Courses
Summer 2026 Course Schedule New Courses Spring 2026 Spring 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 Spring 2026.
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 (FMS 0030) Creative Writing: Journalism. 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.
ENG 0008 (MUS 0016) Topics in Creative Writing: Writing About Music. This course provides an introduction to the art and craft of writing about music. We will explore multiple genres and develop techniques for writing effectively for a broad audience. Through the process of learning to write about music, we will also broaden and refine our skills in listening and develop a fuller a more nuanced understanding of the role of arts criticism, its benefits to us as individuals and as a society. Prerequisite: English 1 and 2 or completion of college writing requirement.
ENG 0010 Creative Nonfiction Writing. This course introduces students 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. By examining published examples in a variety of genres and styles, students will learn how to construct compelling true narratives and essays. Assignments will emphasize experimentation, reflection, and revision, while navigating questions of truth, form, ethics, and power. Writers will practice giving and responding to constructive feedback in a supportive workshop setting. At the end of the semester, students will compile portfolios that represent their growth as writers.
ENG 0011 (FMS 0031) Intermediate Journalism. In this course, students will practice reporting and writing complex stories about pressing, real-world issues. The focus will be on long-form narrative journalism, including features, profiles, and other magazine-style forms. Students will identify and pursue stories that align with their own academic and personal interests. We will discuss how to pre-report and pitch such articles, and practice journalistic skills such as immersion, interviewing, and research. We’ll study excellent published stories on a wide array of subjects, “reading as writers” to learn how the best longform journalists craft compelling, complex, and true stories. We’ll also discuss ethical issues, as well as the threats, challenges, and opportunities currently facing journalism. Guest speakers will offer their real-world experience and advice. ENG 7 Creative Writing: Journalism is a prerequisite for this course.
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: Starting a Novel. A novel, Eudora Welty says, is an object formed from life that contains its own life. How do we as writers begin and sustain the lives of our novels? We will study works from authors such as Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nicholson Baker, and Hala Alyan, exploring how a novel arrives and builds: its movements through time, its textures and frictions, its points-of-view and distances and intimacies. Alongside reading, we will write our own novels with an emphasis on process, experimenting with multiple premises and beginnings, to be shared in a supportive workshop setting. Through generative exercises, journaling assignments, and self-reflections, we will work toward a final portfolio that includes the first thirty pages of a novel, as well as a roadmap for writing beyond the class. Note: The course is designed for students starting a novel from scratch. If you’re currently writing a novel and would prefer to build on it for this class, email simon.han@tufts.edu prior to enrollment to be considered for an alternative track. 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: CYBORG! Science Fiction Poetry. “Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” — Donna Haraway, "The Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) What is poetry, and what is science-fiction poetry? Specifically, what is science-fiction poetry in 2026, when our ways of being human – our ways of belonging via race and gender, our ways of working via creativity and technological production – are being reimagined at every turn? How can we – as humans, as writers – produce poems that are invested in new strategies of world-building, creating alternative possibilities for sound, rhythm, diction, syntax, line, form, and embodiment on the page?
In this course, we will begin our exploration of sci-fi poetry by reading contemporary writers who take up these questions, such as Tracy K. Smith, Franny Choi, Alice Notley, Tracy Fuad, Sawako Nakayasu, Inger Christiansen, Charles O. Hartman, Will Alexander, and Cathy Park Hong. Most importantly, we will be continuously producing – and workshopping – weekly poems in an experimental fashion through generative prompts and exercises. This is an advanced workshop for those who are ready to put together a more substantial collection. Building on your current practice and interests, you will be encouraged to produce a new sequence of “science fiction” or “cyborg” poems. This course is open to students who have completed the college writing requirement and at least one semester of ENG 6.
ENG 0022 British & Irish Literature: Romantic to Post-Colonial. This survey course offers an introduction to major works of British and Irish literature from the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century to the shock of modernism in the early twentieth century to the decolonial projects of the 1950s and after. Viewing these brilliantly original, enormously influential, and often disturbing works in relation to the political and social crises that dominated the period, we will consider the ways in which Romantics, Victorians, Modernists, and Post-Colonial writers responded to industrialization, urbanization, imperialism, immigration, mass literacy, changing roles for women, the rise of fascism, and two world wars. We will pay close attention to the innovative and experimental aspects of the literary works and to transformations in the understanding of art and authorship. But we will also study the implication of those works of art in the structure of their society, inflamed as it was by imperial aggressions, racist ideologies, sexual anxieties, and progressive aspirations. Readings will include poems, plays, essays, and two short novels.
