Courses
Summer 2026 Course Schedule New Courses Fall 2026 Fall 2026 Course Schedule Course Info on SIS Archives
Course Descriptions
The list below includes descriptions of undergraduate and graduate courses offered by the Department of English for Fall 2026. Check out our full Fall 2026 Course Booklet.
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: Expository Writing 2. 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 (FMS 0030 / CVS 0041). This course introduces students to the practice of journalism in various forms such as news, profile, feature, and investigative writing. By examining published examples in a variety of genres and styles, students will learn how to construct compelling narratives on complex and pressing current issues. The course explores essential writing and reporting techniques, ethical considerations, contemporary challenges facing the field, and questions of craft. Writing assignments will give students intensive hands-on practice. In a collaborative workshop setting, students will hone their skills in giving and responding to constructive feedback. At the end of the semester, students will compile portfolios that represent their growth as writers. This course fulfills the pre-requiste for ENG 0011 Advanced Journalism.
ENG 0008 (ENV 0095) Topics in Creative Writing: Writing the Climate Crisis. The first obligation of the writer of nonfiction is to tell the truth. In a time of climate crisis, what is the role of writers to address realities that sometimes feel unbearable? How can and should we bear witness, provoke, motivate, provide hope, build resilience, cultivate gratitude, stoke anger, or tend grief? Writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Báyò Akómoláfé have called for storytelling that steps outside the dominant narratives that have fueled this crisis, stories that both draw on older wisdoms and articulate new possibilities. This course will combine critical consideration of these questions with creative exploration through assignments inviting personal reflection, engagement with science and other academic research, and experimental forms that weave various modes of truth-telling. What might we learn from putting different types of knowledge—from science, memory, myth, and more-than-human perspectives—in conversation with each other? The bulk of written assignments will be creative, and students will share their work with peers in a supportive workshop setting. Together, we will engage these questions as writers, thinkers, and whole human beings living in these times.
ENG 0010 Creative Non-Fiction Writing. This course is an introduction to the practice of creative nonfiction writing in various forms including personal essay, literary journalism, culture writing, travel writing, environmental and science writing, humor, memoir and lyric/hybrid essay. We will read and study the work of writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Elissa Washuta, Lidia Yuknavich, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Dillard, Toni Jensen, Valeria Luiselli, Alexander Chee, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, among others, to gain an understanding of how to craft compelling works of creative nonfiction. Assignments will emphasize experimentation, play, introspection, research, and revision, while navigating the intersection of the personal and political, the unreliability of memory, the limits of objective truth-telling, and questions of form, ethics, and power. Writers will practice giving and responding to constructive feedback in a supportive workshop setting.
ENG 0013 Writing Fiction: Advanced. In addition to craft-based discussions of literary texts, students will write and revise their own works of fiction, 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 a final portfolio that represents their growth as writers. This course is open to students who have already taken at least one semester of Eng 5 (two are recommended).
ENG 0015 Topics in Creative Nonfiction / Journalism: Weirding the Essay. Writing the truth is a slippery task. Even the word we use for it is defined by negation; non-fiction is not untrue. In this advanced seminar in creative nonfiction, we will explore how experimental, unruly forms might help us approach the stickiest of truths–the vulnerable, the complex, the partial, and the contradictory. With a spirit of curiosity and play, we’ll read and write lyric essays, braided essays, hermit crab essays, speculative nonfiction, and hybrid or multimedia forms. We’ll push the bounds of nonfiction while taking seriously the ethics and expectations, the possibilities and perils, that come with the genre. Students will have the chance to try a variety of forms, revise and refine their favorites through workshop, and complete a portfolio of polished work.
ENG 0016 Writing Poetry: Advanced. 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. This course is open to students who have already taken at least one semester of Eng 6 (two are recommended).
