Courses
Summer 2024 Course Schedule New Courses Fall 2024 Fall 2024 Course Schedule Course Info on SIS Archives
Course Descriptions
The list below includes descriptions of a selection of undergraduate and graduate courses offered by the Department of English.
Visit the undergraduate and graduate pages for course requirements for specific programs. For up-to-date information on course offerings, schedules, room locations and registration, please visit the Student Information System (SIS).
ENG 0001 English 1: Expository Writing. English 1 fulfills the first half of the college writing requirement for liberal arts students. For School of Engineering students, English 1 fulfills the English requirement. English 1 explores the principles of effective written communication and provides intensive practice in writing various types of expository prose, especially analysis and persuasion. Essays by contemporary and earlier authors will be examined as instances of the range and versatility of standard written English. English 1 is offered both semesters, with substantially fewer sections in the spring.
ENG 0002 English 2: First-Year Writing Seminars. English 2 fulfills the second half of the college writing requirement for liberal arts students. School of Engineering students are not required to take English 2. Like English 1, English 2 is a composition course designed to provide a foundation for writing in other courses. Unlike English 1, English 2 offers students the opportunity to choose among several seminar topics, all of which are approached in an interdisciplinary way. While drawing on various materials including fiction, essays, films and other visual and aural texts, English 2 puts the primary emphasis on students' own writing. English 2 is offered both semesters, with substantially fewer sections in the fall. English 1 (or 3) is a prerequisite for this course.
ENG 0003 English 3: Reading, Writing, Research. English 3 fulfills the first half of the college writing requirement for liberal arts students. For School of Engineering students, English 3 fulfills the English requirement. English 3 is designed for international students and for students who speak English as an additional language. This course explores the principles of effective written communication and provides intensive practice in writing various types of expository prose, especially analysis and persuasion. Essays by contemporary and earlier writers will be examined as instances of the range and versatility of standard written English. English 3 is offered in the fall semester as pass/fail.
ENG 0004 English 4: Writing Seminar. English 4 fulfills the second half of the College Writing Requirement for Liberal Arts students. Engineering students are not required to take English 4. English 4 is designed for international students and for students who speak English as an additional language. As in English 2, the seminar topics of English 4 are approached in an interdisciplinary way. While drawing on various materials including fiction, essays, films and other visual and aural texts, English 4 puts the primary emphasis on students' own writing. English 4 is offered in the spring semester; prerequisite is English 1 (or 3).
ENG 0005 Creative Writing: Fiction. In this generative workshop, we will read fiction from a writers' perspective while crafting our own short stories. Participants' work will be read and analyzed by their peers in a supportive workshop setting. In addition, we will address specific challenges and possibilities of fiction writing such as structure, tone, style, and point of view through brief creative exercises. At the end of the semester, students will compile portfolios that represent their growth as writers. Class time may be devoted to craft-based discussion of literary texts, as well as the workshopping of student drafts and other writing.
ENG 0006 Creative Writing: Poetry. In this generative workshop, we will read poetry from a writers' perspective while crafting our own poems. Participants' work will be read and analyzed by their peers in a supportive workshop setting. In addition, we will address specific challenges and possibilities in poetic composition such as form, tone, line, and argument through brief creative exercises. At the end of the semester, students will compile portfolios that represent their growth as writers. Class time may be devoted to craft-based discussion of literary texts, as well as the workshopping of student drafts and other writing.
ENG 0007 Creative Writing: Journalism. In this course, we will learn about various forms of journalism, from investigative and feature writing, to multimedia forms of reporting like broadcast and photojournalism. We will discuss journalism in the era of fake news, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, exploring the ethics, importance and perils of journalism. We will also learn how to research topics we are passionate about, gather and synthesize information (through observation, interview, immersion and other techniques), and write succinct, energetic stories that are potentially publishable across print, digital and other media platforms, with an eye towards being a more engaged local and global citizen.
ENG 0010 Creative Nonfiction Writing. This course is an introduction to nonfiction writing in its various guises including the personal essay, literary journalism, travel writing, nature and science writing, humor, memoir and lyric/hybrid essay. We will explore the historical and cultural context of creative nonfiction, including publishing markets and trends in the field, and study the structure, techniques and range of narrative possibilities each of these subgenres provides us. We will read such writers as Joan Didion, Dave Eggers, Lucy Grealy, James Baldwin, Pico Iyer, Mary Karr, Philip Lopate, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tobias Wolff, among others, and work on reverse engineering successful pieces of writing to determine for ourselves how an author uses rhetoric and figurative language to craft something memorable. We will learn the basics of interviewing, immersion, and research techniques, provide feedback to the other writers in class in a workshop setting and create works of our own original nonfiction using the course as a safe space for practice, inquiry, and experimentation.
