Courses
Summer 2024 Course Schedule New Courses Spring 2025 Spring 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.
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 0011 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. Students enrolling in the course should be familiar with the basics of writing and reporting learned in intro journalism.
ENG 0013 Writing Fiction: Advanced. In 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 00140 Topics in Fiction Writing: Starting a Novel – Simon Han. 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: Documentary Poetry – Sara Deniz Akant. Documentary poetry merges two impulses: the impulse to document (from the Latin verb docere, “to teach”), and the poetic impulse (from the Greek verb poiein, “to create.”) In this course, we will read and write through these impulses, with the aim of using the language, forms, and techniques of poetry to reveal something new about the events, materials, and records of the past. Focusing on the 20th century and beyond, the documentary poem often draws attention to historical injustice or misrepresentation, asking how and why history was documented the way that it was, and interrogating the relationship between forms of documentation and forms of power (social, cultural, political). We will look at a range of example texts as entry points for your own work – from classics such as Muriel Ruykeyser’s Book of the Dead (1938) and Theresa Hak Cha’s Dictée (1982) – to more recent reimaginings of historical language, such as M. Nourbese Philip’s book-length cut-up of a legal document in Zong! (2008) and Solmaz Sharif’s reuse of US military language in Look (2016). Through generative prompts and exercises, we will experiment with craft techniques that engage the documentary through primary sources, found language, narrative fragment, disjuncture, erasure, and collage. This is an advanced workshop for those who are ready to complete a longer project or series. As you move towards your final collection of documentary poems, you will also be encouraged to push the boundaries of genre and form in your work. This course is open to students who have completed the college writing requirement and at least one semester of ENG 0006.
ENG 0022 Crisis and Critique: British Literature from 1780 to 1950 – Sonia Hofkosh. This course introduces British and Irish literature from the revolutionary movements of the late 18th century to the various shocks of modernity in the first half of the 20th century. We will read a range of fascinating, innovative, influential, and sometimes disturbing works in the context of the social and political crises that dominated this era, especially those prompted by the impacts of colonialism (including slavery and its abolition), the rise of capitalism and industrialization, the new sciences (such as evolution and psychoanalysis), and war on an unprecedented scale. Paying close attention to aesthetic detail and formal experiment in a diverse selection of poetry, fiction, essays, autobiography, and dramatic writing of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods, we will consider the different ways literature registers and responds to its historical moment, conditioned as it was during these periods by imperial aggression, racist and sexist ideologies, anxieties about class and national identity, as well as by protest and agitation for change. We may also look at how some works have been interpreted or adapted in parody, as song, or in visual art, both then and now. Open to all students; fulfills the survey requirement for the English major.
ENG 0023 Dissent and Democracy: American Literature to 1900 – Nathan Wolff. 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 Phyllis 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? Open to all students; fulfills the survey requirement for the English major.
ENG 0040 Writing in the Beat Generation – Ronna Johnson. The Beat Fifties were “cool,” “hot,” and “mad”– but what did hipsters mean by those tropes? How does beat reprise and revise 19th-century American individualism and romanticism? Was “beat” an anticipation of the postmodern present? We consider the impact of the bombing of Japan and the Nazi Holocaust, jazz, the McCarthy HUAC trials, Abstract Expressionism, cross-cultural racial influences, and the nascent civil rights movement in the writings of authors associated with the Beat Generation – not only the ersatz canonical trinity of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, but also writers who have been marginalized in commentary on Beat writing, such as Joyce (Glassman) Johnson, Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Janine Pommy Vega, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman and others. This course examines how cultural meanings given to the category “beat” function as strategies for the dismissal of the movement’s writers and texts. Through study of the literature, painting, and music of the Beat generation, we will consider rhetorical figures and discourses used to effect social and political dissent in the beat subculture and in mainstream U.S. communities, in particular those of addiction and madness, which vary according to a user’s race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka has framed it. We will focus on ways in which these elements played out to foster the politics and countercultural liberations of the 1960s. We will read the writers through their own statements about writing, and juxtaposed with each other, assessing their formation of an identifiable school of writing. The course will attend to anticipations of the postmodern in the texts and in contemporary reception of the writers and movement. Study will include the substantial body of film and audio recordings, and music, produced by these writers. