly recommended: at least one literature course.

In Advanced Playwriting, students will refine their writing and revision skills, offer and receive feedback through the Liz Lerman critical response process, read and respond to critical essays, and begin the transition to live performance. This writing- and discussion-driven course will also deepen students’ understanding of Aristotelian plot structure and its derivatives, as well as non-Western narrative structures by challenging students to explore and create bold, imaginative work. The basic elements of playwriting will be supplemented by explorations of form, language, character, structure, and space as innovated by contemporary playwrights. Students will complete a written body of dramatic work. Recommended background: THEA 240.

The Africana writer maintains a unique relationship to fiction. Despite its conceptually imposed distance from fact, fiction, the novel in particular, acts as an avenue for truth for the Africana writer. Buried beneath the fiction of global epistemologies that privilege the dominant narrative, the Africana novelist often employs fiction to address what the larger narrative obscures or precludes entirely. The Africana writer demonstrates a perceptive and insightful understanding of the world at large and emerges as a theorist of the human experience within the pages of their literary contribution. So, in addition to challenging the perception of Africana people and culture through the Africana author, this course details a nuanced portrait of the humanities. Recommended background: AFR 100; prior work in research, writing, and critical theory.

This seminar encourages students already familiar with Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" to further explore his other major poetic works in the context of his late fourteenth-century London milieu. Texts include a selection of dream visions, historical romances, and philosophical treatises ("Troilus and Criseyde," "Book of the Duchess," "Parliament of Fowls," and others). Chaucer's literary contemporaries, including John Gower, William Langland, and the "Gawain"-Poet, are studied along with their poetic forms and historical contexts. All texts read in Middle English. Only open to juniors and seniors. Recommended background: familiarity with Middle English literature and/or language.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

Prerequisite(s): English 291.

Prerequisite(s): English 292. May be repeated once for credit.

The sea as transportation, sustenance, violence, mystery, poets have been drawn to, been stirred by the sea throughout time, civilization, language. It has inspired the making of numerous poems. What is the sea inventing in the poets? And how are the poets inventing the sea? How does the metaphor of the sea investigate human internality? In this course, we will read poems that consider and are motivated by the sea and its vastness. We will read poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Hayden, Emily Dickinson, Derek Walcott, Constantine Cavafy, and Mary Oliver. We will discuss, analyze, and make/invent sea poems. Prerequisite(s): One English course.

Romance was the most popular literary genre of the later Middle Ages. Originating in France in the twelfth century, this highly adaptable form quickly became an international phenomenon, with numerous examples found across Europe and the British Isles. Many romances tell tales of amorous exploits, exotic travels, and quests for knowledge; the celebration of chivalric ideals is a central theme. But many of these tales seem to question and sometimes undermine the very ideals they otherwise espouse: courtly love mingles with sexual adventurism, for instance, and loyalty to one's lord often results in alienation or death. Students read a selection of romances from France and Britain (all texts are in modern English translation or manageable Middle English) with an eye toward how they variously articulate and deconstruct the notion of chivalry. Prerequisite(s): one English course.

A concentrated study of the interstices between experienced and imagined truth, dilemmas of disbelief, irony, narration, dialogue, persona, and performance in twenty-first-century autobiographical fictions or "autofictions," as coined by French critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977. Readings of contemporary autofictions, as well as novels written well before Doubrovksy, may include Stendhal, Proust, Wilson, Joyce, Baldwin, Heti, Millet, Lin, Lerner, and Knausgard. A creative writing component is required.

This course investigates two separate disciplines, inquiring how they speak and think about literary imagination, and asks students to consider what interdisciplinary overlap might exist between the two. The course frames imagination and the Lockean language about mind that accompanies it in the writings of Addison, Burke, Johnson, and Young. It then queries whether romantic writing (Schlegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats) advances radically different ideas than these earlier efforts. Finally it jumps to our contemporary moment and ponders how terms of explanation may once again have changed. The course asks whether or not the neurobiological picture of imagination, the cross-neural nature of cerebral processes, cognitive historicism, and imaging techniques is at a great distance from what the eighteenth century once thought.

The "frontier" has long been a controlling idea for U.S. national identity. A vestige of our settler colonialist past, the American frontier persists ideologically as an imagined “meeting point between savagery and civilization." This course examines the history of this concept and its role in American literary history. We trace its influence upon more recent configurations of the nation as territory—namely, discourses of “the border” and “the homeland.” Course readings include literature, law, and history from the nineteenth century through the post-9/11 era and relevant works of scholarship and critical theory. This course gives particular attention to Chicanx and Native American literatures and these traditions’ critical perspectives on the contested paradigms that lend this course its title. Prerequisite(s): Any American Studies or 100-level English course.

