Courses
Summer 2025 Course Schedule New Courses Fall 2025 Fall 2025 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. Living in an era of fake news, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, it is more imperative than ever to examine the ethics, importance and perils of journalism. In this course, we will learn about how this form of writing differs in American than in other countries, examining how the First Amendment has helped to shape the many forms journalism takes today, from investigative and feature writing to multimedia forms of reporting like broadcast and photojournalism. We will discuss how journalists are under attack in Hong Kong, Russia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, and how social media has been mobilized to distort the truth intentionally. Hunter S. Thompson, father of gonzo journalism, believed that objective journalism is a pompous contradiction in terms and used hyperbole and humor in his longform writing, whereas Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who was murdered in the stairwell of her flat in 2006 wrote that she had been under daily assault, "merely for reporting what I have witnessed, nothing but the truth." We will discuss what our idea of truth might be and whether it can be rendered without bias, particularly when the digital revolution has transformed the way we deliver and consume the news. Bring your curiosity to class, because we will 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, always with an eye towards being a more engaged local and global citizen. This is a prerequisite for ENG 011 Intermediate Journalism, offered annually in the Spring.
ENG 0008 Topics in Creative Writing: Writing the Climate Crisis. (Cross-listed as ENV 0195-01) 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) or have equivalent experience in a fiction workshop setting.
ENG 0014 Topics in Fiction Writing: Writing Speculative Fiction. This is a craft based advanced level writing workshop on the composition of speculative fiction with special attention to the philosophy of speculation, world-building, imagination, and preserving complexity of character in a speculative modality. Students will write and revise their own works of fiction, offer feedback to one another in a traditional workshop model, read and comment on sample texts, perform writing and developmental exercises, and work toward a rewritten final project. This course is open to students who have completed the college writing requirement and at least one semester of ENG 5.
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) or have equivalent experience in a poetry workshop setting.
ENG 0017 Topics in Poetry Writing: Contemporary Music & Poetry. In this generative writing workshop, we will listen, analyze, and discuss contemporary songs, of all genres, as a lens to help us with the craft of writing & revising poetry. How can we breakdown Mitski's impactful brevity in relation to haiku? How can we channel JPEGMAFIA's experimental sampling to help us write centos? How can Chappelle Roan and Hanif Abdurraqib help us write about place and identity? Students will be able to bring their own unique musical, and poetic, tastes into this class in the forms of playlists, mixtapes, and an end-of-year chapbook. 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. 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 0036 Asian American Writers. 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 0039 Voicing Early American Multi-Ethnic Lit. Reading early American multi-ethnic literature with a specific engagement with speaking and representation. From pre-Columbian oral traditions to nineteenth-century print culture, topics will include orality and oration, racialization, dialect, rhetoric and rebellion, minstrelsy, and passing. We will consider authors with varying positions of power and subjection, who took to the pen (or the voice) in order to reify or resist white supremacy and its attendant discursive and physical violence. Authors may include Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Thomas Jefferson, Sui Sin Far, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, and more. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0050 Shakespeare-F. In this course, we will undertake a careful study of eight Shakespeare plays: Titus Andronicus, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, 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 largely 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 0057 Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman. This course explores major figures in the American literary, political, and philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Key themes and topics include nature, religion, reform, and the place of the individual in society. Discussions of Emerson and Thoreau focus on the role played by transcendentalism in abolitionism, and, later, the civil rights and environmental movements. Readings from Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century explore her critique of restrictive gender roles. Whitman's poetry grounds a consideration of race, sexuality, and citizenship. 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 0077 Modernizing the Mind. This course is an introductory exploration of some major intellectual figures who made European thought and culture self-consciously “modern.” Through a careful reading of works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, we will investigate the philosophical foundations of a particular kind of skepticism that called the stable certainties of tradition into question. Examining the very birth of what we now call “critical thinking,” we will be scrutinizing the complex hidden dynamics that give shape to moral conventions, the organization of society, and the structure of the mind itself. At the same time, we will complement such abstract theoretical inquiries with a semester-long consideration of George Eliot’s magisterial novel Middlemarch, whose chronicle of sweeping change and social reform in nineteenth-century England will offer opportunities to approach these ideas in more concrete terms. Doing so will allow us to think about both the intellectual affordances and the conceptual limits of each thinker’s arguments and, more broadly, to consider the larger relationship between the discourses of theory and literature. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0078 Feminist Science Fictions. Taking as a starting point Donna Haraway’s claim in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,” this class will explore how the speculative, alien, or alternate worlds imagined in science fiction literature offer ways to see the conventional or normative in our own world through a critical lens. We will read a diverse selection of novels and short stories that grapple with a range of feminist questions, especially questions about the construction of gendered bodies; modes of reproduction both biological and technological; and the politics of post- or trans-humanism. In addition to Haraway, we will also read some classic and recent feminist and queer science studies scholarship. Literature will include texts by Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Mary Shelley, Vandana Singh, and others who continue to work through the evolving genre of science fiction as a form of social critique. Open to all students who have fulfilled the Eng 1 requirement. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0080 Hitchcock: Cinema, Gender, Ideology. Alfred Hitchcock: the name is synonymous not only with cinematic suspense but also with the power of film as the defining art form of the twentieth century. Hitchcock's undiminished appeal reflects our continuing fascination with the visual satisfactions of classic cinema and with the possibilities inherent in the genres (thriller, suspense film, romantic melodrama) in which he primarily worked. This course will explore the relation between Hitchcock's achievement of cinematic "mastery" and his constant, even obsessive, attention to questions of gender, sexuality, and social authority—questions central to his explorations of narrative suspense and that make him at once the queerest and the most normative of classic Hollywood’s directors. We will examine how "seeing" in Hitchcock's films is the join between politics and erotics, inflecting cinematic spectatorship in the direction of erotic (and political) "perversions" including voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, and masochism—"perversions" that find expression in the stylistic flair of Hitchcock's films. With this in mind we will consider the pleasures that Hitchcock's style affords: Whose pleasure is it? What does it presuppose? How does its insistent perversity affect our understanding of film as such? We will try to answer these questions by reading a number of essays on Hitchcock and cinema, including recent interventions from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory. In that sense, this course will introduce students to theories of cinematic interpretation. But our engagement with ways of reading film (in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework) will be filtered through the careful study of Hitchcock’s major works, which are some of the most brilliant, influential, and crowd-pleasing films in cinematic history. These will include The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0091-02 Topics in Lit & Culture: Writing About Food. “I hate people who are not serious about food. It is so shallow of them.” We will take this wisecrack by Oscar Wilde as the motto for our exploration of various genres of food writing, from restaurant criticism to memoirs to cookbooks to journalism. We will see how writing about food is never just about food: where food is bound up with culture, agriculture, politics, and economics, it is a serious topic indeed. We will read works by such writers as Brillat-Savarin, M.F.K. Fisher, A.J. Liebling, Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, Jessica B. Harris, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Eric Kim, Ruth Reichl, and Priya Krishna. There will be one field trip to a restaurant chosen by the class, and of which everyone will write a review. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0101 Old English. An introduction to the Old English language and literature, and to Anglo-Saxon culture. Like any course in a foreign language, this one requires a certain amount of memorization--of vocabulary and grammatical paradigms. But Old English is not that difficult to learn, and our emphasis will be literary. We will read a selection of prose works and lots of poetry, including The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon, and Beowulf. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0131 British Modernism. This course is an undergraduate seminar devoted to a survey of British literature published in the first half of the twentieth century. We will be thinking about how the writers of this era used experiments with literary form and style to question both received aesthetic standards and the stability of cultural norms more generally. As we play close attention to the linguistic texture of these works, we will be connecting the specifically literary to larger historical events and cultural currents, including feminism, colonialism and rebellion, WWI and the fascism leading to WWII. Complementing Eurocentric novels by writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce with more internationally-focused and racially-conscious texts by E.M. Forster and C.L.R. James will help think about the political ramifications of modernist aesthetics and will even lead us to interrogate where the category of the literary ends and "the world" begins. In addition to the authors mentioned, other figures we will study include W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Jospeh Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Samuel Beckett. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0155 American Woman Writers. 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 major requirement.