ENG 0011 Intermediate Journalism. In this class, students will learn how to report and write complex stories about some of today’s most pressing issues. The first unit of the course will introduce students to three genres of longform journalism—the feature, the profile, and the investigative piece—and focus on how to pre-report and pitch such articles. In the next unit, students will work independently on an article of their own design; students will workshop this article at different stages in class. Throughout, we’ll discuss how to report these pieces, how to approach difficult sources, how to use multimedia to our advantage, and how to narrate complex and layered stories; we’ll also discuss the logistical and ethical issues that inevitably arise while doing this work. Guest speakers will offer their real-world experience and advice. Students enrolling in the course should be familiar with the basics of writing and reporting learned in intro journalism.
ENG 0013 Writing Fiction: Advanced. In this course, students will reimagine and revise short stories in a supportive writing community. We will read short stories from a writer's and editor's perspective, exploring a wide range of topics intended for students who have taken ENG 0005 (Creative Writing: Fiction). In addition to discussing published pieces and essays on craft, students will write and rewrite their own stand-alone short stories, as well as offer constructive feedback to one another through small group and full class workshops. This class is more focused on revision than on first drafts, though students should expect to write one new story for this class. Students should also be prepared for intensive take-home reading reflections, in-class writing exercises, revision exercises, and other tailored assignments.
ENG 0016 Writing Poetry: Advanced. This course is open to students who have already taken at least one semester of ENG 6 (two are recommended) or have equivalent experience in a poetry workshop setting. In addition to craft-based discussions of literary texts, students will write and revise their own works of poetry, as well as offer feedback to one another in a supportive workshop setting. Students should also be prepared to work on reading reflections, writing exercises, and developing a sustained poetry practice, project, or collection of poems.
ENG 0017 Topics in Poetry Writing: Ekphrasis, Poems About Art – Anna Ross. What do we see when we observe a piece of art? What narratives, memories, fears, joys, and revelations do images conjure for us? Ekphrasis (meaning “description” in Greek) is the use of vivid language to describe or respond to a work of art. In this course, we will read and discuss ekphrastic poems by poets such as John Keats, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Ranier Marie Rilke, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Camille Guthrie, Brenda Cardenas, Matthew Olzman, and Paisley Rekdal, among many others, and visit museums and galleries in the Boston area where we will compose our own poems in response to works on exhibit. On days when we don’t visit museums, we will hold poetry workshops to discuss the work we’ve written during our museum trips with the goal of revising theses drafts for a final portfolio of ekphrastic poems. This is a generative class, requiring students to read work by model poets and compose and revise their own poetry. Some travel off campus is required. This course is open to students who have completed the college writing requirement and at least one semester of ENG 0006.
ENG 0020 Black World Literature – Modhumita Roy. This course is an introduction to African and African diasporic literatures, principally though not exclusively, from anglophone African countries, the English-speaking Caribbean, and Britain. We will explore a variety of forms—fiction, poetry, memoir, film—and trace their transmissions and transformations. The selection of texts is not meant to be exhaustive but aims to allow us to begin examining the possible political and cultural meanings of the "black" world. Texts may include: Things Fall Apart, Nervous Conditions, The River Between, The Lonely Londoners, Our Sister Killjoy, No Telephone to Heaven, Life and Debt, among others. Non majors as well as majors are welcome. This class counts toward the Africana major, ILVS, and the survey requirement for the English major.
ENG 0021 Heroes, Lovers and Demons: British Lit from Beowulf to 18th C - John Fyler. This course, a survey of early English literature from the beginning through the eighteenth century, makes an excellent introduction to the English major. It should also be of interest to any students who wish to increase their knowledge of earlier English literature and hone their skill in literary analysis. Readings will probably include Beowulf, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost, lyrics by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Queen Elizabeth, Amelia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, and plays by Marlowe (Dr. Faustus) and Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part One).