Now the focus of grave concerns over climate change, the Arctic generated a different set of anxieties in the nineteenth century. Perceived as strange and terrifying, and deadly to those who tried to chart and conquer it, the region was a source of the sublime; its inhuman greatness both inspired and appalled. Drawing on various genres, students examine the "Arctic sublime," considering its artistic and ideological purposes for Romantics and Victorians. Works include Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as well as works of visual art and selections from nineteenth-century theorists of the sublime. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

What does it mean to live the "good life"? How is this related to building, planning, desiring, or dwelling in a "good place"? How do plans and policies for good life morph into bad places? Are good places always exclusionary, and thus foundationally bad places for some? This course traces two trends side by side: the early modern vogue for utopia-fictions, beginning with Thomas More's Utopia, and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century turn to dystopia-fictions. Students consider relationships of genre, politics, identity, modernity, and colonialism between these two trends, while broadly considering the relationship among power, place, and community.

In this course, students analyze revenge and horror across drama and film. Class discussions consider revenge in its thematic resonances within revenge tragedy and horror alongside readings in feminist and queer theories and critical race studies. Early modern revenge tragedy is rife with displays of horror on stage, leaving audiences with high body counts and psychological scars. In revenge tragedies such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, understanding the horror aspects can provide insight into analyzing revenge narratives in films such the Scream franchise. Discussing work such as Julia Kristeva on the powers of horror and pivotal work by Robin R. Means Coleman in Horror Noire, this course will dig into the philosophical underpinnings of horror and revenge. We will ask what acts of revenge are driving motivations in modern horror? Why does revenge play a part in many horror narratives? How do power and identity play a part in both genres of revenge tragedy and horror film?

The cinema seems best able to show the outsides of things: specific places, the details of daily life, the faces of people. A complex inner life is perhaps better left to literature. Yet some film directors nonetheless aim their films at an inner world, a world of psychology, of faith, of imagination. This course looks at a range of topics associated with cinema's inner space: cinema as dream, outer space as inner space, the reading of interior space. Films are drawn primarily from the European art cinema, although some Hollywood, independent, and experimental films from the United States also serve as examples. Directors may include Deren, Lynch, Hitchcock, Godard, Bresson, Fassbinder, Fellini, and Tarkovsky. Prerequisite(s): one course in English.

Focusing on the work of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Bronte, students in this seminar examine the conventions of Gothic fiction and Gothic representations of the monstrous body, exploring the meaning and the "politics" of the corporeal in Britain from the 1790s through the mid-nineteenth century, and considering its relation to conceptions of sexuality, gender, race, and social class. Readings include Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Bronte's Jane Eyre, as well as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis's The Monk, among a range of other works of fiction, criticism and literary theory.

Progressive political movements in the 1960s promised cultural visibility and social equality to oppressed and marginalized communities. 1970s US art and popular culture reflects the ongoing and often painful tension between white supremacist gatekeepers and multicultural voices. Students work with a range of artefacts that may include Hollywood and art films, popular music, selected television episodes, art photography, science fiction stories, and sports magazines. Inspired examples of political engagement (protests by A.I.M.--American Indian Movement, second-wave feminism, gay liberation) are analysed by comparing self-representation with representations in the media. Students learn to analyse multiple kinds of written and visual texts with a view to understanding how politics and culture intersect and generate meaning. Prerequisite(s): one English course.

This seminar takes as its premise that black literature engages with and reflects parts of the world in which it is produced. In this course, students sort through the various conversations authors and critics have with each other. They read canonical authors and less well-known figures in an effort to tease out the nuance present in this body of work. Each text is paired with another in a form of dialogue. These exchanges are not set, so it is up to students to understand how the texts speak to each other. Literary criticism requires us to think through privilege, citizenship, capitalism, intraracial dynamics, gender and sexual dynamics, and political movements. The course theme may vary from year to year (e.g., disability, literature of the left, black queer studies).

The seminar examines diverse efforts to define "postmodernism." Students read novels by Joyce, Pynchon, Wallace, Eco, and Rushdie. Contemporary reviews, secondary criticism, narrative theory, issues of socially constructed reality, and some problems in the philosophy of language mark out its concerns. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

Advanced Early Modern Studies: This seminar focuses on one or two advanced approaches to scholarship within early modern studies. These approaches may include (but are not limited to): the history of science; histories of racialization and/or colonization; early modern political thought; classical reception; ecocriticism and literature of the environment; the relationship between early modernity and modernity; travel writing; gender, sexuality, and early modern women authors.

Students register for ENG 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ENG 457 and 458.

Students register for ENG 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ENG 457 and 458.

The 1960s saw the rise of "new wave" cinemas across the world; not only the French new wave, but also the Czech, British, Japanese, and Hungarian new waves brought youth, energy, and sometimes political rebellion to the screen. The auteurs of the European art cinema (Godard, Antonioni, Bergman) made films that were as intellectual and as challenging as any classic novel. This course introduces students to formal and ideological film analysis through a survey of key international films from the 1960s.

This course offers an intensive close reading experience of William Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman. Langland, a major contemporary of Chaucer, is studied for his use of alliterative Middle English verse, his visionary politics, and his reformist religious views.