ENG 0023 (AMER 0047-01) Dissent and Democracy: American Literature to 1900. From the beginning American literature has been multicultural, artistically diverse, and filled with debates about human rights, religion, gender equality, economics, race, personal freedom, and how to live in relationship with the earth. Bringing together Native American, white European American, African American, Latinx, and Asian American voices, this survey mixes canonical and less well-known texts. We’ll read work by familiar writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as work by equally important but often less-familiar writers such as Handsome Lake, David Walker, William Apess, and Chinese merchants in California. We will think about the construction of literary history and the politics of representation. Who gets to speak? Write? Read? Who does not? Why does this matter in 2025?
ENG 0038 (AFR 0047-01) The First African American Writers. This course will be a journey through the first century of African American writing. Readings will range from the 18th century with Phillis Wheatley's poetry through the turn of the 20th century with Charles Chesnutt's fiction. Along the way, we will ponder why early African American literature is so deeply invested in the problems of authorship, authentication, self-fashioning, dissembling, and personae. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0042 Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. 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 examines the fundamental principles of effective story-telling as demonstrated in their works, and explores 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 0059 (ILVS 0059) The Paranoid Imagination. This English class is about you (yes, you). That sudden rush of anxiety you’re feeling (maybe) is the topic of this course: paranoia. Paranoia has long fascinated literary writers and in this class we’ll try to understand why. We’ll read texts steeped in paranoia, and that means diving into a literary tradition swimming in dread, anxiety, surveillance, secret codes, feigned madness, hidden rooms, nosy neighbors, and unreliable (if not purposefully deceptive) narrators. But our class won’t just be about works that depict paranoid characters or situations. We’ll also consider paranoia as a style of reading or interpretation. What happens when literature encourages our paranoia? When it asks us to hunt for hidden codes or secret messages (that may or may not even be there)? Although we’ll consider some older paranoid literature, our focus will be trained on more contemporary works (since it often seems like we live in an especially paranoid age). We’ll read ghost stories and Gothic tales; detective novels and science fiction; as well as some hard-to-categorize works that play with form, ambiguity, and irony. Authors may include: George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Machado de Assis, Lu Xun, Vladimir Nabokov, Sadegh Hedayat, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Patricia Highsmith, Can Xue, Anna Kavan, Philip K. Dick. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0064 (AMER-0094-06 / WGSS 0064) American Fiction 1950-Present. This study of diverse novels written after 1950 will focus on the emergence of the postmodern in U.S. 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 American perspectives to explore the decline of canonical exclusivity and the rise of multicultural pluralism in American fiction. Our study will note the hybridization of forms and the appropriation of non-literary discourses to fashion fictive texts. It will consider as well as the decentering of the traditional subject and the configuration of numerous and diverse subjectivities newly empowered in literary discourse and through social change in this period– the period which has directly engendered our present moment. Reading the texts juxtaposed with and across each other, and in their moment of composition and publication, we will piece together an understanding of what it means to be “American” in the postmodern era. The course will consider this post-postmodern moment, and its impact on preferences in forms and styles of contemporary American literature, and values in the American twenty-first century. Readings will include; Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler; John Okada, No-No Boy; Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays; Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Chuang Hua, Crossings; Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; David Foster Wallace fiction and nonfiction; Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0069 (RCD 0094-08 / WGSS 0069) Contemporary Multi-Ethnic Literature. This course explores the various ways that recent writers and visual media artists from disparate communities of color in the United States articulate resistance and envision community in or through their work. We will explore examples in literature, film, and television to consider how and for whom these contemporary US texts represent race, gender, sexuality, power, and citizenship. Readings will also include essays and journalistic writing in conjunction with literary and visual materials. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0082 (ILVS 0056 / FMS 0049) Political Cinema. In this seminar, we will be looking at a series of films that depict politics in its more or less familiar forms—campaigns, elections, revolutions, counter-revolutions, organized movements in favor of civil rights. Instead of simply asking how these films represent politics, we will be approaching them with a view toward understanding the interplay between politics and cinema. We will be thinking, that is, about politics and cinema as overlapping, competing, and interdependent representational systems. One of our main concerns, therefore, will be the complex reciprocal relations between Hollywood and Washington. But our focus will not be limited to mainstream cinema in the United States; we will also consider political cinema in other lands (Iran, Algeria, Brazil, China, Palestine-Israel). While most of the works we will discuss will be full-length fictional films (often based, however, on “true stories”), we will turn our attention to some documentaries as well. Films likely to be chosen include Malcolm X, Snowpiercer, One Night in Miami, All the King's Men, Salt of the Earth, Lincoln, Nashville, The Battle of Algiers, Women Talking, This Is Not a Film, I'm Still Here, No Other Land, The Secret Agent. Students will be required to write two short (two-to-three-page) papers and one longer (ten-page) paper. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0089 (WGSS 0089) Feminism in Twentieth-Century US Literature and Culture. This course examines how the postwar U.S. women’s movement for equality, born of the mid-twentieth century antiwar and civil rights movements, made civic, legal and ethical changes that are expressed in representations of women in literature and film, in mass and high cultures, and in women’s experiences across lines of race, class, ethnic, and sexuality. We will study novels, poetry, and essays, as well as films, to explore the impact of second wave feminism on discourses of gender and women’s equality. The course will cover critiques made by feminist writers with a view to understanding a central insight of feminism, that forms of knowing are not universal but culturally constructed, contextual, mutable; gendered; and that gender identity is intersectional, a simultaneity of class, race, sexuality and ethnicity. Our study questions feminism as postmodern and speculates how postmodernism is in part a feminist production; how the emergence of the postmodern fits with recognitions about gender and sexual liberations in the postwar U.S. women’s movement. We will read Riot Grrrl manifestos and zines to discern a next stage – possibly a third wave – of feminism’s challenge to assumptions about women’s places in patriarchy. Readings will include: Kate Millett, Sexual Politics; Toni Morrison, Sula; Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto; Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle; Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays; Chuang Hua, Crossings. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0092-01 (RCD 0094-09) Poetry and Decolonization. Global Anglophone poets have not only written about but actively taken part in decolonization struggles. In this course, we will focus on poetry written by African, Asian, Caribbean, Indigenous, and diasporic writers to explore two critical moments: the decolonization movements of the 1950s-1970s, and social movements in the present. What kinds of writing strategies have poets adopted to figure or otherwise formalize decolonization struggles? What have these strategies and techniques got to do with their political activities? How might we think about the entanglement of politics and art? From Askia Touré’s epic song of Tricontinental struggle to Hugo García Manríquez’s poetic critique of the North American Free Trade Agreement, we’ll consider how poets have sought to resist colonial violence, both in their writing and their activism. Readings may also include poetry by Etel Adnan, Craig Santos Perez, Aimé Césaire, Layli Long Soldier, Trisha Low, Precious Okoyomon, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, as well as accompanying critical writings by Lisa Lowe, Kamau Brathwaite, and Walter Rodney. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0092-02 (WGSS 085-09) Topics in Lit & Culture: Women of Color Memoir. In this seminar we will read memoirs, fictional memoirs, and watch films made and written by women of color to examine how the genre of memoir explores American as well as global histories. We will look at how documented and imagined personal stories can radically re-shape static, essentialized and romanticized narratives of racialized, gendered, and sexual identities. We will also look at the radical possibilities that memoir possesses to reimagine representations of BIPOC women. Additionally, the class will both analyze the craft and creation of memoir as a political tool. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0107 Chaucer. This course explores the works of one of the three or four greatest poets in English. We'll read Chaucer in Middle English, but he is in almost every respect easier to understand than Shakespeare, who lived two centuries later. We will spend roughly half of the semester on the Canterbury Tales, the other half on Chaucer's most extraordinary poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer is primarily a narrative rather than a lyric poet: though the analogy is an imperfect one, the Canterbury Tales are like a collection of short stories, and Troilus like a novel in verse. We will talk about Chaucer's literary sources and contexts, the interpretation of his poetry, and his treatment of a number of issues, especially gender issues, that are of perennial interest. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0108 (CLS 0083) Virgil and Dante. 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 0111 English Literature of the 17th Century. This course focuses on lyric poetry between John Donne and Andrew Marvell, a period that saw the rapid development of disparate poetic forms and a shifting sense of what constitutes lyric subject matter: from the idealizing erotics of the Petrarchan tradition so common in the previous century to less traditional subjects such as social satire, political commentary, above all, meditations on sacred subjects. More specifically, the period witnessed the emergence of the professional poet in the person of Ben Jonson, the development of the poetic coterie with its distinctive poetry of call and response, the explicitly social and political uses of lyric (as well as a further development of the tradition of satire) and the cultivation of the gestures of poetic subjectivity. In addition, women poets increasingly inhabit and begin to extend and critique masculinist poetic modes. Finally, throughout this time secular and sacred poetry jostle for supremacy but also share tropes and motifs, a sharing that leads to its own distinct poetic. In engaging these poems, beyond careful attending to the texts and their contexts, we will study both contemporary lyric theory and critical readings of the poets we are studying. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English Major requirement.
ENG 0112 Topics in Shakespeare: Hamlet. How is it that we are able to derive pleasure from the experience of tragic drama when most of us would do anything to avoid pain and suffering in real life? Why do tragedies––as written or performed works of verbal art––exist? What needs do they serve (and have served historically)? Together, we will attempt to answer these questions by examining Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601-4) along with other major tragedies written for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. We will first try to understand the historical conditions that made it possible for a play like Hamlet to be written and popularly received (e.g., the creation of purpose-built theaters, the rise of professional dramatists, the reception of classical/Senecan tragedies, the proliferation of tragic theories that accompanied the translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, controversies surrounding matters of religion and politics, the emergence of skepticism, and so on). But we will also take seriously the remarkable fact that Renaissance tragedies like Hamlet continue to find audiences in our own time––despite much talk of the supposed “death of tragedy” in the modern and post-modern eras. What would it mean to view our present moment through a tragic lens? What is Hamlet to us? And how might we envision the future of tragedy? This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0114 Milton. This course focuses on the work of poet, politician, and revolutionary, John Milton. Completely blind by the age of 46, and forced into hiding for his role in the overthrow and execution of England’s king, Milton still managed to compose one of the most important works in the English language, the epic poem Paradise Lost. The story of Satan’s rebellion against God, and of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise, Paradise Lost attempts nothing less than to “justify the ways of God to men.” We’ll also attend to Milton’s other major works, Paradise Regained, which finds a darkly witty Satan seducing unsuspecting souls, and Samson Agonistes, a searching meditation on pessimism, catharsis, and religious violence. Milton’s work forces us to reckon with some large questions: the nature of good and evil, the conflict between freedom and fate, the necessity of rebellion and political transformation, the seductions of figurative and poetic language, humanity’s relationship to the natural world, the battle between religious and scientific worldviews, the nature of gender, sexuality, and desire, and Christianity’s vexed encounter with other cultures and beliefs (ancient and modern). This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0123 (WGSS 0123) Frankenstein’s Sisters: Austen & Shelley. During the early decades of the 19th C, Jane Austen wrote domestic fiction focused on the experience of an ordinary (more or less privileged) young woman in the circumscribed world of the English gentry. Beginning with Frankenstein in 1818, Mary Shelley created stories about monsters, forbidden passions, and the end of the human race. What concerns do these two apparently so different authors share? What does reading Austen’s marriage plots alongside Shelley’s gothic dystopias tell us about British women’s authorship in the first half of the 19th C? To address these questions, we will consider the conventions of the particular genres they take up but also resist, their experiments with style and narrative voice, and the formulations of gender, class, race, and nation (more or less explicitly) at issue in their novels. This course counts for the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0157 Poets on Poetry. Ever wondered how poets think about their craft, how they balance the act of creating with the task of explaining their work? In this discussion-driven seminar, we'll take a deep-dive into the minds of two major