English (ENGL)
ENGL 1001 Expository Writing 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1011 Critical Reading Writing 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1070 Approaches World Lit 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.
ENGL 1072 Lit of the Indian Ocean World 3 Credits
The Indian Ocean World is one of the first global systems to encompass a wide range of nations, markets, cultures, and languages in interaction with another, connecting an enormous geography between the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia and the Swahili Coast in East Africa. It is no wonder that the Indian Ocean has been home to a vibrant cosmopolitan literature for millennia. In this course, we will explore the historical and contemporary worlds of the Indian Ocean through a rich range of literary media, including epics, story cycles, travelogues, memoirs, and novels. We will focus in particular on how literature captures issues of exchange, circulation, migration, and encounter in this vast oceanic space that has mediated a dynamic cross-cultural traffic across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1075 Ottoman-Armenian Literature 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: (WRIT 015 or WRIT 1150) or WRIT 016
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1090 Critical Methods 3 Credits
This course aims to give students a coherent understanding of various theoretical and critical tools used to interpret texts by introducing them to strategies of close reading and to larger discussions regarding textual analysis. Although the course will not necessarily encompass the entire history of literary and cultural criticism, it will examine a range of schools and methods. These schools and methods will be grounded historically and will be situated and contextualized within larger critical conversations that have developed over time. (This course will NOT fulfill the HALC requirement.).
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1091 Hist of Lit Media Culture I 3 Credits
A two-semester survey of Anglophone literary and cultural history. Literary History I focuses on texts from the medieval period through the eighteenth century; Literary History II focuses on texts from the nineteenth century to the present. These courses will highlight a number of critical and / or representative texts, debates, developments, and crises illustrative of the time periods studied. (These courses will NOT fulfill the HALC requirement).
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1092 Hist of Lit Media Culture II 3 Credits
A two-semester survey of Anglophone literary and cultural history. Literary History I focuses on texts from the medieval period through the eighteenth century; Literary History II focuses on texts from the nineteenth century to the present. These courses will highlight a number of critical and / or representative texts, debates, developments, and crises illustrative of the time periods studied. (These courses will NOT fulfill the HALC requirement).
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1095 Ways of Reading 3 Credits
What is “reading,” after all? “Ways of Reading” exposes students to a range of analytical methods, creative practices, and objects of study relevant to the interpretation of culture. We will learn how influential forms of the past continue to inspire aesthetic innovation and invite new habits of engagement. We’ll also discuss how texts and media reflect, contest, and otherwise intervene in the power dynamics of their own time and ours. Along the way, we will learn strategies for interpreting cultural forms; for thinking about artistic genres and social contexts; for conducting imaginative research; and for writing about, in response to, and alongside a range of literature and other media. All this work showcases the various pleasures of English study today.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1100 Medieval Lit 3 Credits
This course offers a survey or focused case study in the literature of the medieval period (c. 500-1500 CE), one of the most dynamic and contested periods in the history of culture. In this period key aspects of the modern world —defintions of the human, relationships among social classes and cultures, the boundaries and meaning of the natural world, among others—were still in formation or had yet to seem natural, making it a key site of study both for its own sake, and for any full understanding of the contemporary world. Please see section description for specific topics and approaches.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1105 Poetry: 1600-2000 3 Credits
This course will examine poetry by a range of writers between 1600 and 2000, including Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. The emphasis throughout will be on close analysis of text, and group discussion in which all students are expected to participate. The aim will be to enable students to analyze verse with a full understanding not just of its meaning but of the formal elements of prosody. A principal course text will be Philip Hobsbaum’s Meter, Rhythm and Verse Form (Routledge), which students are expected to read and memorize. Students should be prepared to write regular short essays on aspects of poetry. Each essay will contribute to your overall assessment, as will your attendance record and performance in class. Students are expected also to attend one-to-one tutorials with Professor Wu in order to discuss their work. There will be occasional tests. These activities will contribute to each student’s final grade.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1110 Global Medieval Literatures 3 Credits
Our focus in this course on global medieval literatures will be on the cultural construction of emotion -- in particular, romantic love -- in the courtly literatures of medieval Europe, Persia, and Japan. Each set of texts will give rise to its own set of issues, but abiding preoccupations will include the relationship between “artificial” conventions and “real” emotion (is this a valid distinction?); the cultural construction of the desiring and desirable body; the role of women as writers, court patrons, or courtly audience; conflicting ideals of masculinity; erotic love as religious experience; love in relation to arranged marriages, incest, and polygamy; the function of “noble” emotions as a marker of aristocratic distinction; love and the poetics of public and private spaces; the place of same-sex desire in relation to heterosexual love; and the use of irony as a destabilizing challenge to the reigning amatory system. Since religious practices and belief systems strongly inflect emotional constructs in each of the three cultures we will be exploring, our work will involve attention to Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Shinto and Buddhism.
All readings will be in modern English translation. European texts will include Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, the Lais of Marie de France, and Gottfried von Strassbourg’s Tristan and Isolde. Persian texts will include the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and Majnun and Khusrau and Shirin, and poems by Rumi and Hafez. Japanese texts will include the abridged version of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, the poems of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, and excerpts from The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon and similar poetic diaries by women of the Heian court. We will seek to embed these literary works in a wider cultural matrix by reading extracts from additional primary sources such as chronicles and conduct books as well as brief selections from secondary sources. Methods from the anthropology and history of emotion will also guide the kinds of questions we ask about an emotion that seems so “natural”; do our literary texts from different cultures suggest, as one scholar puts it (Lutz), that “emotions are not precultural, but preeminently cultural”?
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1115 Medieval Women's Lit 3 Credits
Do these situations sound like the Middle Ages you know? A medieval girl is raised as a boy. A lady saves a knight instead of the other way round. A mother curses unsympathetic men to suffer labor pains when they are needed in battle. A medieval woman constructs a universal history entirely about women to show that misogynists lie. The roots of our modern gender expectations and debates in the West come mainly from medieval society, but you may not have realized how old some of these contentions are, and that women were actively involved in them. This course looks at the writings of medieval women and writings about them, considering the variety of cultures and cultural influences over the thousand years of the European Middle Ages. Literatures from Ireland, Wales, England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia are contextualized against and within cultural expectations of women under such influences as gender roles, religion, national identities, self identity, and mythology. Outside material on historical backgrounds and literary criticism from multiple perspectives supplement the literature read.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1120 Heroes and Vikings 3 Credits
“No hero is immortal till he dies.” -W.H. Auden “Then said Atli, when he got the thrust, “These broad spears are becoming a fashion.” After that he fell forward over the threshold.” -Grettir's Saga ch. 45 “One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a human.” -Goethe Heroes and Vikings come down to us in the present as exceptional characters--good and bad, violent, wise, fated, driven, flawed, poetic, and fascinating. The nature of heroism in the early medieval period differs in many ways from our current views. This introductory course will focus on early medieval materials from Anglo-Saxon/Old English and Norse prose and poetry, supplemented at times with texts from other early cultures such as the Irish. We will focus on examining heroes male and female and the societal values and costs of heroic warrior societies. Studies may include Beowulf, The Saga of the Volsungs and various Eddic poems related to that hero and dragon story, Norse mythology, the Anglo-Saxon female heroes Judith, Juliana, and Elene (Helena, finder of the True Cross), and a variety of shorter sagas and poems from Icelandic sources. Where useful, we will look at artifacts and the material record to augment our studies, for example, looking at swords to consider their roles and cultural significance. Students should expect to write several response papers and short essays throughout the term and to engage with scholarship and critical conversations about these texts.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1130 Chaucer the 14th Century 3 Credits
A reading and discussion of Chaucer's great (if unfinished) master-work, the Canterbury Tales, a work of first importance to anyone who reads (or writes) narrative fiction. Students will read the work in original Middle English in which Chaucer wrote it, and discuss it in small and in large groups, focusing upon the work's narrative strategies, intellectual constructions, and artistic accomplishment. They will also write, in a variety of ways, about those aspects which particularly take their interest.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1133 The Art of Short Fiction 3 Credits
The brevity of short fiction has often had the effect of sidelining its significance in literary history and its particular power in the modern world. But sometimes less is more. Taking a transhistorical approach, this course investigates the aesthetic affordances of short fiction as it has developed in Britain and Ireland across time. Our scope will range from premodern story collections such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Lais of Marie de France, the Welsh Mabinogian and the Irish Ulster Cycle to modern and contemporary work by writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Connor, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. We will also consider genres that test the limits of the form, including the novella and flash fiction. Throughout, we will seek to develop the theoretical acumen and practical critical tools that will enable us to read any short fiction with greater skill and pleasure.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1135 Topics in Medieval Lit 3 Credits
This is a special topics course for sections on Medieval Literature. Please see section description for details of this term's offering.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1136 World Lit: Premodern 3 Credits
This course offers an introduction to the rich and diverse literary traditions of the premodern world during a thousand-year span of time, from about 500 to 1500 C.E. Beginning in China and making our way to Japan, India, Persia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, we will read selections from works such as The Ballad of Mulan, The Tale of Genji, the Thousand and One Nights, the Shahnameh, the Kebra Nagast, the Divine Comedy, the Lais of Marie de France, and The Canterbury Tales. We will also consider the ways that contemporary filmmakers, writers, and artists continue to find inspiration in these tales from the distant past, adapting them for new contexts, new audiences, and new times. All readings are in English translation.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1138 Adapting Medieval Literature 3 Credits
What relevance can medieval texts, written hundreds of years ago, have for us today? Why should we still be reading them? A consideration of a range of medieval English literature reveals representations that not only affirm but also challenge traditional power hierarchies and views on gender, sexuality, ableism, and race. Engagement with these texts help us understand the ways the legacies from this period continue to influence us today, even as we have developed more liberatory ideas. Popular culture has increasingly turned to the medieval period for inspiration, as evidenced by recent films such as “Catherine, Called Birdy”, or the adaption of medieval texts, as in “The Green Knight”. In this course we will read primary medieval texts and secondary sources to understand how literary works respond to their historical context. Students will produce an adaptation of a medieval literary text that reimagines it in our contemporary context. (This course fulfils the pre-1800 literature requirement for the English major.)