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0051 Shakespeare-S – Judith Haber. In this course, we will undertake a careful study of eight or nine of Shakespeare's plays: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale. We will place a strong emphasis on gender and sexuality and consider questions about race where possible. We will proceed largely through close analysis, but we will engage historical contexts as well. Please note: Shakespeare S (this course) and Shakespeare F (English 50) 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 0055 Of Microscopes and Monsters – Jess Keiser. Literature about aliens, space travel, and technology run amok might seem like a wholly contemporary invention, but the concerns of the genre date back to the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. In this course, we’ll trace our contemporary obsession with science and technology back to its beginnings. We’ll read about mysterious planets and technologies alongside narratives of discovery, wonder, and scientific catastrophe. We’ll think about how early satires on science and reason point ahead to our own concerns about the use and abuse of scientific knowledge. We’ll consider the ethics of animal experimentation, the creation of artificial intelligence, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and England’s growing imperial ventures. Above all, this course will focus on the relationship between science and literature—two fields supposedly at odds with one another. We’ll see that quarrel first take shape when various satirists attacked their scientific contemporaries for engaging in useless experiments or ethically dubious activities. At the same time, though, we’ll also attend to scientists who use literary form for their own ends. We'll be reading works like Shakespeare's The Tempest, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0064 American Fiction 1950-Present – Ronna Johnson. 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 ask you to think about whether, as it is already being said, we are in the post-postmodern moment, and, if so, what that could mean in terms of trends and preferences in forms and styles of contemporary American literature, and in values of and ways of life in the American twenty-first century. Our readings will include authors such as Jack Kerouac, John Okada, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Renata Adler, Norman Mailer, Cynthia Ozick, Ishmael Reed, Gayl Jones, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Pynchon. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0069 Contemporary Multi-Ethnic Literature – Rani Neutill. 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 0083 Un-American Activities: Popular Culture and the Left – Joseph Litvak. This course takes its title from the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, which, during the 1950s, attempted to destroy the left in the U.S. entertainment industry. For the Un-American Activities Committee, the concept of the “un-American” included anything that posed a threat to the power of normative white, male, heterosexual, capitalist interests. We will seek to understand the left, therefore, in post-1945 U.S. politics as not just anti-capitalist but also as anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-xenophobic—which is to say, as a wide range of political, social, and cultural positions that sometimes entered into coalition and sometimes into conflict with one another. We will examine the right-wing campaign of destruction and the left’s resistance to it during the Cold War, but we will also look at how both the destruction and the resistance have shaped the politics of more recent popular culture in the Obama, Trump, and Biden years. Works to be studied will include Hollywood films (Body and Soul, Native Son, On the Waterfront, High Noon, The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Strangelove, Rustin), Broadway plays (The Crucible, Trouble in Mind, Angels in America, Hamilton), novels (Invisible Man, The Book of Daniel), and documentary films (Point of Order, Heir to an Execution, Scandalize My Name, The Lavender Scare). We will be interested in calling into question the meanings of “popular” in “popular culture.” This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0088 Film Noir and the American Tradition – Lee Edelman. This course explores film noir as a profoundly American cinematic tradition that emerges from the fascination with evil that accompanies the fantasy of American innocence, a fascination rooted in the racial crimes at the origin of the nation. We will read film noir as an expression of the contradictions that structure U.S. society--contradictions between law and self-determination, between social collectivity and individualism, between Puritanical strictures and capitalist amorality. These contradictions inform film noir as a genre about incoherence, moral ambiguity, and the inevitability of interpretative doubt. The racial and ethnic subtexts of the genre will be examined in terms of film noir’s response to perceived threats to the social dominance of white, heterosexual, cis-gendered men. Those same threats make the femme fatale, the figure on whom the crisis of interpretation tends to focus, and the queered man, the foil who frequently serves as the femme fatale’s accomplice, central to the sexual anxiety that permeates these films. Linking these narratives of corruption, betrayal, and forbidden desires to issues raised by feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory, this course will engage the tensions that continue to shape our national psyche and our cinematic imagination. Films to be studied may include The Maltese Falcon, Murder My Sweet, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Third Man, Kiss Me Deadly, Touch of Evil, Odds Against Tomorrow, The History of Violence, Devil in a Blue Dress, Lost Highway, and The Dark Knight. This course fulfills the post-1860 major requirement.
