Approved Courses for Majors

Please note: Not all courses are offered every semester. If a course that you are taking does not appear on this list please consult with your adviser to determine which requirement it meets.

In addition, each semester the English Department offers several 91 and 191 courses in the Fall (Topics in Literature and Culture and Seminars in English) and 92 and 192 courses in the Spring (Topics in Literature and Culture and Seminars in English) that count toward the English major's Pre- or Post-1860 requirements. Please check courses for current listing.

  1. One Survey course:

    No.Title
    0020Black World Literature
    0021Heroes, Lovers, and Demons: British Literature from Beowulf to the Eighteenth Century
    0022Crisis and Critique: British Literature from 1780 to 1950
    0023Dissent and Democracy: American Literature to 1900
  2. Two non-survey classes in American, British, or other Anglophone literature written before 1860, including at least one course in British literature. No more than one course used to fulfill this part of the requirement may be on Shakespeare. The following courses meet this requirement:

    No.Title
    0038First African American Writers
    0039Voicing Early American Multi-Ethnic Literature
    0050Shakespeare - F
    0051Shakespeare - S
    0055Of Microscopes & Monsters: Science & Literature
    0056Literature of Migration: Past & Present
    0057 Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman
    0086Jane Austen Goes Abroad
    0101Old English
    0105Middle English Literature
    0107Chaucer
    0109Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition
    0110Renaissance in England
    0111English Literature of the 17th Century
    0112Topics in Shakespeare
    0113Renaissance Drama
    0114Milton
    0115Philosophy and Literature in the Eighteenth Century
    0116Epic Strain
    0117Age of Unreason: 1660-1740
    0118Enlightenment Art and Illusion
    011918th-Century English Novel
    0120The Sublime
    0121Romantic Literature & Culture I: 1789-1810
    0122Romantic Literature & Culture II: 1811-1837
    0123Frankenstein's Sisters: Austen & Shelley
    0124Visual Narrative Before Cinema
    012719th-Century British Novel
    0149American Literature 1620-1815
    0151Poe/Hawthorne/Melville
    0182American Gothic

    Please note the following courses DO NOT meet the PRE or POST 1860 requirement:

    No.Title
    0029Literary Studies Now
    0049The English Bible
    0108Virgil and Dante
  3. Two non-survey courses in American, British, or Anglophone literature written after 1860.
    The following courses meet this requirement:

    No.Title
    0035Reading at Sea: Experimental Texts of the 20th-Century
    0036Asian American Writers
    003720th Century African American Literature
    0040Literature of the Beat Generation
    0041Literature of the American Sixties
    0042Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner
    0045Nonwestern Women Writers
    0048From Beijing to Bollywood: Cinema of China and India
    0054Conrad, Forster, Woolf
    0058Short Fiction
    0059The Paranoid Imagination
    0063American Fiction 1900-1950
    0064American Fiction 1950-Present
    0066Modern American Poetry
    0069Contemporary Multi-Ethnic Literature
    0074Literature of the Jazz Age
    0077Modernizing the Mind
    0078Feminist Science Fictions
    0080Hitchcock: Cinema, Gender, Ideology
    0081Postmodernism & Film
    0082Political Cinema
    0083Un-American Activities
    0084Black Comedy
    0085Horror Stories
    0088Film Noir and the American Tradition
    0089Feminism in 20th-Century US Lit and Culture
    0129The Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in English
    0131British Modernism
    013220th-Century British Novel
    0134James Joyce's Ulysses
    0135Virginia Woolf & Bloomsbury Group
    0136Major Figures of the Irish Literary Renaissance
    0139Emotion and American Literature
    0145Black Feminist Thought and Art
    014620th-Century Black Women’s Writing
    0147The African-American Novel
    0152Whitman & Dickinson
    0153American Realism
    0155American Women Writers
    0157Poets on Poetry
    0159Contemporary Jewish Fiction
    0160Environmental Justice & World Literature
    0164Representing the Jew
    0167What the Novel Knows
    0172War and American Values
    0173Literary Theory
    0176Earth Matters: Global English Literature & Environment
    0177Feminism, Literature, Theory
    0180Psychoanalysis & Cinema
    0183American Culture during the Great Depression
    0186How Films Think
    0187Ghetto Sur/Realism: The Harlem (Detective) Fiction of Chester Himes
  4. Five remaining courses of the student's choice from the department's listings.
    See course listings >

    A Senior Honors Thesis may count for two of these courses. There are restrictions on the number of creative writing courses that may be applied.
    See Major concentration requirements >