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1140 Literature and the Black Death 3 Credits
This course is online. Examines literary responses to the Black Death, as well as some highly entertaining fiction.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1145 Premodern Worlds: 500-1500 3 Credits
In this seminar, we will travel back in time and around the globe to encounter some of the diverse literary and cultural traditions of the global Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500 C.E.). Our approach will be interdisciplinary, and our virtual itinerary will be ambitious. Starting in China and Japan, we will move on to India and along the Silk Roads to Persia, the Middle East, and Africa; then head across the Mediterranean to Italy, France, and England; and conclude with a foray into the Americas prior to the arrival of the first Europeans in 1492. Close readings of literary texts will be our primary critical practice, as we explore classics of world literature ranging from the The Tale of Genji to The Shahnameh to The Canterbury Tales to the Popol Vuh. Our classroom in Booth Special Collections will allow us to examine some of the rare books and manuscripts related to
these early literary forms. Many of these texts can take us into the history of everyday life and private worlds of thought and feeling with remarkable immediacy. Tangible artifacts can be equally revealing. Taking inspiration from the British Museum’s History of the World in 100 Objects, we will supplement our literary studies with close attention to particular objects held in DC museums, including clay pots, musical instruments, manuscripts, icons, earrings, game boards. What can close attention to the crafting of objects reveal about cultural values, social structures, battle tactics, belief systems, aesthetic sensibilities, daily pleasures? Investigating such questions will take us to DC area museums, including the Smithsonian Museums, the National Gallery of Art, the Textile Museum, and Dumbarton Oaks. Conversations with curators at these museums will enrich our understanding of the interdisciplinary methods scholars use to gain a deeper appreciation of human creativity during this period and to reconstruct the past from the textual and material fragments that remain.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: UNXD CALL (may be taken concurrently)
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1150 Shakespeare and the Other 3 Credits
Shakespeare and the Other asks how it is that some of Shakespeare’s most memorable “others”—his stigmatized and unruly women, a money-lending Jew, a noble African, and a New World cannibal—speak themselves so powerfully from the stage of an essentially conservative society. It asks students to consider whether these voices are silenced or otherwise contained when the texts conclude. In addition, through a combination of close reading and performance review, we will observe to what extent and in what way the choices made by actors and directors change our understanding of these characters, their motives, and their social identities. These wonderful plays present human experience both in its most particular and its most enduring form—in Shakespeare’s plays, “all the world’s a stage, and the stage is world. Students will view several performances on the screen and at least one, possibly two, on the stage, depending on what’s available in Washington over the course of the semester. The main menu? The most likely list would include Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Othello, the Tempest, and All’s Well that Ends Well.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1155 Shakespeare Film 3 Credits
This “Shakespeare and Film” course focuses on five critical questions about the relation between film and the Shakespearian stage: 1) Is Shakespeare on the stage narratively and technically distinct from Shakespeare on the screen? (For instance, does the directorial control of the cinematic gaze change everything?) 2) How have Shakespearian films evolved from the filmed stage productions to the cinematic presentations and back again to the currently popular “theater live” productions? 3) What is the difference between a Shakespearian performance on film and a Shakespearian adaptation on film? 4) In what ways does the audience’s experience change from the theater to the cinema? And 5) How do film productions, like theatrical productions, reflect (and participate in) the cultural moments and places in which they were made?
This class is necessarily based on a painfully short reading list that would certainly include Macbeth, the play most frequently produced and adapted for film (from Polanski’s horror-filled 1971 version, to Scotland, PA (2001), to the more recent production with Michael Fassbender (2015); The Merchant of Venice, whose production on the screen (or stage) must inevitably wrestle with the specter of anti-Semitism; and Henry IV pt. 1—Henry V, whose radical re-contextualization has included the well-regarded Chimes at Midnight (1965) and the adaptation, My Private Idaho (1991). We may also read (and look at) Much Ado About Nothing, for the sake of a comedy, or Hamlet, in order to include Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haidar (2014), an adaptation set in 1990s Kashmir.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1160 Early Modern Revenge Tragedy 3 Credits
Revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and The Revenger’s Tragedy share a fascination for bloody murder and lurid, predatory. But what else do they have in common besides these notorious themes and a certain literary awareness of one another? The writers of Tudor and Jacobean England, we will find, usually took the Roman Seneca as their model, and embraced Seneca’s path of spectacular violation and violence: the five core plays are all haunted by ghosts (the ghosts of both the victims and Revenge itself); driven by secret murder; and complicated by disguise and feigned madness. In addition, we will attend a performance of Macbeth at the Shakespeare Theater, if one of the other plays listed above is not available on a stage in the spring. Another Washington, D.C. theater group, Taffety Punk, will come in to produce an in class workshop. Students are required to write three short papers, participate in a small group presentation, and take two “quizams” over the course of the semester.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1165 Early Mod Marvels Monsters 3 Credits
If the “monstrous body is pure culture” as Jeffery Cohen has argued, then the literature of the monstrous inscribes the boundaries of culture, defining the normal through the deviant, the knowable through the marvelous, the socially and religiously acceptable through the prodigious and deformed. Starting with Beowulf (more medieval, of course, than Early Modern) and its cultural doppelganger Grendel, that founding monster of English literature, this course lays out a geography of medieval and Renaissance English culture through a reading of the marginal and the monstrous. Besides Beowulf, readings include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a text in which the monstrous becomes a late medieval gomen. From there (some ground rules of monstrosity established), the remaining readings are organized into categories of so-called monstrosity: 1) the first takes on the Jew as monstrous, and includes the Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” a retelling of the Blood Libel, and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta; 2) a second looks at the peril of the transgressive-feminine, as bounded by “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and the Shakespearian sonnets of the sexualized dark lady; 3) a third group makes an approach to Early Modern representations of blackness through readings of Othello and Oroonoko; 4) and a fourth group begins with Richard III, but also includes Bacon’s short essay “On Deformity,” and selections from two of Montaigne’s essays that began to naturalize the apparently “monstrous.” The class ends with a reading of Gulliver’s Travels whose eighteenth-century satire conflates the marvelous and monstrous in a way that challenges the beliefs of the Early Modern period and shows little faith in those of the Enlightenment.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1170 Shakespeare 3 Credits
This course offers a survey or focused case study in the work of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Readings may be drawn from the dramatic work or the poetry or both; methods and approaches will vary from term to term. Please see section description for details about this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 124
ENGL 1210 Early Modern Drama 3 Credits
In this course we will explore early modern English drama through representations of Jews and Muslims to understand how the people of these faiths were understood in relation to each other and to Christianity. While Jews and Muslims are often seen in conflict today, in early modern England, they were often perceived to be in cooperation with each other, sometimes against Christians. There are also ways in which Jews and Muslims were seen as radically different from each other. Interestingly, while we tend to understand race and religion as different identity categories today, in earlier periods race and religion were sometimes conflated. In order to try to understand the logic underlying these representations, we will gain historical perspective on relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews by reading current scholarship on the subject as well as primary non-literary texts from the period. How do Christians’ relations with the powerful Ottoman empire influence early modern views of Muslims? Why are Jews a subject of interest when they were officially banned from living in England at the time? How is race understood in the period and why is it linked to religion? How does the unsettling experience of the English Reformation influence ideas about religious truth, tolerance and conversion, and to what extent are other religions considered in these contexts?