ENG 0017 Topics in Poetry Writing: War, Revolution, and the Poem. This class gives student-poets an opportunity to think about the relationship between poetry and history, as well as experiment with the intersections of literary, historical, and creative writing, through the lens of the Great War and Russian Revolution. The years 1914-1918 generated a wide range of exuberant and critical poetic responses—and in this class, students will add their own. We will read poets like Anna Akhmatova, Guillaume Apollinaire, Bertolt Brecht, T.S. Eliot, Else Lasker-Schüler, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Georg Trakl, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Siegfried Sassoon, to see what the years of war and revolution produced in terms of poetic innovation. We’ll also read memoirs (primary sources) and histories (secondary sources) about the Great War and October Revolution, and, most importantly, write poems of our own. We will experiment with forms like the found poem and epistolary poem, and try out imagistic, lyrical, narrative, and other poetic responses in a supportive workshop context. The final project asks students to develop a series of their own original poems in conversation with research and reading.
ENG 0020 Black World Literature (AFR 0022 / ILVS 0020). 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: Brit Lit from Beowulf to the 18th Century. 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). Open to all students; fulfills the survey requirement for the English major.
ENG 0029 Literary Studies Now. 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 are a first- or second-year student at Tufts and love literature and art – no matter what your (intended) Major may be – this class is for you. In it, we read everything from canonical classics to tricky works of avant-garde writing to ghost stories, detective novels, and science fiction. Above all, we consider artworks that make the act of interpretation central. Is Hamlet mad? Are the ghosts in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw real? How can Sherlock Holmes so easily solve mysteries which appear utterly baffling to everyone else? All of these questions, we’ll see, turn on reading and interpreting the slippery stuff of literary language. And so in this class, 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 (and subverts!) meaning. This class explores how and why it does that.
ENG 0049 The English Bible. In this course we will read substantial selections from the Bible. Although we will consider theological, textual and historical perspectives in reading the text, our primary focus will be literary. Our most sustained inquiries will be into questions of narrative, but we will also consider issues of poetics, genre, and translation. Throughout, we will ask ourselves how the literary enhances but also questions readings of the Bible as a sacred text. Finally, we will discuss the place the Bible has in the history of interpretation, with particular emphasis upon the way the book interprets itself and establishes its own canonicity.
ENG 0050 Shakespeare-F. In this course, we will undertake a careful study of eight Shakespeare plays: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Coriolanus, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will read the plays in their social, political, theatrical and literary contexts. We will proceed through close analysis, but we will continuously engage historical contexts as well. Please note: Shakespeare F (this course) and Shakespeare S (English 51) are not a sequence; they are courses that present two different selections of plays, chosen from the entirety of Shakespeare's career. You are free to take both courses; you may not repeat either one of them. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0066 Modern American Poetry. 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 the making and experiencing of 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 major requirement.