ENG 0092-01 Topics in Lit & Culture: South Asian Diasporic Literature – Rani Neutill. This course will question how a broad range of South Asian writers from the United States, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, interrogate questions of dispersal and migration to explore the global dynamics of the diaspora. We will look at how the writings we read deploy a diasporic critique as a mode of refusal — of belonging, nationalism, colonialism, heteronormativity, assimilation and model minoritization. And we will look at the possibilities and impasses that are opened up by South Asian diasporic literature as a mode of resistance. Authors may include Bapsi Sidhwa, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Taslima Nasrim, Micheal Ondaatje, Avni Doshi and more. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0092-02 Topics in Lit & Culture: James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal: Novelist-Critics of the 1960s – Joseph Litvak. A seminar on three major public intellectuals of 1960s America, all of whom worked at the intersection of fiction and critical essay. We will consider how experiences of racial, sexual, and gender stigmatization figured in the writing and careers of these provocative, acerbic, even outrageous authors during a transformative decade. How did Baldwin, McCarthy, and Vidal combine scathing cultural criticism with commercial success? How did they use fiction as a mode of polemic and cultural critique? What can they teach us about the mixing of elite and mainstream forms today? We will read such works as Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and The Fire Next Time, McCarthy’s The Group and Vietnam, and Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and United States. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0092-03 Topics in Lit & Culture: Women’s Travel Writing – Shannon Derby. In this course, we will study a wide range of women travel writers, beginning with now-seminal writers like Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Seacole. As the semester progresses, we will work our way through the centuries to contemporary writers who challenge the status quo of gender, race, sexuality, and colonialism, including Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Bani Amor, and Monisha Rajesh. While some women travel writers embody the image of the “eccentric” and “proto-feminist” adventurer, others produced accounts that were quite traditional in their focus on domesticity and otherwise stereotypically “feminine” details. Moreover, colonial and postcolonial politics, issues of race and racism, discourses of feminism, and debates over genre complicate a singular view of what constitutes “women’s travel writing.” Questions we will consider in this course include: What makes women’s travel and travel writing distinct from that of men? What are some of the issues that women travelers face in both their journeys and their writing? What have modern and contemporary women travel writers inherited from their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors? How might we deploy the politics of intersectional feminism in our goal of defining “women’s travel writing”? This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0105 Medieval Literature – John Fyler. This course will explore the two central and related pseudo-historical traditions in medieval literature: the fall of Troy and its aftermath, and the romance of King Arthur and the Round Table. It will culminate in our reading two of the greatest English fourteenth-century poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by an anonymous author, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. We will begin with Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which includes the story of King Arthur within the larger origin story in which the descendants of the Trojans founded all the countries in western Europe. We will read Lancelot and Yvain by Chrétien de Troyes, who invented Arthurian romance, and Thomas Malory's narrative at the end of Le Morte Darthur about the destruction of Arthurian society and the death of the King. We will also read excerpts from Vergil's Aeneid and from medieval versions of the Troy story to prepare for a close reading of Troilus and Criseyde, a tragic love story set near the end of the Trojan War. This course fulfills the pre-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0109 Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition – John Fyler. 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 0117 The Age of Unreason 1660-1740 – Jess Keiser. The “Age of Unreason” (1660 – 1790) began roughly twenty years after a revolution unseated England’s king. And even after the aristocracy’s safe return, the country continued to experience a series of violent upheavals in its thought, culture, and literature. This course examines these revolutions by attending to the poems, plays, art, and philosophy of the eighteenth century. Our main focus will be the writing of Jonathan Swift, the author of experimental novels, black comedies, scandalous love poems, and some of the most formally inventive literature ever written. (Swift was a proto-post-modernist, we’ll see.) A priest, a poet, a satirist, and, later, a madman, Swift exemplifies the “Age of Unreason” and its many contradictions. We’ll use Swift’s writing to guide us through some of the key questions of his contemporaries. Why did a period obsessed with reason and enlightenment find itself continually plagued by madness and un-reason? Did the birth of science banish mythology and superstition to a benighted past or did it produce some new myths of its own? In addition to Swift himself, we’ll consider the work of his (few) friends and (many) enemies, as well as those who inspired his “savage indignation” and who were inspired by it in turn. That means reading the scandalous erotic works of the Earl of Rochester and Eliza Haywood; the cutting satires of John Dryden and Alexander Pope; the dreams of escape and exploitation in the novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe; and the enthusiastic, visionary, entirely un-reasonable poetry of Christopher Smart and William Blake. Our tour through the “age of unreason” concludes, naturally, with the appearance of the first horror novel in the English language (Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto). While we’ll pay attention to some contemporary theorists of the Enlightenment (Descartes, Hobbes, Cugoano, Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft), we’ll also consider some more modern thinkers who, Swift-like, found themselves ambivalently attached to its legacy (Freud, Horkheimer/Adorno, Foucault). This course fulfills the pre-1860 major requirement.