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1220 Topics in Renaissance Lit 3 Credits
This is a special topics course focusing on the literature, culture, and aesthetic production of early modern Britain, or "the English Renaissance," (c. 1485-1660). Please see section description for details of this term's particular focus.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1230 Spenser 3 Credits
This course offers a survey or focused case study in the work of Edmund Spenser (1553-1599), one of the most gifted artists in the history of English literature. Please see section description for details about this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1250 Milton 3 Credits
How does a poet make a poem? How does God make a world? How do we make a choice? John Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost, is centrally concerned with these three kinds of making – poiesis, creation, and decision – and the relationships between them. To understand what kind of a maker Milton is, we will read his epic alongside his other writings and compare his accounts of making to those of Christian and classical predecessors as well as early modern contemporaries. Students should come ready to try their own hand at making arguments, poems, choices, and imagined worlds.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1260 Restoration Drama 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1290 Shakesp: Text Performance 3 Credits
The course examines the relationship between Shakespeare’s scripts and the performances actors and directors develop from them. It gives students the opportunity to attend six productions of Shakespeare’s plays, three in London and three in Stratford-upon-Avon. The course begins in London, where students will spend a week focused on Shakespeare’s theatre, past and present. The second part of the course takes place in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. In Stratford students attend classes taught by scholars of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In both London and Stratford-upon-Avon students visit historic sites associated with Shakespeare’s life and work.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1300 Global 18C Lit Culture 3 Credits
Eighteenth-century modernity and the literature it produced can be cast as ‘global’ in many ways—through commodity and celebrity culture, print media, enlightenment philosophy, and the rise of metropolitan centers. This global modernity, though, is inseparable from darker, more sinister elements--the horrors of war, enslavement, and imperial and economic conquest.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1310 18C British Novel 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: ENGL 040 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 143
ENGL 1320 18C Lit of Reason Sentiment 3 Credits
A special topics course for 18C literature sections.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1340 The Makings of Modern Sex 3 Credits
According to some historians and literary theorists, a fundamental shift in social attitudes toward sex took place in the eighteenth century. A body of literature spanning the entire century and a range of literary forms was produced to grapple with new ideas about gender roles, sexual violence, and previously taboo subjects like sexual orientation. But the details remain contested: was the eighteenth century a time of repression or revelation, and what do poems, dramas, novels, visual art, and treatises from that period tell us about our own inherited values and assumptions when we talk about sex? We will explore the ebbs and flows of a century that repeatedly tried and failed to control sexuality, with a particular focus on what was left unsaid, unexamined, and unpublished—in the case of Jeremy Bentham, for nearly 200 years. Primary texts by Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Alexander Pope, John Cleland, Jane Austen, Bentham, and others; critical texts by Michel Foucault, Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, Frances Ferguson, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Sandra Macpherson, and more.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1440 Sex/Body/Religion: 19C Poetry 3 Credits
This course will trace the major forms and thematic concerns of nineteenth-century poetry through a focus on the works of three major poets: John Keats, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between poetic form and meaning, as well as considering how each poet engages with such issues as history, politics, gender and sexuality, and the representation of bodily experience. In addition to the poems themselves, we will read critical and theoretical accounts of individual poems and poetics more broadly. Written assignments will include a number of essays, some done in class, as well as a final exam.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 154
ENGL 1450 19C British Novel 3 Credits
An examination of novels which explore the development of the self within the context of a changing nineteenth-century British society.
Required texts: Austen, Emma. C. Brontë, Jane Eyre. Dickens, Great Expectations. Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Conrad, Lord Jim.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 155
ENGL 1460 Topics in 19C Brit. Lit 3 Credits
This is a special topics course focusing on some aspect of the literature and culture of England and its empire in the nineteenth century, 1800-1900. Please see section description for details of this term's particular focus.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.
ENGL 1462 Major Authors 3 Credits
This course offers an intensive and sustained investigation of the work of a single major author. Focus varies from term to term; please see section details for information about this term's topic.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1470 Mad Romanticism 3 Credits
Mad Romanticism surveys the Romantic period through the lens of writers who were either mad or at the very least mentally challenged in some way; writers who were sane but fascinated by madness; and writers who were totally insane but didn't realise it--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb and many others.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1480 British Romantic Poets 3 Credits
For poetry lovers: a survey of the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley. This is a rigorous, demanding course which will entail a considerable amount of reading outside class time. There will be numerous tests and written exercises that will affect end of term grades.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1482 Late Romantics 3 Credits
This course considers the so-called “second-generation” of Romantic writers--a group that conventionally refers to such figures as Byron, Keats, and Shelley--and places later Romanticism within a broader global context. We focus especially on questions of colonialism and imperialism, slavery and abolition, as we think through the ways that Romantic literature reflects and shapes nineteenth-century political life.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1489 Senses of Brown 3 Credits
While it has become increasingly common to talk of brownness as a racial and cultural category in the U.S., brownness remains largely under-theorized. This course invites students to take part in an emerging conversation about the meanings of brownness, its conceptual and material histories from to the nineteenth century, which witnessed the popularization of race science and rapid colonial expansion, to the present day. In what ways, if any, does the idea of brownness cohere as a concept, and how does it relate to more commonly discussed ideas of whiteness and Blackness? In what ways does the term work for or against rigid notions of racial difference? And, perhaps most important, what, if any, emancipatory potential does the term offer us?
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1500 Victorian Lit Photography 3 Credits
"The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph." - Walter Benjamin Almost 200 years before iPhones and the Internet, the innovation that first recorded, preserved, and produced visual images for the masses – i.e. photography as we recognize it today – imploded the boundaries of art, ethics, colonialism, expedition, technology, and science in its 1839 induction into framing – and exposing - everyday realism. The several surprising and fascinating effects of the camera’s lens to read both magical and truthful effects of the pictures it “took” provide a stimulating focus through which to read Victorian realism in the era’s literature. The camera elevated the authority in perceiving and reading criminal evidence, while it also promised that nostalgic impressions might be kept for posterity – no mean feat in the age of Change. The photograph slyly fought the painting in its greater affordability to purchase and copy. Photographs were portable in a variety of ways, signifying the importance of traveling from place to place and transforming the meaning and perception of Time as well as the relation between creating the image and reading the image. Photography gave a new meaning to individualism, suggesting the power of the visualized “type” to shape perception and perform identity – and even to mislead the former and misread the latter. Photography, in short, pumped up a faith in realism not only in its adamant poses of actuality, but also in the questions it raised about paying attention and disturbing the parameters, focus, clarity, and depth of what we see. The camera zoomed in and out as a machine that could equally enchant and mesmerize, exciting human knowledge, imagination and terror focused on such realities (pretended and actual) as Victorian landscapes, work, interiors and secrets, wars, class and gender dynamics. The course participants will consider these and more varied functions of early photography in light of Victorian literature’s awareness of modes and effects of seeing. Our main texts will be the novels: Villette (C. Brontë), Jude the Obscure (T. Hardy), Picture of Dorian Grey (O. Wilde), and To the Lighthouse (V. Woolf). Leadership in class presentation, two short papers (one a visual narrative using your camera phones) and one final research paper are required.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1510 Austen 3 Credits
This course introduces students to the novels of Jane Austen. We will examine her contributions to the development of the English novel, including her popularization of free indirect discourse, use of the marriage plot, and parody of the gothic mode. We will also read her novels with an eye toward the major social and political issues of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain, including the Napoleonic wars, the abolition of the slave trade, and gender inequity in property laws and customs. But we will also consider her enduring popularity. Despite a lack of recognition during her lifetime, Austen’s novels have never gone out of print; in fact, Austenmania has only continued to increase. In addition to exploring the literary and historical contexts of Austen’s novels, we will also interrogate why their adaptations remain so popular and the multiple, and sometimes problematic, ways in which her image takes shape in our modern imagination.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1520 Victorian Lit Globalization 3 Credits
This course on British literature of the Victorian period (1837-1901) examines how works of culture confronted what was arguably the fundamental social fact of the nineteenth century: the empire. Focus varies from term to term, but each section will highlight one or several of the major media forms of Victorian modernity, including novels, drama, poetry, print journalism, visual art, and early photography, paying special attention to how those forms began to imagine “the globe” as a knowable entity. How did categories of gender, sexuality, race, and even personhood change in this new framework? How were the conventions of Victorian literature affected by the fact of imperial domination? And was the practice of imperialism itself shaped by the works that described, and sometimes critiqued, it? How did the Victorians imagine their era of globalization? How do we imagine ours? Please see section description for details about this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1530 19C American Literature 3 Credits
This course examines U.S. literary history before 1900, surveying American literature in the context of broader social and intellectual developments. Throughout the semester we will focus on four issues that figure centrally in the emergence of American writing: 1) citizenship and the contested ideal of the American self; 2) nationhood and the cultivation of national literary and cultural traditions; 3) literature’s relationship to revolution, political protest, and social change; and 4) the realities and legacies of slavery, emancipation, and American empire. Authors include Rowlandson, Rowson, Sedgwick, Apess, Walker, Douglass, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Stowe, Twain, and Chesnutt. The semester will culminate with a reading of Moby-Dick. This course requires two essays and a final exam, as well as regular response writings throughout the term.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: ENGL 040 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 171
ENGL 1540 Irish Lit Before 1900 3 Credits
This course will explore Irish literature written in English from the late sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, taking up questions of colonialism and revolution, gender and genre, nationalism and globalism, aesthetics and politics. It covers fiction and nonfiction prose, poetry, and drama, surveying the rich traditions of Irish writing in several genres. Authors may include Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Francesca Wilde, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and others. Throughout, we will consider how Irish writers both represented and critiqued the concept of the nation prior to independence.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1550 Transgression in Victorian Lit 3 Credits
The Victorian novel loves trouble. Some of the Victorian period’s most noteworthy novelists, such as Dickens, Wilde, and Thackeray, created iconic fictional troublemakers, monsters, deviants, and criminals that continue to resonate with contemporary readers. What can the Victorian novel teach us about the Victorians and the polarizing world in which we currently live? How can the Victorian novel inform our understanding of transgression? How does the Victorian novel use transgression to interrogate Victorian values? From suicide, criminality, and murder to vivid monstrosity and sexuality, countless Victorian novels center transgression. Is transgression in the Victorian novel found in acts of taboo such as suicide, forbidden desire, and the problematization of class, gender, and racial categories, or does it more readily manifest in acts of speech, dissent, passing, and performance? This course examines transgressive figures and themes in the Victorian novel and attempts to articulate why transgression is a powerful conceptual tool for a culture that is ostensibly conservative.