ENG 0067 Surviving with Yeats and Auden. This course will provide an in-depth look at two of the twentieth century’s greatest poets in English, William Butler Yeats and Wystan Hugh Auden, in order to think about what resources poetry offers us during times, like our own, of great cultural upheaval and uncertainty. Reading across Yeats’ and Auden’s wide-ranging careers (with brief forays into the work of other poets for comparison), we will be paying special attention to the way they use their writing to comment on, contribute to, and work through the crises of their historical moments, most notably World War I and the fight for Irish independence for Yeats and the Spanish Civil War and World War II for Auden. The hope is to construct as much a history of their poetry as an account of the way poetry can give an intelligible shape to history. We will thus also be thinking about the place of the personal in these larger social and political landscapes, particularly as it pertains to issues of ethnicity and sexuality. Along the way, we will be constantly attentive to the work done by poetic form, broadly conceived, to mediate and survive experiences otherwise beyond our comprehension and/or endurance. Prior knowledge of poetry is not required; anyone interested in learning how to think about language and how to live with poetry is more than welcome. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0068 Contemporary Asian American Literature & Pop Culture (WGSS 0085-68). This course focuses on intersections of race, gender formation, and sexuality in contemporary Asian American literary and popular culture across a range of genres and media, including literature, film, television, and stage. We will put concepts of feminism, queerness, and LGBT identity in conversation with issues such as ethnicity, citizenship, power, activism, art, politics, resistance, representation, and collective as well as individual histories in an interdisciplinary exploration of selected 21st C Asian American cultural production. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0081 Postmodernism and Film (ILVS 0089 / FMS 0087). 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, Donna Haraway, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard) 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 at once impossible and inescapable. If you’re curious to know what that might mean, then this course may be for you. The following are likely to be among the films we examine this semester: 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, Nolan’s Memento, Kent’s The Babadook, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Peele’s Us, and Daniels’ Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0091-01 Topics Lit & Culture: Flight of Fancy: Travel in Early American Literature. This course will focus on what multi-ethnic, early American literature has to say about travel, migration, captivity, escape (literal and metaphorical), and other versions of movement and stasis. Authors may include: Jane Schoolcraft, Harriet Jacobs, Zilpha Elaw, Charles Chesnutt, John Rollin Ridge, Sui Sin Far, Hannah Crafts, and Phillis Wheatley, among others. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0091-02 Topics in Lit & Culture: Inventing Childhood. This course examines literary representations of children in the American 19th century, a period that shaped many of our contemporary notions of childhood and the child’s role in society. We will look at the iconic child characters of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Mark Twain’s fiction, the racialization of childhood in texts like Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, the haunted children of Ambrose Bierce’s civil war stories and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and lesser-known works by 19th-century children themselves. In doing so, we will reveal the important part that children played—as agents and as symbols—in both the household and the young nation. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0091-03 Topics in Lit & Culture: 19th Century American Literature on Film (ILVS 0091). In this course, we will read 19th-century texts and watch their film adaptations. We will examine the ways 20th and 21st-century cinema adapts the historical conflict, literary styles, and cultural anxieties of the period. Pairings include Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and the gothic visuals of Roger Corman, Solomon Northrup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave retold through Steve McQueen’s stark representation of plantation life, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd seen through Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, and Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese’s interpretation of its aristocratic decadence. By reflecting on the ways that these texts engage with American ideals of freedom, rebellion, and progress, students will develop a vocabulary for reading both literature and film. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0099 Internship in Literary Study. Students can receive credit for practical experience in professional settings relevant to the study of literature, such as teaching, publishing, editing, public relations, librarianship, and other related fields. With guidance from the career center or the English Department, students identify their own opportunities to integrate academic study with real-world training. An advisor in the English Department will determine specific expectations for journal keeping, reflection paper, or other written components on an individual basis depending on credits assigned and other factors. Department approval required. Internships do not count toward the requirements for the English major or minor.