ENG 0029 Literary Studies Now – Jess Keiser. This class is about how – and why – we study literature. It is intended for students interested in the fundamentals of literary analysis, for those fascinated by the pleasures and challenges of interpretation, for the sort of person who always finds themselves hunting for hidden codes, clues, signs, symbols, and meanings. If you’re a first- or second-year student thinking about majoring in English, or if you’re a Senior STEM student interested in learning how to think more deeply about literature – this class is for you. In it, we’ll read everything from short poems to sweeping, complex novels and plays. You’ll learn how to read “like a professor,” which could mean: how to unravel a tricky metaphor, how to pin down the reliability of a narrator or track the unfolding ironies of a story. We’ll discover ways of reading that open new ways to think about life in all its complexity: the nature of language, art, society, politics, identity, illusion, desire, and history. Literature can open up new questions in far-flung fields because literary works are themselves open questions. Literature rarely provides easy answers or readymade meanings; instead, it asks us to challenge commonsense and to think about how language creates (or subverts) meaning. This class explores how and why it does that.
ENG 0036 Asian American Writers – Rani Neutill. This course examines works across a range of genres by Asian-American writers and filmmakers, paying particular attention to the intersection of race, gender formation, sexuality, location, and class. We will put conceptions of feminism, queerness, and LGBT identity in conversation with the issues about ethnicity, race, citizenship, power, activism, and collective as well as individual histories that these works raise. Through close reading of literary and cinematic texts, we will explore the politics of representation and the various ways art can inform the world and be informed by it. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0042 Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner – Ichiro Takayoshi. This course introduces students to the lives, works, and legacies of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Alongside their most celebrated novels such as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, the readings encompass a broad selection of their short stories and their lesser-known masterpieces, including Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Faulkner's Light in August. The course consists of a series of lectures designed to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of who these authors were – their values, personalities, and aesthetic tastes. Additionally, it explores the fundamental principles of effective story-telling as demonstrated in their works, and delves into the profound insights these authors offer into the complexities of human existence. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner emerge from this exploration as dedicated craftsmen, keen social observers, and formidable moral thinkers. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement
ENG 0063 American Fiction 1900-1950 – Ronna Johnson. This course explores the emergence and character of American late high modernism, the self-conscious intellectual and aesthetic movement dating roughly from 1910 to 1945. We will study modernism in its experimental literary expressions; as a social period encompassing the First World War, women's suffrage, Prohibition and the Depression; as a period of diverse cultural expressions that include the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, European expatriation and urban bohemianism. We will focus on modernist writers' struggles to efface or subordinate plot or structure in narrative (an effort only more or less successful and oscillating in its visibility in texts under study); the condition of the modern subject, alienation; and representations of gender, racial designations, and sexuality, with emphasis on class across these categories and the difficulties attending ideas or efforts to achieve class mobility or economic self-sufficiency in this period. Texts will include: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Jean Toomer, Cane; W. E. B. DuBois, from The Souls of Black Folk; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and selections from the writings of Gertrude Stein; William Faulkner, The Bear; James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room, and others. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0066 Modern American Poetry – Ichiro Takayoshi. This course offers an accessible introduction to modernist poetry in America. Participants will learn how to read poems that are often considered "difficult," explore poets' motivations for their experiments, and understand the historical background of this movement. The course begins with a brief exploration of pre-modernist poets. Understanding the tradition that preceded the age of modernist experimentation is vital, as much of modernist poetry was a reaction to it. The bulk of the course is devoted to a close examination of major American modernists: Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Hart Crane. Over the 13-week duration, several questions are likely to arise as points of convergence among this diverse set of poets. These questions may include the role of imagination in poetry, the challenge of determining what constitutes reality, the significance of emotions, the relationship between music and poetry, and the artist’s connection to tradition. The course welcomes students from all backgrounds – English majors and non-majors, poets and non-poets alike. However, the course material will be best appreciated by those who are in love with the imaginative potential of language. This course fulfills the post-1860 English requirement.