Students will be asked to consider various definitions of transgression and apply them to their readings of the Victorian novel. In addition to reading several canonical Victorian novels, students will engage with the writings of various key Victorian cultural critics and journalists as well as seminal scholarship in Victorian studies. Students in this course will walk away with a better understanding of the Victorian novel’s form, content, and subgenres.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.
ENGL 1560 Victorian Lit the Theater 3 Credits
This course examines the dynamic relationship between the literature of the Victorian era (1837-1901) and the theater. Course focus varies by term; please see section description for details about this semester's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1570 Romantic Realist: 19C US Lit 3 Credits
This course focuses upon a close reading of certain famous American texts written both in the Middle American Period (the years between the end of the Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War (1820-60), and the early modern period (1870 to about 1900).
These periods differ in many ways, but it was in them that distinctively American values, attitudes and assumptions took root and developed and that the country began to abandon European models, all the while being influenced by them, German romanticism before the war, French Realism after, English throughout. We will be concerned with these developments, but our focus will be upon familiar authors -- Thoreau, Emerson Hawthorne, Crane,Chopin and Dreiser among others -- though we will give attention as well to some who gave energy as well to the changes that were everywhere apparent, and that informed the new republic, altering attitudes that, for better or for worse, are with us even now.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1580 Fin de Siecle to Post-WWI Lit 3 Credits
Fin de Siècle to Post WWI Lit & Culture. This course covers the literature and culture of the Fin de Siècle period (1880-1900) through World War I, and concluding in the Interwar period (1818-1939). Focus will fall on the literature and culture of the British Isles and the British Empire, but some attention to transatlantic and American texts may also feature. Special focus varies from term to term; please see section description for this semester's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1590 American Gothic Fiction 3 Credits
In this course we will explore the haunted houses, woods, and cities of the American imagination. Through our study of mid-19th-Century American Gothic writers, we will engage the persistent question of why a country that values clarity, freedom, religious purity, inclusion, and progress, produces literature so often characterized by darkness, claustrophobia, madness, monstrosity, and haunting. Specifically, we will look at dialogues between the American dream and madness, between “normal” communities and maniacal individuals, between “The City on the Hill” and the “wilderness” beneath. Then, as we move into the late 19th Century and 20th Century, we will focus on specific contexts of Gothic fiction—namely, the female Gothic, African-American Gothic, Southern Gothic, urban Gothic—and we will consider what these novels and short stories reveal about alternative narratives (especially narratives of otherness) that confront the dominant story of a “self-evident” culture. Among many questions we will address: What is the relationship between the distinctly interior notion of America as an idea (a dream) and the psychological nightmares expressed in many of these texts? What are the distinct forms of dominant culture paranoia that issue from nature spaces and urban spaces? Why might the American South be a repository for the Gothic and the grotesque? Major works to be discussed may include: Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales, Poe’s Great Tales and Poems, Bloch's Psycho, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Wright’s Native Son, O’Connor’s Selected Short Stories, Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Selby Jr’s Requiem for a Dream.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1600 American Literary Traditions 3 Credits
This course offers an introductory overview of particular topics or themes in the American literary tradition. Topics vary from term to term; please see section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1610 20th Century American Poetry 3 Credits
This is a wide ranging course that will concentrate on 20th century American poetry. Focus, approach, and thematic range will vary from term to term. Please see section description for further details.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1620 Modernist Literatures 3 Credits
“Make it new”: These three words, delivered by Ezra Pound, became the rallying cry of what is known as Modernism. “Modernism” is a term that encompass a wide range of visual and literary movements, socio-political concepts, and cultural productions that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and developed into the twentieth, concluding approximately with the end of the Second World War. Modernism, or rather modernisms, grew out of the rapid changes that occurred during the nineteenth century. These were transnational historical events that transformed how people perceived and experienced the world and themselves. This course provides an overview of this period by analyzing novels, short fiction, and critical writings. We’ll consider how historical phenomena such as crowd mentality, urbanization, World War I, migration from colonies to Europe and from Europe to colonies, racial segregation, class conflict, and gender and sexual repressions, liberations, and transgressions, played a part in artists’ and writer’s attempts to “make it new.” That is, we will examine how such social, political, and economic forces informed and shaped these endeavors to create innovative forms of artistic expression in literary and visual realms.
To get a sense of the global reach of modernism, we will consider works by authors, artists, and critics of diverse nationalities: British, French, Anglo-Irish, Jewish-American, African American, Indian, Caribbean, and Irish. Course requirements are attendance, participation, two quizzes, three papers (5 pages), and occasional postings on course blackboard.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1630 Poetry Social Revolt:20thC 3 Credits
The focus of this course on 20th century poetry varies from term to term; please see section description for specific details.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1640 Mod Cont Poems Poetics 3 Credits
In this course, we’ll discuss and study terrific Modern and contemporary poems, and contend with some poets’ essays that (seemingly) advocate for such poems. Breakthrough Modernist poems have helped establish our sense of the world; we now drift through a murky era named “the Post Modern.” This course will test poems against their poets’ claims, and against our own, developed readings of poems. We may briefly consider some Romantic poems, then study the titanic Moderns—Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, WC Williams, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and others; then we’ll follow several of the outwardly spiraling clusters of significant poets since then. You need not be very experienced in reading poems; you may even find poems difficult, murky, or bewildering. I only ask, be ready to jump in! Text: Ramazani & Ellmann’s Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry (both volumes), and some short single books of poems. We’ll attend some of our Lannan poetry readings as well.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 182, ENGL 1820
ENGL 1650 Detective Fiction/Film Noir 3 Credits
This co-taught literature and film course rigorously investigates the intertwined evolution of two crucial modern art forms: American hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir.
In the early twentieth century, a new American literary genre emerged out of the promise and threat of city streets and the social estrangement of the men and women who walked down them. This “gals, guts, and guns” school of detective fiction--otherwise known as “hard-boiled”—investigated more than who killed Colonel Mustard in the library with a knife. It interrogated the promise of America and its failures. Beginning with its origins in the 1840s with Edgar Allan Poe’s three subversive August Dupin stories, the literature part of this course will trace the evolution of this distinctly American literary genre.
And no art form rages against the machine more violently than film noir with its dark frames and even darker lives. Taking shape and definition in the late 1930s and 1940s, and continuing through the 1950s, one benighted character after another struggles to make sense of the world-- sometimes failing at the effort. Such failures could be chalked up to many things. But most alarming among the possibilities was the thought that the world might be intractable, that you can never figure out how it works, what makes it tick. Not unlike the hard-boiled detective’s intuition that a story doesn’t add up, noir’s sensibility was an attitude, a mood, a language, a critique, and aesthetic of alienation where cynicism was part of a moral code and fatalism a part of democratic faith expressed, developed, and tested at the margins of legitimate cultural discourse. We shall explore how noir dramatized specific wartime and postwar American traumas about citizenship, gender relations, the reintegration of millions of soldiers into a peacetime society, abundance, corruption, and the fear of enemies from abroad and within. Along the way, we will study some of the most provocative and lasting literature and film America has produced.