ENG 0109 Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition. Ovid is the most powerfully influential Roman poet in European literature from the twelfth century on. His erotic poems—the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris—fully explore the pathos and comedy of love and make Ovid the Freud of the Middle Ages: he provides the most elaborate and memorable terminology for describing the uncertain stability of the lover's mind. The Metamorphoses, an epic or anti-epic, serves as a bible of pagan mythology for later poets. We will look in detail at these works and at some of the most memorable examples of their later influence. We'll read two French works in translation, the Roman de la Rose and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, as well as a number of shorter works in English. Authors to be studied may include Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Spenser. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0138 The Literary Imagination (WGSS 0185-13). What makes a story all-engrossing or a poem transcendent? How do writers and readers conjure new worlds from mere words? At the heart of these mysteries lies the imagination—the force that drives artistic creation and deepens our connection to literature. This course explores the nature of literary imagination through a dynamic, interdisciplinary lens. Blending insights from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy with firsthand reflections from writers—drawn from their notebooks, letters, journals, and manifestos—we investigate how imagination fuels both the making and experiencing of literature. Students will engage with a rich and diverse selection of texts, from classics of fantasy and children’s literature like Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea to Jorge Luis Borges’ philosophical short stories, the illuminated books of William Blake, the horror fiction of Shirley Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and poetry spanning eras. Through hands-on creative activities, interactive discussions, and critical assignments, we will uncover how genre conventions and artistic innovation alike rely on imaginative leaps. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, a critical reader, or simply curious about the mechanics of creativity, this course will deepen your understanding of literature’s defining magic—its power to invent, transform, and endure. Students from all majors are welcome. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0155 American Woman Writers (AFR 0155 / AMER 0155 / CVS 0135 / WGSS 0152). This study of diverse twentieth century U.S. novels and prose texts focus on the emergence of women writers in arts and culture, with emphasis on formal developments, aesthetic consequences, and social implications. We will read a wide range of texts from a variety of perspectives to explore the challenges to canonical exclusivity posed by previously silenced and marginalized women writers, white and of color, in the rise of multicultural pluralism in American literature. Our study will note the hybridization of forms and the appropriation of non-literary discourses to fashion poetry and fictive texts. We read counter-narratives composed in diverse genres: prose fiction, long form journalism, poetry, memoir, New Journalism Gonzo Style, oral presentations, theoretical essays. We will consider as well the decentering of the traditional (white male) literary subject and the configuration of diverse subjectivities newly empowered through sociopolitical changes in the position of women. Reading the texts against each other and in their moment of composition and publication, we will piece together understandings of what it may mean to be an “American” woman – or girl. Our writers include authors of African American, Chinese American, and Euro American descent. The course will consider the impact of the advancing status of women culturally and in struggles with censorship in forms and styles of twentieth century American literatures, and history. Writers we will consider include Edith Wharton, Joan Didion, Cookie Mueller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, Eve Babitz, Audre Lorde, Chuang Hua, Sylvia Plath, Leslie Marmon Silko. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0191-01 Seminar in English: The Female Complaint (WGSS 0185-19). In this course, we will investigate the relationship between race, gender, and sentimentalism in 18th- and 19th-century American literature. Authors may include Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, etc. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0191-02 Seminar in English: #MeTheory (WGSS 0185-02). Why is so much contemporary writing all about “me”? From #Booktok to autotheory, avant-garde lyric poetry to Oprah’s Book Club, this course will consider how writing about the self shapes a wide variety of “cultured” and lowbrow feminized literary genres. We will explore how these new and emergent genres are gendered, racialized, and classed, and how they are different from more established forms of autobiography and memoir. Drawing on cutting-edge scholarship on women's writing and literary industries by Sarah Brouillette, Jane Hu, Eva Illouz, and Mark McGurl, we will discuss Wattpad fiction as a form of amateur bibliotherapy, misogynist dismissals of romance writing, data-driven systems of literary publishing, and more. Readings may include work by Juliana Spahr, Lola Olufemi, Anne Boyer, Britney Spears, Kay Gabriel, rupi kaur, Maggie Nelson, as well as texts drawn from Wattpad, #Booktok, and Workers’ Inquiry. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0191-03 Seminar in English: The Invention of Utopia. This course will trace the history of utopian literature back to Thomas More's Utopia (1516), paying close attention to the contexts in which More's seminal work had its meaning. We will start by reading Utopia carefully alongside the works of More's humanist friends in order to understand the cultural milieu of which More was a part. We will think about the social and political realities to which these (northern) humanists were responding, their visions of a reformed humanity, as well as the inevitable––yet enabling––limitations of these visions. We will then proceed to read other examples of Renaissance utopias, such as Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1626), Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing Sun (1666), Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), to get a sense of the scope and variety of utopian thinking afforded during this period. Finally, we will think about the afterlife of Utopia by considering some later instances of utopian fiction, such as William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) or Ursula K. Leguin's The Dispossessed (1974). This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0194 Undergraduate Directed Independent Study. Individual study of an approved topic guided by a full-time faculty member in the English Department. Students pursuing such study are normally expected to have already taken the department's available courses on the topic, as well as one survey course (ENG 20, 21, 22, or 23). Complete the Directed Independent Study Form in collaboration with the full-time faculty member who has agreed to direct your independent study to gain department approval. Department permission is required. One Directed Independent Study may be counted towards the English major or minor. Prerequisites: Fulfillment of the College Writing Requirement.