ENG 0081 Postmodernism and Film – Lee Edelman. We all use the word “postmodern,” but do we really know what it means? This course will introduce students to the radical force of postmodern thought (as articulated by critics and philosophers including Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Frederic Jameson, Lisa Guerrero, Walter Benjamin, Anne Friedberg, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Jane Gallop, and Jacques Lacan) by studying a variety of films that engage or mobilize postmodern concepts (including replication, parody, inauthenticity, epistemological groundlessness, unoriginality, and interrogation of the “human”). We will explore the tensions between modernist and postmodernist views of the world in the context of other relations as well, including those between film and philosophy, between technology and interpretation, between meaning and image, and between what Barthes calls “the work and the text.” The argument of this class is that postmodernism in cinema is both inescapable and impossible at once. If you’re curious to know what that might mean, then this course may be for you. The films we will examine are likely to include (depending on availability): the Wachowski's The Matrix, Scott's Blade Runner, Lassiter’s Toy Story, Polanski's Chinatown, Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Persichetti, Ramsey, and Rothman’s Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse; Fincher’s Fight Club, Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, Kent’s The Babadook, Nolan’s Memento, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Peele’s Us, and The Daniels’ Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0091 Topics Lit & Culture: Courtroom Drama: Film/Law/Justice – Joesph Litvak. In this seminar, we will study films that put justice on trial and explore the theatricality of the legal system itself. We will begin with two recent films that reinvent the genre of the courtroom drama: Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022) and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023). We will look at how these films make the courtroom drama, a genre sometimes dismissed as the epitome of mainstream or bourgeois cinema, surprisingly and even disturbingly pertinent in the twenty-first-century. In the light of these two recent French films, we will then consider how earlier, “classic” courtroom dramas, mostly American, may be more radical than they seem in their interrogation of such concepts as Law and Justice, and of the systems in which they are put to work. Films to be studied, in addition to the two mentioned above, will include Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, Mervyn LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget, Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust, Robert Wise’s I Want to Live!, and Rob Marshall’s Chicago. Readings will include critical and historical texts that help us to think about the genre and its possibilities. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0095 Lit & Art Collaboration: Book Alive - John Lurz & Chantal Zakari. This course is an introductory investigation of the role played by the object of the book in the production and reception of literary and artistic texts. What, in an age of so much screen reading, does it mean to read a book? Team-taught by a literary critic and a graphic designer, it combines a close-reading approach to verbal meaning and a sensitivity with visual layout and material format to develop a multi-faceted account of textual aesthetics in both theoretical and practical terms. Troubling the institutional divide between art and criticism, we will pursue analytical discussion of poetic or novelistic texts that significantly engage their own bookish medium with the opportunity for a studio-based practice in book creation and construction. More specifically, literary works by authors like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lewis Carrol, and Anne Carson will raise questions about public exhibition and its fraught relationship with private introspection, about the broader struggle between speech and silence, and about the interaction of fantasy and reality. At the same time, more explicitly conceived “artist books” by figures like Johanna Drucker, Warren Lehrer, and Mark Danielewski will help us put these ideas into conversation with texts that engage design-based questions regarding typographical play, text-image relations, and unity vs. multiplicity. Students will have the option of writing analytical papers on literary texts and artist books or producing their own books or book-like objects. Depending on which option they choose, the course will fulfill a Fine Arts or a Humanities distribution requirement (but not both). BFA/CD students can use it towards a Studio Arts requirement or a Liberal Arts requirement (but not both). No prior experience in literary study or the graphic arts is necessary; anyone interested in reading, writing, and designing books is welcome.
ENG 0108 Virgil and Dante – John Fyler. This course will focus on two major texts in the European literary tradition, Vergil's Aeneid and Dante's Commedia. The two are linked because Virgil is Dante's guide in his journey into Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory: he is the guide because Aeneid 6 describes an earlier trip to the underworld, but even more, because Dante has the whole Aeneid very much in mind throughout his own great poem. We will also look at a number of allusions to these works in English and American literature.