teams of poet-critics: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the central figures of Romanticism, and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who a century later sparked the Modernist movement to liberate poetry from what they saw as Romanticism's limitations. Students will explore a rich collection of primary texts, including the poems, literary criticism, and theoretical writings of these poet-critics. We’ll ask big questions that resonate with anyone passionate about poetry: What is the role of imagination, reason, and emotion in poetry? How does individual creativity interact with literary tradition? Can poetry exist outside of religious contexts? And what really separates verse from prose? By examining how these influential figures grappled with these questions, students will deepen their understanding of poetry’s essence and potential, whether they aspire to write, critique, or simply appreciate it on a deeper level. No prerequisites are required—students from all backgrounds are welcome. However, those who feel captivated by the imaginative power of language will find this course especially rewarding. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0160 (RCD 0179-05 / ENVS 0160 / ILVS 0160 / CVS 160) Environmental Justice and World Literature. Who is most hurt by environmental degradation and abuse and who benefits? In this course we’ll examine what contemporary world literature has to say about the global environmental crisis--what brought it on, how previous (and the current) generations have understood the process, resisted it, and proposed solutions. In what literary and cultural forms have artists, poets, novelists raised and engaged with critical questions of environmental in/justice? In reading a variety of texts we will be attentive to such issues as the social construction of nature, globalization, and urban ecological issues. We will ask: What is the role of art in the struggle for social change? Readings include authors from diverse racial and national locations—Zambia, South Africa, multicultural U.S., India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Canada, Guatemala and China. Our study will focus on the intersection of environmental issues and various systems of social injustice, especially racism, misogyny, and structural economic inequity. Primary texts include films, novels, essays, and poems. Novels may include Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus and Helon Habila, Oil on Water.
This course meets a number of articulated English Department, Civic Studies, and Environmental Studies objectives (and fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement), especially in its emphasis on critical thinking, historical and socio-political contexts, and diverse aesthetics. One of the goals of this course is empowerment for social change. How can each of us participate as a change agent in the struggle for environmental justice, locally and globally? How can our reading of literature contribute to such goals? This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0182 American Gothic. Examines the gothic genre in 19th-century American literature. Associated in England with spooky castles, gothic fiction in America dramatized the dark side of U.S. history against backdrops ranging from the frontier wilderness to colonial settlements to urban slums. Challenging an idealized vision of democracy, these texts probe the racial violence, class antagonism, and gender exclusions that haunted the nation from its founding. And countering an Enlightenment faith in reason, they depict characters in the grip of uncontrollable desires and pervasive anxiety. The reading list includes authors both well known (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) and less so (Lippard, Southworth, Hopkins). This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0186 (ILVS 0186 / FMS 0186) How Films Think. This class starts from the premise that cinema is, among other things, a machinery of thought. But what does it mean to say that films think? How do the resources of the medium produce a cinematic language that shapes not only their narratives but also our understanding of the medium itself? This course will examine various elements of cinematic construction—montage, the long take, point of view, shot/reverse shot, the mobile camera, deep focus, non-diegetic sound, among other aspects of filmic discourse—as used by specific film-makers to think in cinematic terms. Our attention will be centered on the elaboration of a rhetoric of film by which particular film-makers generate a sort of visual philosophy: a way of thinking simultaneously with and about the filmic medium. We will focus on a small group of American directors (likely to include Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Stanley Kubrick, Dee Rees, and Quentin Tarantino) to see how they extend the possibilities of cinema by defining distinctive ways of thinking in film. Depending on their availability for screening, works to be studied will probably include Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Kill Bill (Volumes 1 and 2), Pariah, The Hurt Locker, and Apocalypse Now. Registration in this class is limited to English majors, ILVS majors, FMS majors, and students who have received permission of the instructor. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement
ENG 0192-01 Seminar in English, Playtexts: Video Games and Literary Theory. Explores video games through the lens of literary and cultural theory, examining how games create meaning through narrative, play, and rules. Readings include foundational works in game studies (Murray, Bogost, Nguyen, etc.) and literary theory and narratology (Genette, Derrida, etc.). Games studied may include Disco Elysium, Red Dead Redemption, and others suggested by the class. Topics include the “magic circle” of play, narrative and digression (“side quests”), point of view and perspective (e.g. the effects of “first person” POV in games and literature, and the cultural politics of open-world design. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement
ENG 0192-02 (RCD 0179-04) Seminar in English: James Baldwin: Revolutionary. At the funeral service for James Baldwin (1924-1987) in New York City, the poet Amiri Baraka exclaimed, “For Jimmy was God’s black revolutionary mouth. If there is a God, and revolution His righteous natural expression.” First celebrated as a darling of the liberal New York intelligentsia in the 1950s, Baldwin was more harshly treated by many white critics in the last two decades or so of his career. While Baldwin’s reputation has more than bounced back in the almost 40 years since his death—indeed, he has become virtually a secular saint—the more revolutionary aspects of his writing have often been less emphasized. In this course, we will read Baldwin’s essays, fiction, dramatic work against the context of political currents during his life (liberalism, anti-colonialism, Black nationalism, among others) but also as the emanations of a queer and diasporic wanderer, who resisted reductive versions of identitarianism. A great deal of attention will be paid to Baldwin’s aesthetics—rooted in the rhythms of the King James Bible, Black church, and Black music—and the inextricability of form from issues of race, sexuality, class, and ideology. 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.
ENG 0292-01 Graduate Seminar: Gender, Race, and Marx: Reading Dialectically. This course introduces graduate students to new methods in Marxist literary criticism, and a renewed critical effort to understand how society is shaped by the capitalist form of value. Unlike traditional Marxisms focused on the exploitation of the (white, male) wage-worker, new approaches understand capitalism as a form of impersonal and abstract domination, and emphasize how value dissimulates itself from the social world that it produces – the world we perceive around us. Value disappears, in fact, because it is only ever expressed in an equation between one thing and another. What does this mean for how we understand the production of race, gender, and other forms of difference in capitalism? How does it inform the way we interpret literary texts and other aesthetic objects? In addition to these questions, we will consider how literary texts–in this seminar, works of contemporary poetry–are themselves doing theoretical work. In folding our reading experience into those points where something feels a little off, maybe deeply wrong, or even pleasurably incorrect or artificial, poems can draw us into the critical work of comparison—comparing what we intuit versus what appears before us—a dialectical kind of criticism akin to the comparative and deductive aspects of value critique.
Texts may include critical writing by Beverley Best, Sianne Ngai, Carolyn Lesjak, Karl Marx, Chris Nealon, Michael Lazarus, Chris Chen, and Sarika Chandra, and poetry by Myung Mi Kim, dg nanouk okpik, Anna Gréki, Keaulumoku, Stephanie Young, and Rob Halpern.
ENG 0292-02 Graduate Seminar: The Renaissance of Tragedy. Why do tragedies––as written or performed works of verbal art––exist? What needs do they serve? We know that tragic drama underwent a renewal in Elizabethan-Jacobean London (late 16th to early 17th century) under conditions different from, but not unrelated to, those of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England, and continental Europe. During this time, the most innovative English tragedies came to be written by professional dramatists (often university-educated) with the explicit aim of having their plays performed (not just read) in the city’s purpose-built theaters (not only during the occasional festivals or when itinerant players happen to visit your town): these vernacular tragedies were staged openly before paying audiences of all ranks, in a new kind of commercial, public theater. What are we to make of the fact that tragedy, the most ancient and exalted of artistic forms, became popularized in the early-modern era? What was being communicated through the experience of tragedy? What did tragedy reveal? And what were the effects of such disclosures?
As students of the literary phenomenon, our goal will be to understand––and perhaps, explain––the reasons behind the rebirth of tragedy in the English Renaissance. We will explore the historical and aesthetic conditions under which the different kinds of tragedy (e.g., of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Massinger, Middleton, Webster, Heywood, Ford, and others) could have acquired a sense of lived relevance for the contemporaries. At the same time, we will try to situate these plays within the long, global, and still-unfolding history of tragic art, theory, thought, and emotion. If tragedy isn’t dead, what relevance does it hold for us today? What might the future of tragedy look like?
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.