ENG 0164 Representing the Jew. (Cross-listed as JS 0164) This course will center on a set of anxieties around Jews’ roles in and behind the scenes of U.S. mass entertainment. Tracing these anxieties back to the 1927 film The Jazz Singer (considered Hollywood’s first full-length “talking picture”), and continuing into the 21st century, we will look at a series of exemplary moments in the project of turning Jews into Americans. We will think about representations of Jews in relation to representations of other minorities, particularly African Americans, and we will attempt to understand how questions of ethnic or religious or racial identity are bound up with questions of sexuality and gender. We will also pay some attention to representations of Jews outside the United States. Works to be studied will include films from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup to Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, plays from The Diary of Anne Frank to Fiddler on the Roof to Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, television series from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Broad City to Curb Your Enthusiasm, and performers from Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker to Lenny Bruce and Joan Rivers to Tiffany Haddish and Rachel Bloom. Readings will include theoretical essays and cultural histories. This course fulfills the post-1860 major requirement. This course fulfills the post-1860 major requirement.
ENG 0173 Literary Theory. This course, intended as a seminar for advanced students interested in literary theory, will focus on some major texts of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, Afropessimist, and “ethical” theory from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We will examine how various theorists conceptualize the relations among language, representation, and society, with a particular focus on “literariness” as an effect of figure and rhetoric. By considering how structuralist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic modes of analysis unexpectedly ushered in contemporary theory's investigation of gender, sexuality, racial identity, terrorism, radical evil, and political ideology, we will approach the question of whether or not “literature” has borders that can contain it. We will move from Barthes' utopian hope of freeing language from the signified’s tyranny to more recent, and far more traumatic, encounters with the negativity of the death drive.
Students should be prepared not merely to accept, but also, and more importantly, to revel in the difficulties of the texts we'll be studying and to engage them with all the passion and energy they bring to the reading of novels, poems, and films. They should also be prepared to work closely with other members of the seminar in the protracted, intense, and rewarding project of thinking and conversing together. Authors whose works we'll examine may include: Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, de Man, Said, Lacan, Gallop, de Lauretis, Johnson, Bhabha, Lowe, Žižek, Butler, Hartman, Wilderson, Zupančič, Spivak, Warren, Fanon, and Badiou. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0191-01 Special Topics: The Literary Imagination. 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 0191-03 Special Topics: Contemporary Asian American and Asian British Poetry. (Cross-listed as AAST 194-01 / RCD 179-01) If the United States and England (or, more broadly, the United Kingdom) are two countries “separated by a common language,” as the saying goes, then does this claim hold equally true for Asian American and Asian British subjects and writers? What separates and what connects poets of Asian “descent” in both countries? Culture? Ethnicity? Race? The English language? Experiences of immigration, diaspora, minoritization, and/or racism? We will examine a sampling of works by contemporary Asian British and Asian American poets, including a few who have lived in both countries. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0191-04 Special Topics: Poetic Experiments. Please email the English Department at english@tufts.edu for the full course description. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major 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. Only English Graduate students can register.
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. Only English Graduate students can register.
ENG 0291-01 Graduate Seminar: Interesting Passages: Race and Travel in Early American Lit. 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. Only English Graduate students can register.
ENG 0291-02 Graduate Seminar: Absorption and Theatricality in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. “Absorption” and “theatricality” are key terms for the contemporary art critic Michael Fried, who derived these concepts in turn from Diderot’s eighteenth-century criticism. In a nutshell: “theatrical” art acknowledges, or winks at, the viewer’s presence; while “absorptive” art pretends as if no one is looking, thereby purposefully (and so paradoxically) erasing the presence of the spectator. This course will use Fried’s (and Diderot’s) art-historical terms to explore eighteenth-century literature (which will mean thinking about literature alongside visual art). More specifically, absorption and theatricality will help us understand the early novel’s “experimental” nature. Although we tend to think of experimental novels—works that evince a degree of formal innovation, that reveal their artifice, that take part in metafictional games, and that veer off into essays and other digressions—as a strictly contemporary phenomenon, we’ll soon see that the first novels were also experimental in precisely this sense. In fact, we’ll see that the early novel’s experimental nature was a response to the interplay of absorption and theatricality. Additionally, we’ll think about literature’s relationship to voyeurism, the gaze, spectacle, “interpassivity,” defamiliarization, and other concepts. Only English Graduate students can register.