ENG 0120 The Sublime – Jess Keiser. This class is about sublime literature, art, nature, and film. The “sublime” is the word eighteenth-century thinkers (with an assist from some ancient writers) used to describe a peculiar aesthetic reaction. Impossibly high mountains, endlessly deep abysses, and infinitely involuted labyrinths were the stuff of the sublime. Such powerful and overwhelming objects seemed to push our capacity to make sense of the world to its very limits—an experience, for many, that was wrought with anxiety and oddly pleasurable. The course will examine discourses on and around the sublime. Our main focus will be Edmund Burke’s crucially important book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beauty—the text that, more than any other, worked to define the sublime and explicate our strange fascination with it. We’ll consider some works Burke himself identified as particularly sublime: Genesis and the Book of Job, Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, moments in Homer and Greek tragedy. But we’ll also examine some of the thinkers Burke directly inspired (Kant, Schiller, Lyotard) as well as the genre of literature he influenced most of all: Gothic or horror fiction (think: Frankenstein). Controversially, Burke argued that only literature is sublime; visual art (painting and, later, film and photography) could never reach those heights. So, the class will think about the relationship between literature and other kinds of art. We’ll take a trip to the MFA to see Turner’s (probably sublime) painting in person, and we’ll consider some films (The Lighthouse, Nope, The Shining, Picnic at Hanging Rock) that seem to fulfill the criteria for the sublime. Along the way we’ll consider the following questions: What is the relationship between art and nature? Why do we “enjoy” artworks that set out to overwhelm or terrify us? How is the sublime connected to other aesthetic experiences (like the beautiful or picturesque)—not to mention other, apparently related affects like the uncanny? This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0145-01 Black Feminist Thought and Art – Amaris Brown. This course introduces students to the critical and theoretical approaches of a black feminist art practice. We will study the waves of black feminism from the turn of the twentieth century into the contemporary period, pairing art emergent with and responsive to the concerns of black women’s lives, labor, and social location. Challenging limits of whiteness and maleness as dominant cultural frames, this course reads performance, video, installation, photography, drawing and literature as mediums to investigate conceptions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship. We will summon art as a lens through which to engage black feminist thought. Artists and theorists under our consideration include Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Carrie Mae Weems, Belkis Ayón, Simone Leigh and Hortense Spillers.
ENG 0167 What The Novel Knows – Joesph Litvak. Novels, especially in the realistic mode, claim to tell us about the world. They can be as acute and as fine-grained in their analysis as the best psychology and sociology, but they elaborate their insights with the resources that are particular to the novel as a genre. In this course, we will read a series of novels that surprise us into new understandings both of the world and of ourselves. We will be concerned less with the individual novelist’s consciousness than with the critical and imaginative possibilities afforded by the novelistic genre itself. Attending to what novels know that we don’t already know–-to the ways in which they challenge our assumptions about, for instance, gender, race, and power–-we will try to develop techniques of novel-reading that take into account how novels read us. Texts will include works by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, J.D. Salinger, Marie Ndiaye, Ian McEwen, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others. We will also read pertinent literary criticism. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0176 Earth Matters: Global English Literature & Environment – Gayathri Goel. With an historic rise in extinction rates, political volatility in ecologically vulnerable regions, and a rise in the global population of climate refugees, it is imperative now more than ever to identify the causes of environmental devastation and reckon its various costs. In what ways have human actions caused this catastrophe? And what can we do about it? In this course we will turn to literary texts (novels, poems, non-fiction prose), films, and documentaries to help understand how we got to this point and explore and imagine alternative futures. Major themes and topics include climate change, resource extraction, deforestation, extinction, human rights, and environmental justice. Readings will focus mostly on the Global South: Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, while also including North America and Europe. Authors may include Rita Wong, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Amitav Ghosh, Rachel Carson, Jamaica Kincaid, Fred D’Aguiar among others. The class fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0188 Slave Revolts & Maroons – Greg Thomas. This course will focus on the texts, traces and testimonies of African insurrection in the Americas during the official period of “chattel slavery,” hemispherically. On the one hand, we will study what we have learned to refer to as “slave revolts,” the uprisings of those who resisted and refused enslavement and therefore organized themselves to overthrow “slavery” – daily, historically. On the other hand, we will study the practice of “maroonage” - or the “Maroons” who would escape enslavement, set up alternative African communities elsewhere (typically in the mountains or “hills,” not infrequently with “Indians” or indigenous peoples), while at the same time returning to plantations to register their opposition to enslavement as well. In the end, students should come to develop a critical familiarity with literary-critical discourses of slavery and anti-slavery; to expand their knowledge of maroonage and its relationship to uprisings; and, finally, to manifest a cultural literacy or counter-literacy from Haitian Revolution to Nat Turner, Stono and Denmark Vesey in the U.S. South to rebellions in Cuba and Bahia, Brazil, for example. We should all also pose and answer a number of crucial critical questions, such as: How does this literature of “slave revolts,” these texts of “grand maroonage” recast the fundamental assumptions of “literature” as well as “history,” “culture” and “politics,” among other things, both then as well as now? This course fulfills the pre-1860 requirement.