Readings and films will include: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, Chester Himes’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Daniel Mainwaring’s Out of the Past, W. R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle, Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1660 20C British Lit 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 182, ENGL 1820
ENGL 1661 Writing Britain:Empire, Beyond 3 Credits
Since the June 1948 arrival in Tilbury, England of the Empire Windrush, carrying hundreds of West Indians to their new home, Britain has been reinvented by communities of citizens from its various former colonies. This evolution has been warmly welcomed by some and violently resisted by others but has undeniably altered the landscape of British cultural life – as the British Empire had previously altered the rest of the globe irreversibly. The confrontations, conflicts, tragedies, harmonies, and mutations of colonialism and postcolonialism are constructed, confronted, and reflected in literary texts that span the twentieth century and beyond. In this course, we’ll consider some historical conditions and writing from the heyday of British imperialism and then go on to read a selection of work by writers of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds who have been significant contributors to the changing cultural and literary scene of Britain and its former colonies. We’ll explore issues of economic disparity, race, gender, environmental impact, and national identity. Participation in discussions and debates is required, helping to further develop your analytical and communication skills. Short written assignments will build towards a final research essay.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1670 Hardy, Larkin, Heaney 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1680 Lit, Art, Film of WWI 3 Credits
Students participating in this timely – and time travel – seminar in summer 2019 will experience some unique opportunities. The first is a visit to the site of the new DC WWI memorial which is under construction. Joe Weishaar, the architect whose design won the rights to construct this memorial, has been a revered and favorite guest lecturer for the past three years to this course. He credits his engagement with GU students as further inspiration to some of the choices he’s made in revising his design to get the narrative “right” as well as engage with DC politics! I’m in process of coordinating our meeting Mr. Weishaar on this site remembering the Great War via the U.S. participation. Secondly, this summer’s students will meet for one of their classes at the Lib of Congress to enjoy the expertise of research librarians there who have recently newly curated the Library’s holdings of this war. You will select which archival artifact you would like to work with to create your paper for the course. You will engage in primary research which is very exciting and also, pragmatically speaking, provides a boon for that cv! Thirdly, the last several years have prompted many historians; literary, visual and performance artists/art and history curators; technology experts; and film makers to re-visit the endless causes, details, and effects of this war. Might you be interested in experiencing what the final moments of the war sounded like? Join us and this experience is yours. The somberly sonorous voice of Yeats in his 1920 “The Second Coming” perhaps most wondrously confronts both the horror of WWI, the brute itself, and the ensuing madness unleashed upon a new century perceiving its ideals lost but not gone: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre. . . Things fall apart. . . The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere [t]he ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, [s]louches toward Bethelehem to be born?” Modernism’s vision ghosts the war’s bitter but resilient afterbirth, offering us a battlefield strewn with individual suffering and resurrection beside the mass shame and redemption. And we, the 2019 readers in English 168.1, enter the surreal fray begun in 1914 of chivalric courage that becomes the sacrificial charge to rescue friend and the barbaric attack to defeat foe. This course invites its participants to read a medley of perspectives and genres of WWI literature in order to ask how and why this war both reflected and catapulted change in the ways we understand and value life, provoking such questions as where is our present or immediate identity, both individual and collective, in light of this war’s influence? How did this particular war cause chivalry to give way to the monstrous? What happens to perception when the beautifully strong becomes the grotesque freak? Did we land in the abyss of the Great War’s aftermath because we leapt from Edwardian extravagance or Victorian hubris or even complacency? How might we justify an idealistic regard (nostalgia) for the past, given our shattered memory? How do we sustain a hope that both trembles before and yearns toward a future in the wake of futility? Why did this world experience (the Great War and its effects), which destroyed the lives of so many, also propel liberation for women? To what degree did it also shift economic class identities? How and to what effect did its technological advances – even with humanitarian aims - participate in moral degradation? Why did so many artists respond NOT with anger or grief but instead with cynical detachment – did they reflect the sympathies of the masses or were they a movement unto themselves? And given the unique (Heroic? Showy? Game-Changing?) role of the U.S. in this war, how has our own nation’s history in global fighting been shaped by this war? How do we, living in the U.S. as both citizens and scholars, remember this war? How does the Great War’s Art of its own time and of our time provoke us to re-view this war and our role within it as well as on its borders? Isn’t it intriguing to consider that the language of the performing arts, such as theatre (a space of entertaining audiences and perspectives), resounds in identifying battlegrounds, often referenced as theatres of war, and the medical operating room, often marked as the surgical theatre. Further, how were entertainment halls – theatres – sites of recruiting soldiers as were propagandist posters appealing to women’s power, the value of family, and an individual’s right and responsibility to enact moral duty? Participants in this course are encouraged and expected to ponder such questions and to create other queries from the readings for each class. Class discussions are comprised of these critical thinking exchanges – everyone assumes a voice here. This trying out and exchange of ideas – including the arguing between positions – are meant to lead you to the creation and development of dynamic arguments in class conversations, a presentation focused on some aspect of WWI, and your term paper for the course.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1700 20th C American Poetry: Part 2 3 Credits
This will be a rigorous, demanding course that will continue the analysis of 20th Century American poetry begun in the Spring Term of 2018. The emphasis throughout will be on disciplined, close analysis of text, and group discussion in which everyone is expected to participate. The elements of prosody are essential concomitants, and all members of the class should be aware of them.
Students should be prepared to write regular short essays on aspects of the poetry. Each essay will contribute to your overall assessment, as will your attendance record and performance in class. Students are expected to attend one-to-one tutorials with Professor Wu in order to discuss their written work. There will be occasional tests on technical aspects of prosody. All these various activities will contribute to each student’s final grade.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1730 Reading Race in America 3 Credits
The aim of the contemporary cultural studies investigator is not to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality. --Stuart Hall
How do we read race? What interpretive protocols do we use, knowingly and unknowingly? What is the language, grammar and praxis of race? In this course, we will examine race in American culture, specifically as constructed in texts by Anglo-American and African American writers from 1845 to the present in our quest to understand better the cultural, social and political significance of race in American society. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the problem of the twentieth century in the United States would be race, or as he put it, “the color line.” This metaphor of linearity ironically represents the demarcating nature of race as constructed, employed, and deployed in the US. We will be particularly interested in how the symbiotic binary of black and white signifies, symbolizes and reifies social and cultural aspirations, interests and conflicts as depicted in the fiction and film. In many ways, the history of the United States and the history of race are mutually constitutive. We will be concerned with how American writers on both sides of the historic color line construct and represent race. By pairing representative texts from nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will explore how thematically, stylistically, politically, and culturally the narratives speak to each other in their construction of race. We will follow an arc that takes us, in Anglo-American literature, from the seemingly expressive authority in terms of race as encoded in The Scarlet Letter to the lack thereof in Light in August, the stereotypes of race in Crash and the hybridity of race in The Human Stain. Of the African American texts, from Douglass's Narrative to Morrison's A Mercy, we will explore a move from codified physical bondage to the afterlives of bondage as well as liberatory resilience. Our primary tools of inquiry will be critical race theory (CRT), Black feminist theory, and performance theories. Readings/viewings may include works by F. Douglass, N. Hawthrone, F.S. Fitzgerald, N. Larsen, T. Morrison, L. Hansberry, J. Baldwin, P. Roth, and Jordan Peele.