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: Queerness and Afropessimism. Our discussion of queer theory and Afropessimist thought will consider each of these analytic models in relation to the “ontological turn” in contemporary critical discourse. In doing so, it will help prepare students—regardless of the specific period or national literature they plan to study—to enter the critical conversations of the 21st-century academy. Focusing on how queer theory and Afropessimism interrogate subjectivity by thinking about what ontology necessarily excludes (and what, therefore, is structurally inaccessible to political repair), we will explore how theorists in these two traditions deploy and revise our understandings of sexuality, race, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. We will pay particular attention to how language, rhetoric, and figure simultaneously position blackness and queerness in the register of “non-being” and locate them in materialized bodies to positivize what ontology negates. Necessarily, therefore, we will engage negativity in relation to the dominant academic narrative of transformation or “becoming” and think about whether that relation is one of opposition or antagonism—and what difference the answer makes. Throughout we will reflect on what this all means for literary and cultural analysis. Among the authors likely to be studied this semester are Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Christina Sharpe, Frank Wilderson III, Lauren Berlant, David Marriott, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Calvin Warren, C. Riley Snorton, Judith Butler, Tavia Nyong’o, Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, S. Pearl Brilmeyer, Achille Mbembe, Denise Ferriera de Silva, Fred Moten, Jack Halberstam, Guy Hocquenghem, Monique Wittig, and Slavoj Zizek. Students are not required to have a background in critical theory, but they are required to have an appetite for it and a willingness to approach theory as an imperative for graduate literary studies and not as a mere add-on.
ENG 0291-02 Graduate Seminar: Money and Modern Literature. The motivating questions of this course revolve around the relationship between verbal and monetary signification: what ways of thinking do money and monetary transactions promote and how do they intersect with and diverge from the kind of mental moves sparked by literary and linguistic representation? We will pursue this inquiry by looking to a set of mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts that explore in more or less explicit terms the role played by money in the intellectual or imaginary constitution of the world. In doing so, we will examine dynamics of exchange, definitions of value, and the function of material mediation from both financial and literary perspectives to think about the place of signification and abstraction in everyday life. Though Marx’s account of money and commodity circulation will be one important aspect of our discussion, we will be complementing his focus on capitalist production with an emphasis on consumption and the psychological effects of money drawn from the work of Georg Simmel. Other thinkers such as Marc Shell, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Jean Baudrillard will introduce arguments derived from semiotics about the operation of money in the experience of modernity. Literary texts by writers such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, and James Joyce will lend concrete illustration to these theoretical frameworks and extend our particular interest in the language of money into broader social questions of gender, politics, nationality, and interpersonal relations that contribute to the textures of our world.
ENG 0299 Graduate Internship in English. This optional course offers English PhD students the opportunity to integrate academic learning with practical experience in professional settings related to their studies and training such as teaching, tutoring, advising, publishing, editing, public relations, and related fields. Students will engage in internships that enhance their scholarly and professional development, applying theoretical knowledge to real-world contexts. Students will maintain a reflective journal, participate in periodic meetings with a faculty internship director (usually the Director of Graduate Studies, Career Advisor, or the student’s Dissertation Director), and submit a brief reflection at the end of the semester. In general, students should not seek additional work-study during the regular school year when it could distract from coursework and First Year Writing teaching responsibilities. Exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Summer internships are more likely to be approved. For more information, please email gradenglish@tufts.edu.