ENG 0191-01 Seminar in English: US Literature Against Work – Nathan Wolff. For sociologist Max Weber, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography epitomized and helped produce America’s “Protestant work ethic.” For the protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener—and his famous refrain, “I would prefer not to”—stood as an emblem of resistance to capitalist demands for productivity and profit. Engaging with contemporary theorists of “post-work” or “anti-work” (David Graeber, Kathi Weeks, etc.) this course explores the genres and narratives that have shaped prevailing perceptions of the meaning of work, as well as those that have modeled key alternatives. Through readings of Franklin and Melville along with Henry David Thoreau, Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman, Harriet Wilson, and others, we will examine topics including the temporalities of work, gendered and racialized labor, the work ethic’s ecological implications, and the labor of writing itself. This course fulfills the pre-1860 requirement for English majors.
ENG 0288 Graduate Seminar: Colloquium. A series of 2-hour colloquia run by distinguished professors at other schools; each year, the invitees will be selected to cover a wide variety of specialties. In advance of each colloquium, a selection from the visiting professor’s work-in-progress is distributed; students discuss the work in detail at the colloquium, raising pertinent questions and offering feedback. Required of all graduate students currently in classes; those who have finished coursework are welcome to attend.
ENG 0290 Graduate Seminar: Pro-Seminar. This series of meetings is required of all first-year students entering the graduate program with an M.A. and all second-year students who entered with a B.A.; other English graduate students may attend individual meetings, but do not have to register for the seminar. Different faculty members will address various topics relevant to professional development, pedagogy, and intellectual currents in the discipline in a minimum of six one-hour meetings.
ENG 0291-01 Graduate Seminar: Literary Theory – Lee Edelman. This course is designed to introduce graduate students to some of the central strands of thought that invigorate contemporary theory. It is not, however, a survey that aims to be comprehensive, but rather a reading of critical thinking that traces the consequences of theory’s “linguistic turn” in the second half of the 20th-century. Perhaps surprisingly, that linguistic focus gave rise to some of the most politically engaged developments in 21st-century critical theory as well as to some the repressive responses the academy faces today. Readings will include texts by: Saussure, Derrida, de Man, Johnson, Lacan, Gallop, Zupančič, Žižek, Deleuze, Marx, Fanon, Said, Lowe, Butler, Malabou, Chu, Halberstam, Menon, Wilderson, Warren, Jackson, Hartman, and Spivak.
ENG 0291-02 Graduate Seminar: Kevin Dunn – The Rapes of Lucrece in Context. This course uses Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece to center an exploration of the literary, political and social world of England in 1594. This latitudinal approach is itself intended to open onto larger and enduring theoretical, literary and historical issues. We will need to consider the questions of consent, affect, republican representation, the visual studies and style, among many others. Other than the poem and secondary texts we will read works by Marlowe, Daniel, Churchyard, Middleton and others. The class is intended to help you develop professional pedagogical and scholarly skills; therefore, the assignments will include the preparation of study questions for your peers, a book review, a final conference-length paper, and the collaborative creation of panels at which your papers will be presented. Finally, it would be helpful if you had read the poem before the first day of class.
ENG 0291-03 Graduate Seminar: Slave Revolts & Maroons – Greg Thomas. This seminar will focus on the texts, traces and testimonies of African insurrection during the official period of “chattel slavery” throughout the Americas. On the one hand, we will study what we have learned to refer to as “slave revolts,” the uprisings of those who resisted and refused this enslavement by organizing themselves to overthrow it – daily, historically. On the other hand, we will study the practice of “maroonage” -- or the “Maroons” who would escape enslavement, set up alternative African communities elsewhere (typically in the mountains or “hills,” not infrequently with “Indians” or indigenous peoples), while at the same time returning to plantations to register their militant opposition to enslavement as well. We will read political and historical as well as creative texts, including novels such as Martin Delany’s Blake; Monifa Love Asante’s Freedom in the Dismal; Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon; Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby; Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons. Ultimately, students should come to develop a vital familiarity with literary-critical discourses of slavery and anti-slavery; to expand their knowledge of maroonage and its relationship to Global African uprisings; and, finally, to manifest a cultural literacy or counter-literacy from Haitian Revolution to Nat Turner, Stono and Denmark Vesey in the U.S. South to rebellions in Cuba and Bahia, Brazil, just for example. We should all also pose and answer a number of crucial critical questions, such as: “How does this literature of “slave revolts,” these narratives of “grand maroonage,” recast the fundamental assumptions of “literature” (literary “history,” literary “culture” and literary “politics,” beyond "history," "culture" and "politics" in general), both then as well as now?