This course offers a deep close reading of the Old English epic poem, "Beowulf." Students compare multiple translations of key passages, study the poem's historical and cultural contexts, and appreciate its major themes.

Fictional movies not only tell stories, they organize and re-organize space. Sets contextualize the characters; camera lenses see clearly or half-clearly; lighting highlights or blurs edges; editing makes the world seem connected or disjunct; the frame itself includes or excludes. Using examples drawn mainly from international art films (1960s up to now), students practice spatial modes of film analysis in the form of essays, diagrams, and maps.

Twentieth-century French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, produced writings that profoundly challenge the disciplines of politics, philosophy, sociology, criminal justice, colonialism, gender and queer studies. Foucault both coined or invigorated theoretical terms such as govermentality, biopower, genealogy, épistémè to expose the specific historical rationalities embedded in ordinary academic discourse which he opposed. His books and lectures from the Collège de France where he lectured from 1970-71 through 1983-1984 compose his work’s corpus. This unit primarily studies two works: The Order of Things, the book that made Foucault world-renowned, and the later four volumes, first published in 1976, The History of Sexuality. The unit distinguishes the seminal concepts and structures Foucault posited from the broad, changed explanations of those who draw on his writings. Why read Foucault? Because he is one of the world’s most influential thinkers in the past 100 years.

Queer theory provides a critical method that complements intersectional feminist approaches to literature and visual culture by analyzing the construction and regulation of gender and sexuality through social, legal, and medical norms of embodiment and identity. This course explores canonical queer critique in relation to the early history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, an era in which the radical currency of the term "queer" links scholarly, activist, and artistic responses to the AIDS crisis and its homophobic cultural politics. Students also consider present-day LGBTQ+ scholarship, literature, and art to explore the insurgent visions and world-making projects that animate queer thought today. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course, or GSS 100.

This course enables students to (better) know Dickens by introducing them to three of his works of fiction, to biographical studies of the writer, and to his autobiographical fragment. In addition, students examine one of his novels in its original, serialized form, in the weekly journal, Household Words. Students read Sketches by Boz, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and write their own concluding chapter(s) to that last, unfinished novel, in addition to critical essays and pseudo-Victorian journal articles. Prerequisite: one 100-level English course.

Who tells the stories of trees, how do they tell them, and why? How are the lives and voices of forests captured and constructed? Students in this course address these questions by examining a range of novels, histories, and scientific studies focused on trees and forests, and by constructing their own narratives -- fictional and/or historical -- about their lives with trees, including those on the Bates campus and in the surrounding community. They consider how trees and forests have been identified by writers as models for human beings and human communities. Students hear from those who work with trees, including foresters and arborists, and consider the ways in which the lives of trees and those of human beings are intertwined. Readings include Richard Powers, The Overstory; John Fowles, The Tree; Lauren Oakes, In Search of the Canary Tree; and Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Lives of Trees. Prerequisite(s): ENVR 205 or one 100-level English course.

The last completed novel of Victorian author Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend is considered a harbinger of British modernism, though it was first published in the 1860s, and T. S. Eliot first used a line from the work -- "He do the police in different voices" -- as the title of what became his famous poem "The Waste Land." Multi-voiced and, at times, apocalyptic -- a study of human predation, social veneers, and the polluted waste land that was Victorian London -- Our Mutual Friend is considered to be among the most complex and significant English novels by generations of critics and writers. Students in this course closely read Dickens's work, consider its meaning, structure, context, and its relevance in the present day, and compare it to the award winning BBC film adaptation of the novel. Prerequisite(s): Any 100-level English course.

In courses on "The Brontes," Emily's 1847 Wuthering Heights usually takes second place to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which was published in the same year, despite their comparable literary significance and innovation. In this course, students focus on Wuthering Heights while also comparing the two works; they read fictional rewritings of Emily Bronte's novel, consider its various film adaptations, and read Victorian assessments and reviews, including Charlotte Bronte's own critique of her sister's writing. Texts include Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Conde's Windward Heights, and biographies of the Brontes, among other works. Not open to students who have earned credit for ENG 121H. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level English course.

An introduction to the study of print cultures and the history of the book by closely examining one type of printed text, poetry. Students consider how the invention of the Gutenberg press and developments in printing practices began to influence poets, before tracing the relationship between print technologies and poetic practices up through the present day. The class read widely, studying: Tottel's Miscellany (the first printed anthology of English poetry), George Herbert's image poetry (1633), William Blake's illuminated Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789), and the 20th- and 21st- century concrete- and pattern-poetry movements, including poetry by Augusto de Campos, Guillaume Apollinaire, e e cummings, Mary Ellen Solt, Marilyn Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, and Jen Bervin. Students also compose their own poetry and experiment with type-setting/printing on a hand press.

This course introduces students to the issues, politics, and the methodologies of Black genealogy. It begins and centers exploration with Africana texts and films that represent lineages of people of the Black Atlantic. It augments these texts with cookery books and historical texts about diasporic arts and crafts. Recommended background: coursework in Africana, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, or American or African histories or literatures.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.