ENG 0135 Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group – John Lurz. This course provides a survey of the work of Virginia Woolf, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, within the context of the Bloomsbury Group, the set of writers, painters, and intellectuals whose ideals made central contributions to the development of self-avowedly “modern” art and thought in twentieth-century England. As Woolf’s work will be the central focus of the course, we will be reading all of her major novels as well as important short stories and essays in which she develops her artistic experiments and comments on the culture of her time. To explore the milieu out of which these literary experiments grew, we will be complementing our reading of Woolf with a selection of works by other major figures from the Bloomsbury Group, including E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. As we move back and forth between explicitly literary texts and more philosophical statements on visual art, history, and politics, we will weave a portrait of this cultural moment with Woolf at the center. We will be constantly attentive to the way particular uses of language shape more abstract ideas (and vice versa), and we will be especially interested in emergent attitudes towards art and aesthetics, feminism and sexuality, politics and economics. This course fulfills the post-1860 major requirement.
ENG 0146 20th Century Black Women's Writing – Amaris Brown. Beginning with the social, political, and economic forces that shaped black women’s writing after Emancipation, this seminar traces black women’s authorship in North America across the 20th century. We will examine how, in striving for a published voice, writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Octavia Butler sought to unsettle dominant racial and gender ideologies that conditioned their lives. Some critical questions under consideration include: How do our authors articulate black womanhood as both individual and cultural identity? What can readers of American literature learn from the aesthetic practices and political underpinnings of literary texts that unsettle dominant ideologies of race and sex? Foregrounding critiques of democracy, black nationalism, capitalism, social welfare, cis-hetero patriarchy, the medical industrial complex, climate catastrophe, and neurotypicality, we will engage in an interdisciplinary conversation about the creative, theoretical, and political interventions that structure black women’s literature. Students will experience black women’s writing as offering both theories and tactics for surviving our world. This course fulfills the post-1860 major requirement.
ENG 0157 Poets on Poetry – Ichiro Takayoshi. 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 dive into the minds of two major pairs 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 unpacking 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 0180 Psychoanalysis and Cinema – Lee Edelman. Psychoanalysis has affected all of us, whether we recognize it or not. The world would look quite different without such concepts as the unconscious, fetishism, identification, oedipal relations, or the drives. And cinema is particularly difficult to imagine in its absence. Psychoanalysis seems to presuppose cinema (as notions like “projection,” the “dream-screen,” or the “primal scene” suggest) as much as cinema and cinema theory seem to presuppose psychoanalysis. This course thinks the two together in three specific ways: by looking at how we can understand psychoanalysis through cinema; by looking at psychoanalysis as represented in cinema; and by looking at psychoanalytic principles as essential to cinema. Each week we will pair texts of psychoanalytic theory (including psychoanalytic film theory) with films that exemplify, respond to, or illuminate them in some way. We will explore how the theories of sexuality at the heart of psychoanalysis shape both the form and content of cinematic representation. Readings may include works by authors such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Jane Gallop, Christian Metz, Joan Copjec, Mary Anne Doane, Barbara Creed, Stephen Heath, Kaja Silverman, Laura Mulvey, Kara Keeling, Diana Fuss, Frank Wilderson III, and Thierry Kuntzel . Films to be studied may include Spellbound (Hitchcock), Cat People (Tourneur), Freud (Huston), Secrets of a Soul (Pabst), The Phantom Thread (Anderson), Moonlight (Jenkins), The Silence of the Lambs (Demme), Black Panther (Coogler), Persona (Bergman), Pressure Point (Cornfield), Peeping Tom (Powell), and Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons). This class is intended to be a small seminar and registration will be limited to those who are majoring or minoring in English or FMS. Others who wish to enroll may do so by requesting permission of the instructor via email and explaining their preparation for the class. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.