How do we read race? What interpretive protocols do we use, knowingly and unknowingly? What is the language, grammar and praxis of race? In this course, we will examine race in American culture, specifically as constructed in texts by Anglo-American and African American writers from 1845 to the present in our quest to understand better the cultural, social and political significance of race in American society. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the problem of the twentieth century in the United States would be race, or as he put it, “the color line.” This metaphor of linearity ironically represents the demarcating nature of race as constructed, employed, and deployed in the US. We will be particularly interested in how the symbiotic binary of black and white signifies, symbolizes and reifies social and cultural aspirations, interests and conflicts as depicted in the fiction and film. In many ways, the history of the United States and the history of race are mutually constitutive. We will be concerned with how American writers on both sides of the historic color line construct and represent race. By pairing representative texts from nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will explore how thematically, stylistically, politically, and culturally the narratives speak to each other in their construction of race. We will follow an arc that takes us, in Anglo-American literature, from the seemingly expressive authority in terms of race as encoded in The Scarlet Letter to the lack thereof in Light in August, the stereotypes of race in Crash and the hybridity of race in The Human Stain. Of the African American texts, from Douglass's Narrative to Morrison's A Mercy, we will explore a move from codified physical bondage to the afterlives of bondage as well as liberatory resilience. Our primary tools of inquiry will be critical race theory (CRT), Black feminist theory, and performance theories. Readings/viewings may include works by F. Douglass, N. Hawthrone, F.S. Fitzgerald, N. Larsen, T. Morrison, L. Hansberry, J. Baldwin, P. Roth, and Jordan Peele.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1740 Literatures of American West 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1750 American Lit 1900-present 3 Credits
This course examines U.S. literary history after 1900, surveying American literary production in the context of broader social and artistic developments. Over the course of the semester, we will address many of the principal historical contexts for understanding the development of U.S. literature and culture during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on 1) debates about immigration, citizenship, and American democracy; 2) the persistence of social inequality and racial discrimination; 3) the rise of new technologies of communication and mass entertainment; and 4) the globalization of American culture and identity. Authors include Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Colson Whitehead. This course requires occasional response writings, two critical essays, and a final exam. Students do not need to have taken U.S. Literary History I to enroll.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1790 Amer. Women's Autobiography 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1800 Topics: Eras in 20C US Lit 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1810 How to Think Like a Writer 3 Credits
How do writers think? What does it take to develop the intellectual tools to write—to really, honestly, *write*? This hybrid course combines elements of the creative writing workshop with approaches from literary studies and critical theory to focus on the inner life of authorship: that is, the reading, thinking, and attentional practices required to create real literary writing. Specific texts, approaches, and focus vary from term to term; please see section description for details about this semester’s offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1820 American Lit: The Sixties 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1830 Beats Generation 3 Credits
"The Beats Generation and Subculture" In this course we will examine the so-called Beat Generation and the cultural context around it, as well as related subcultural movements in literature, film and music including those in contemporary society. Of particular interest will be the ideas and theories around the production of resistant expression in literature and other art forms and the reception in American society and culture.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 212
ENGL 1840 Contemporary Poetry 3 Credits
This course introduces students to poetry and poetics of the contemporary moment. Topics, approaches, and thematic concentrations will vary from term to term; please see section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1850 Comedic Fiction and Writing 3 Credits
Modern Comedic Fiction and Comedic Fiction Writing. This is a class that studies the work of leading writers of comedic fiction with an eye towards helping us develop our own skills as creators of written comedic content. The class will oscillate between close reading and analysis of literary comedic masters on the one hand, and our own attempts to apply their insights in structured writing assignments on the other. Aside from reading theoretical works about literary comedic fiction as an art form, we scrutinize works by authors such as Paul Beatty, Fran Ross, Helen DeWitt, Philip Roth, Percival Everett, Tony Tulathimuitte, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Howard Jacobson, Jane Smiley, Julia May Jonas, Pola Oloixarac and David Lodge, among others. Students will be given ample opportunity to analyze the comedic techniques of these writers, and invent their own. They will participate in exercises that will introduce them to the joys and challenges of trying to be funny through the written–as opposed to the spoken–word.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1860 Postmodern Lit 3 Credits
This course examines a variety of literatures that are remixed, remade or reframed in some way, and, as such, complicate our understanding of authorship, creativity and literary value. Mashed-up film clips and audio remixes that we find on the Internet are the most obvious examples of remixed works today, but there are many more less obvious examples dating back to the last century and earlier. The more literary works of this kind give us an opportunity to ask important questions about our current cultural moment and literature generally: What makes something literary? How is literature adapting to digital culture and the globalizing consumer culture connected to it? How do changes in the way we view creativity, originality and authorship affect our ideas about what literature is and does, and what do these changes require of us as readers, viewers, consumers and citizens? To answer these questions we will take a critical, often comparative, approach to the material. In addition to examining primary works in fiction, poetry, the graphic novel and audio, we will follow developments in aesthetics, literary and cultural theory, rhetoric and semiotics (the theory of signs). The course material, as well as the concepts we will discuss and develop in class, will be the basis for two writing assignments. Correspondingly, we will discuss topic and thesis development, paper organization and research and examine a variety of secondary sources that will help students situate their claims and critiques. There will also be a mid-term exam.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 201, ENGL 2010
ENGL 1862 Philosophy Literature 3 Credits
The course will address traditional philosophy from the classical tradition to the present, looking at how concerns about nature, truth, morality, war, knowledge, beauty, existence, being, spirit, the world, God and the afterlife shape our understanding of world literature and film. Special attention will be given to the traditions of philosophical idealism, stoicism, hedonism, rationalism, empiricism, skepticism, world religions (from Asia, the Middle East, and the West), mysticism, empiricism, phenomenology, mathematics/ logical positivism, pragmatism, existentialism, objectivism, biopolitics, necropolitics as well as critical conversations about the history of science, the study of language, political theory and action, and theories of justice
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1870 Post 9/11 Culture 3 Credits
What changed with regard to lived experience, media and culture in the new millennium? How has a War on Terror and significant changes in privacy and surveillance in the U.S. been imbricated into American culture in the aftermath of and response to 9/11? How did artists in literature, film, music, digital media and video respond to the attack and its impact on American life? In this course we will look at critical theory, rhetoric and art since 9/11 and ask questions about cultural consumption during America since then.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 246, ENGL 2460
ENGL 1890 Topics:American Cultrl Studies 3 Credits
This topics course in American cultural studies offers a focused investigation into a particular domain of American culture. Focus and approach varies from term to term; please see section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1920 Topics in Post-Colonial Lit 3-4 Credits
In the teaching of literature in many American universities, non-Western literatures, especially those of the Global South, are often underrepresented. Sub-Saharan African literatures may be among the most underrepresented, even though many African novels, stories, and poems are written in English. Those African books that do frequent syllabi are often generically “realist,” and too often are interpreted as windows into cultural difference rather than literature worth exploration for its literary value. This course provides the opportunity for students to engage with late 20th-century and 21st-century texts from diverse sub-Saharan African cultures and countries. Students will analyze a variety of literary genres and learn how the global markets for African literatures flow. Students will develop their skills of cross-cultural competency and a deeper and broader understanding of world literature.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1930 Anglophone Poetry 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1950 The Global African Novel 3 Credits
This course examines works from Nigeria, Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Somalia, Ghana, Zanzibar, and South Africa that have made a significant impact on the history of the novel both in Africa and far beyond it, across the world. We will address issues specific to each work’s cultural and historical context as well as consider how each text speaks to debates about the relationships among literature and history in contemporary postcolonial societies. Some questions we will ask: How do writers from across the African continent engage with global processes of writing, publishing, and reading? How do they address issues of race, class, gender, and sexual identity? How do they comment on environmental damage, climate change, so-called “natural” disasters such as oil spills, as well as processes of migration, asylum, and revolution? Writers include Amos Tutuola, Nurrudin Farah, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bessie Head, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. We will read nonfictional writings by historians, cultural theorists, and literary critics from across the world to help us situate the novels. Some other issues we will consider: how do African novels interact with or challenge some of the features of European and US-based literature? Is there such a thing as "the" Global African novel, and how might definitions of the novel change when we look at different forms of African writing? Requirements include 3 short papers, quizzes, and class participation.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1955 Global Lit Social Change 3 Credits
This course will involve the reading and analysis of a handful of provocative novels from around the world with a focus on BRICS countries (specifically Brazil, India, China and South Africa). Most of these works are darkly comical and are loaded with social, cultural, and political commentary. These novels serve as springboards for discussion of class, gender, colonialism, art, culture and the capitalist economy. Paired with these award winning literary works will be several films that either resonate with the themes discussed in these books or contradict them, thus expanding the parameters of discourse on the countries in question.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1960 Irish Lit 3 Credits
Revolution and Independence; Colonization and Decolonization; Nationalism and Disillusion; Development and Underdevelopment—the history of Ireland in the twentieth century is the history of the world writ small. Irish literature of the twentieth century has, not coincidentally, played a central part in the global library, and in this course we will engage with the complex interactions between politics and aesthetics that produced a rich tradition of writing in Ireland.
This will be a survey course, covering the best of Irish writing from 1900 to the present. The course will cover prose, poetry and drama, giving a sense of the full range of literary production across genres. Authors will include W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, James Joyce, J.M. Synge, Seamus Heaney and others.
Our approach to the literature will be broadly postcolonial, and guided by the pairs of abstract nouns above, which is to say that we will be thinking about how Irish literature in the twentieth century responds to the global legacy of colonialism. While the course title and reading list gesture towards the nation, we will venture into this material remembering always that the frame of the nation, which has so often defined how we organize courses in literature, might not always be sufficient or appropriate. We will look with a skeptical eye on nation and nationalism
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1965 Lit Controversy 3 Credits
This class looks at controversial works of art and literature, weighing the various arguments surrounding the texts and considering the motivations of different participants. We will focus on 3 cultural “case studies”: the rise of the public sphere in Romantic-era Britain, race the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and sex and violence in contemporary literature and film. In doing so we will think about the relationship between art and society, the way that texts both participate in and transform social dialogue. How have race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality historically factored in critical reception? Why is art a continual site of cultural contestation? How do aesthetic controversies reflect fundamental beliefs that structure society?
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1970 Postcolonial Novel 3 Credits
The Postcolonial Novel of the Indian Ocean
National literatures (American, Tanzanian, English, French, Indian) are becoming increasingly less coherent in a world of forced and voluntary migration, travel and global trade—our experiences are less and less confined to the boundaries of nations. But none of this is new—for centuries the Indian Ocean has seen slave transports, movements of migrant workers, trade between East Africa and West Asia, mostly driven by European and Muslim empires. In many ways, the regional economy and culture of the Indian Ocean was a precursor to latter-day globalization. In this class we will read a series of novels that emerge from and represent Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia, India, and the waters that lie between them. Our focus will be on connections between the novels of the cosmopolitan world of the Indian Ocean and the legacies of global empires.
This course is a bi-local course run through the Global Classroom (RPX) with students in both Qatar and in DC. The professor will be in DC. Classes on main campus will start at 10:00am all semester. Classes in Qatar will start at 5:00pm and end at 7:30pm, and then from Sunday 3 November will start at 6:00pm and end at 8:30pm.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 1980 Middle Eastern Aesthetics 3 Credits
Post War & Contemporary Aesthetics in the Middle East and North Africa This course introduces students to the aesthetics of the Middle East and North Africa produced in the postwar era (i.e after 1945). Defined by a period of coups, anticolonial politics, postcolonial revolutions and wars that transformed the region both nationally and globally. Responding to these experiences of historical and psychic rupture, artists, writers, and filmmakers produced works that were at once experimental and avant-garde. The works discussed in this class will cut across genres and media, often disrupting a linear sense of time or realist representation of events. Through close-reading and group discussions, students will learn to analyze works for their formal innovation and draw connections between aesthetics and politics.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2000 Transnational Women's Lit 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2010 South African Literature 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2012 Post-Apartheid S. African Lit. 3 Credits
While we will start in the so-called “interregnum” period before the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the bulk of the time will be given over to reading and discussing the extraordinary explosion of post-apartheid novels, poetry, non-fiction, and plays. Authors covered will included JM Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Phaswane Mphe, CA Davids, Zoe Wicomb, and others, and the course will trace literary interventions into the politics, ethics, and aesthetics (successful and failed) of building a new nation after the violence of apartheid.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2015 Kabbalah and Literature 3 Credits
The aim of the course is to examine the medieval Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah – primarily through its major text, the thirteenth-century Zohar – and subsequently to examine the acknowledged influence of Kabbalah upon a variety of modern writers, Jewish and non-Jewish. The first half of the course will investigate extracts from the Zohar, including important secondary criticism by the most famous of Kabbalah scholars, Gershon Scholem. The second half of the course will go on to look at various famous writers – Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Benjamin, Borges – and try to understand precisely where this influence lies, and how it developed.
In all of the textual approaches adopted, a range of contexts and interpretations will be considered – not just literary or theological, but even questions of gender, class, race which run across the boundaries of the many scholarly disciplines this course encompasses: it is a course primarily of literature, but also sociology, religious studies, media studies, history and theology. Questions of theory – Derrida, Zizek, Foucault – will also be implicit in our classroom discussions. Some films which deal directly with the themes and questions of Kabbalah (Aronofsky, the Cohen brothers) will also be shown.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2020 African Am Lit: 1903-Present 3 Credits
This course is a survey of African American literature produced in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read texts that may include explorations of racial identity development, coming of age, relationships, travel, citizenship and belonging, self-definition, and sexuality, among other themes. We will also contextualize our readings within their historical and political moments and explore such cultural movements as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Chicago Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and Black feminism. Course assessment is based on class participation, essays of varying lengths, and may include quizzes/exams, a group project, and/or a digital assignment.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attributes: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul, XAFA name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2022 Imagining American Slavery 3 Credits
In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts, "Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh." This course—Imagining American Slavery—considers what is definable about American slavery as imagined over time in the creative arts. Examining works of history, fiction, and film, students will read and analyze depictions of the "peculiar institution" to uncover connections between America's racial past and its racial present. Beginning with the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs, students will think with what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” and Rinaldo Walcott identifies as “the long emancipation.” In doing so, they will make connections between mass incarceration, civil rights, Black politics, Black creativity, and institutional barriers to Black freedom and aspirations, all within the historical context of the disposability/devaluing of Black life. We will explore the relationship between what Robin Kelley has called "freedom dreaming" and the imagination in defining and depicting slavery in the US.
Specific discussion topics may include the material conditions of American slavery; the emancipatory narrative and the liberatory narrative; pro-slavery ideology; abolition; regionalism; the archive; repetition and representation; constructions of racial identity; gender and slavery; memory and history; agency and resistance; and the idea and construct of freedom. Weekly readings, viewings, and writings will be required. The works we examine may include the following writers and artists: F. Douglass, H. Jacobs, J.W. Johnson, K. Chopin, M. Mitchell, W. Cather, O. Butler, S.A. Williams, T. Morrison, V. Martin, D. Bradley, L. Cary, H. Gerima, J. Peele, T. Coates, Q. Tarantino, S. McQueen, K. Lemmons, and J.C. Cooper.
Specific discussion topics may include the material conditions of American slavery; the emancipatory narrative and the liberatory narrative; pro-slavery ideology; abolition; regionalism; the archive; repetition and representation; constructions of racial identity; gender and slavery; memory and history; agency and resistance; and the idea and construct of freedom. Weekly readings, viewings, and writings will be required. The works we examine may include the following writers and artists: F. Douglass, H. Jacobs, J.W. Johnson, K. Chopin, M. Mitchell, W. Cather, O. Butler, S.A. Williams, T. Morrison, V. Martin, D. Bradley, L. Cary, H. Gerima, J. Peele, T. Coates, Q. Tarantino, S. McQueen, K. Lemmons, and J.C. Cooper.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: XAFA name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2030 Black Women Writers 3 Credits
This course will focus on the politics and poetics of Black women writers and Black feminism. We will read representative writings by Black women writers, exploring how these writers construct and complicate notions of history, nation, race, class, gender, and sexuality in their works. We will pay particular attention to the differences and similarities between the writers and their texts and how these similarities and differences reflect historical, social, and political realities. One overarching question for the semester: What role does the written word and the imagination play in struggles for freedom? Central themes this semester will include: the dialogic nature of black women's fiction; cultural conservation; the politics of black respectability; inclusive knowledge and theories; intersectionality; and the black female body as both ideological and political site. We will employ a variety of critical approaches, particularly critical race theory, Black feminist theory, and African American cultural studies. Writers may include Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Roxanne Gay, Edwidge Dandicat, Gloria Naylor, Jesmyn Ward, Claudia Rankine, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Toni Morrison. This course is reading and writing intensive. Students may expect short papers, presentations, quizzes, and a research project.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 4963, ENGL 474
ENGL 2040 Lit/Cult of theGreat Migration 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2050 African American Poetry 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2060 Intro. to Asian Amer. Culture 3 Credits
Reading works that represent a variety of ethnic groups, genres, and historical backgrounds, this course will introduce students to the primary issues and events that have shaped how we read Asian American literature and culture. While there has been Asian American literature almost as long as there have been Asian Americans in the United States, there has in the last twenty years been an explosion of Asian American literary and cultural production. From children’s books, romances, and dystopian fictions to historical novels and mysteries, from movies and television shows to comedy specials and Youtube channels, Asian American culture is receiving increasing public recognition.
In this class we will consider what this all means for Asian Americans and how to read the literature and culture that is being produced. We will pay particular attention to the genre of the work and consider whether reading different forms requires different critical tools and strategies. And finally, out discussion of various forms of Asian American culture should be read alongside the question of what constitutes “Asian America”? Given the disparate ethnic histories of Asian Americans in Asia and the United States, what does or should “Asian American” mean?