ENG 0192 Seminar in English: Disordering the World: Race and Disability –Amaris Brown. This course introduces students to the field of critical race and disability studies. We will explore how racial identity is conceived, regulated, and disciplined through its approximation to and violation of normative subjectivity in literature and art. Reading across a varied archive from the slave narrative to post-psychiatric survival literature alongside and against contemporary affect, feminist, and disability theory, we will examine how the political desires of the blackened, queer, and disabled challenge popular understandings of citizenship and humanity. We will approach new theories of embodiment and subjectivity that emerge from bodies differently abled and marked for reform. Assigned reading includes the literary and artistic work of Harriet Jacobs, Christopher Bell, Dennis Tyler, Marci Blackman, Pope L., Ilya Kaminsky, Barbara Smith, Sami Schalk, Therí Pickens, Zakkiya Iman Jackson, and C. Riley Snorton. Topics include histories of medical experimentation, art and activism, mad black studies, and revolutionary politics. 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: Globalization and Its Fictions – Modhumita Roy. This seminar will deliberate on the entanglement between the phenomena associated with “globalization” and their representations in cultural texts. “Fictions” in the title refers as much to narrative form of the “global” novel as to the ideological discourses closely associated with globalization: mobility, cosmopolitanism, the ‘freedom of the free market,’ among others. Some questions on which we will focus are: How do cultural texts (novels primarily) respond to, repeat, or challenge these “fictions” (that is, the ideologies of globalization)? How are the processes of globalization expressed, facilitated, and normalized in these texts? As the Warwick Research Collective argued recently, globalization is not a uniform occurrence but has to be understood as “combined and uneven development.” If so, what are the signs of this unevenness in textual form? How does the “global” novel (or film) engage with worldwide histories of terror, forced migration, and climate disaster? How do these geopolitical conditions mediate textualization? Novels and films may include The Reluctant Fundamentalist, A House for Happy Mothers. Oil on Water, Kartography, Dirty, Pretty Things, Darwin’s Nightmare, What Strange Paradise, Goat Days. Only English Graduate students can register.
ENG 0291-02 Graduate Seminar: Renaissance Drama: Gender, Sexuality, and Power – Judith Haber. The Renaissance is unquestionably the greatest age of the drama in England; Shakespeare's plays are only the best-known examples of the outpouring of theatrical activity that occurred during the period. In this course, we will read the always fascinating (and sometimes gruesome) plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors, many of whom adopted more radical stances toward the major issues of their time. As we examine their presentations of various forms of power, their constructions of gender and sexuality, and their attitudes towards language and the theater, we will discover why many of these plays have been termed "oppositional drama" and "radical tragedy." We will begin by examining Christopher Marlowe's frontal assaults on contemporary orthodoxies, and we will consider the construction of sodomy in his plays. We will go on to explore the development of the drama of blood and revenge, which was introduced in The Spanish Tragedy, and which exploded in what has been called the "parody and black camp" of The Revenger's Tragedy. We will then explore the tensions which tear apart Ben Jonson's more conservative comedies. Finally, we will look at a selection of 17th -century plays about women: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The Roaring Girl, The Changeling, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and The Convent of Pleasure. We will discuss their varying attitudes toward female autonomy and desire and consider why women became such central figures in the drama at this time. Throughout the course, we will think about these texts’ investment in their own (sometimes quite extreme) theatricality, and we will attempt to do justice to their pervasive sense of play. Note: we may substitute for one or two of the above plays by Shakespeare (probably 12th Night and/or Othello. Only English Graduate students can register.
ENG 0291-03 Graduate Seminar: Poets on Poetry – Ichiro Takayoshi. 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 dive into the minds of two major pairs 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 unpacking 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. Only English Graduate students can register.