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2061 Asian/Amer. Women's Writing 3 Credits
This course examines contemporary writing by Asian/American women in its multitude of genres and cultural productions. Please see section description for further details about the current term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2070 Asian Am the Public Sphere 3 Credits
This class will address issues concerning power and visibility in public life for Asian Americans in the 21st century. We will make an informed historical and cultural evaluation of the critical factors that have led to being perennially understood as an “invisible minority” and propose real-world solutions to reverse this trend. The class will center on politics, culture, media and representation with some important critical discussions about government and the public sphere. Using Asian American literature, performance art, multimedia projects, manga, television and film, we will observe the limits and opportunities that accompany entrance into the U.S. cultural mainstream. Readings may include works by Jessica Hagedorn, Adrian Tomine, Catherine Liu, Sesshu Foster, David Henry Hwang, Don Lee, Sara Husain, Garrett Hongo and Kaiji Kawaguchi. We will be viewing acclaimed films by Asian Americans such as Philip Wang and Wesley Chan’s Everything Before Us, Frances Hsueh and Steven Hahn’s Party, Evan Jackson Leong's Linsanity and Greg Pak’s Robot Stories. Requirements will consist of two short essays, a midterm exam, a class presentation and a final research paper or final exam.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 215, ENGL 2150
ENGL 2080 Intro to Asian Amer. Studies 3 Credits
In this course, we will consider the history and politics of Asians in the United States. Beginning with definitions and theories of Orientalism, Race, and Asian Americanism, we will turn our attention to the events that have defined Asian Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Paying particular attention to the politics of an event—exclusion, incarceration, immigration, war, and racial conflict—we will examine how and why particular policies were put into place, why events unfolded, and how Asians were imagined and how they acted in the face of racial attitudes, systems of imperialism, capitalism, and race, and ideas of nation. We will focus primarily on how race works, how it’s read, constructed, understood, and shaped by other forces. Given ideologies surrounding race and nation, how can we best understand and advocate for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders?
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2082 Intro: Asian Amer. Performance 3 Credits
How is “performance” a significant lens and paradigm for understanding the historical and cultural production of “Asian America”? And what does “performance” as creative expression, critical inquiry, and public engagement, offer for Asian/American politics and consciousness? Asian American Performance surveys the performing body and Asian racialization through the lens of performance studies, theater, and media. Students will examine performance as it encompasses plays and staged performances, experimental performance, performance poetry, film and television, social media, activism, and the everyday. Students will gain a critical understanding of performance, as theory and art, and be introduced to key themes and issues in Asian American performance studies, like immigration and exclusion, abjection, yellow face, orientalism, disidentification, hypersexuality, gender, and sexuality. The course covers autobiographical solo shows such as Byron Yee’s Paper Son (1997) and Kristina Wong’s Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (2013); musical productions like Flower Drum Song (1961) and Allegiance (2012); experimental and/or activist performers like Yoko Ono, Techching Hsieh, Yayoi Kusama, Tina Takemoto, Emma Sulkowicz; and what might be ascribed the everyday encounters with social media influencers, video games, athletic sporting events, and muk bang videos.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2090 Intro To Race Ethnic Studies 3 Credits
This course introduces students to a range of twentieth-century texts - short stories, novels, memoirs, and scholarship - by canonical Native American writers such as Zitkala-Sâ, Louise Erdrich, D'Arcy McNickle, James Welch, and M. Scott Momaday. It also examines some key moments in twentieth-century Indigenous film and visual arts. Drawing on tribal traditions and worldviews, these writers and artists grapple with the rich, complicated histories that have emerged from the contact between Indigenous Nations and the U.S. With a focus on the concepts of rhetorical and visual sovereignty, we will explore how these representative writers and artists express individual and tribal identities, revise stereotypes and contest colonization. For example, we will analyze how these artists reframe stories of victimization as narratives of survivance and strength. While respecting the specific cultural context of each writer/artist and the demands of the genre of each text, this course will identify shared thematic concerns and literary and visual strategies. To help us better appreciate the cultural work these texts do, we will also read scholarship by Indigenous writers and work by non-native scholars on historical and cultural issues relevant to the texts such as forced removal, Indian boarding school programs, museumification, and repatriation. The course will also investigate recent controversies over the representation and appropriation of Indigenous images in popular culture. As this course fulfills both English major and humanities requirements, assignments will center on the writing process (prewriting, drafting, responding, revising, editing, and publication) to develop critical thinking skills that can be used across disciplines.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2100 US Latinx Literature Culture 3 Credits
Imagine the cultural, social, and political history of the United States, and of the continent and the peoples that predate it, if it were narrated from west to east, rather than east to west? Through a primary archive of literary, cultural, and media texts, “State(s)” offers alternative imaginings of the American experience that resist and critique colonial, imperial, and other dominant structures of knowledge based around intersectional formations of race, and class, and culture, as well as around, gender, sexuality, and ability. Writers assigned may include Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Walter Mosley, Richard Rodríguez, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Tommy Orange, but the course will also feature numerous sources from popular culture, including film, television, music and new media, from the Beach Boys and Los Lobos to Kendrick Lamar and Lana Del Rey, from films like East of Eden and Psycho to Boyz n the Hood to Strange Days to There Will Be Blood.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2110 Native American Lit. 3 Credits
In her book The Melancholy of Race Anne Cheng observes, “Asian Americans have come to occupy a curious place in the American racial imaginary, embodying both delight and repugnance.”
In this course we will examine how Asian Americans have contradictorily been rendered both highly visible and strangely invisible through US culture, history, and the law. Beginning with anti-Asian movements and legislation in the nineteenth century, we will move through different forms of Asian American racialization: the Chinese coolie, the Japanese enemy, the Filipinx colonial subject, the Southeast Asian refugee, the 1992 Koreatown business owner, the South Asian immigrant, the Asian transnational, and the Asian American model minority. Examining dominant narratives of Asians in the United States as well as Asian American cultural and identity formation, this course introduces students to the moments, conflicts, and movements that constitute the field of Asian American Studies.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2130 Narrating US-Mexico Borderland 3 Credits
Literature and the visual arts exist largely as separate cultural and aesthetic categories. There are many works, though, that mix forms from these two categories, examples from books to paintings, to video, to digitally animated text, that combine pictures, drawings or other graphic elements with printed words or text. Such combinatorial strategies have been common in advertising and in other popular forms like comics for decades. Increasingly, they are now used to literary ends, in work, that in aggregate, seems to conform to a new, hybrid category--a visual literature. While it can be argued that examples of visual literature can be found in many historical periods, the application of the term to work of the last hundred years or so seems to be the most productive, given the unusually wide range of examples, and especially given the recent proliferation of electronic forms that demonstrate a similar hybridity.
More specifically, this class will focus on contemporary “visual“ literature and spillover forms in sound art and performance and consider their implications. We will be especially interested in understanding how so-called visual works merge the traditions of literature and the visual arts and challenge the way we read, view and value aesthetic objects, in a culture increasingly dominated by technology, as seen on the Internet, on television, in film, video and graphic images. Additionally, we will explore the concept of “visual rhetoric,” the ways in which visual materials become evidential and persuasive as they parallel verbal language.
The course material, as well as the concepts we will discuss and develop in class, will be the basis for two writing assignments. Correspondingly, we will discuss topic and thesis development, paper organization and research and examine a variety of secondary sources that will help us situate our comments and critiques.
There will also be a mid-term exam.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2132 State(s) of California 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2140 Turkish and Armenian Lit 3 Credits
What kind of place did the Armenian have in the Turkish novel? How do Turkish novelists remember the Armenian past? How did Armenian writers themselves feature and engage with Muslim (particularly Turkish) characters and cultures? How was Islam and Christianity involved in this engagement?
The course is a course of intercultural study; it aims to examine the reciprocal representation (or non-representation) of two ethnic groups who co-existed for centuries together in the same (Ottoman) society. Looking at images of Turks in Armenian literature, and images of Armenians in Turkish literature, but in both cases often extending this to the representation Christian (orthodox, catholic, Greek) and Muslim (Kurdish, Arab) Others, to consider exactly how cultures represent one another. Some degree of theory will also be invoked to understand this situation of selective representation better – Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas – and also some degree of Trauma theory in particular (Cathy Caruth), given the background of violence that these literary texts often take place against.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute:
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2150 Modern Turkish Literature 3 Credits
The aim of the course is to examine a range of modern Turkish literature – poems, fiction and plays – from the end of the nineteenth century, through the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the modern Turkish state and into the twenty first century. The course will have a direct relationship to politics – the background of many of the texts we are studying will be examined in all of their historical/contextual depth. Broad questions concerning Turkish national identity – and the status of other minority identities within that overall framework – will be tackled. Questions of gender, nation-state, historiography, sexual politics, religion and literary history will be addressed as central themes of the course. Finally, the course will also examine aspects of popular culture – cinema and television in particular – and the way they have been represented in Turkish literary texts. Probable Reading List: Halide Edip Adavar, b. 1884 Memoirs (1926), The Turkish Ordeal Yakup Kadri, b. 1889 “Rites of Nur Baba” Omer Seyfettin, “The Mahdi”, “The Refrain”, “After Gallipoli”, “beyaz lale/The White Tulip” Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Huzur, “Acibadem”, Orhan Veli, selected poems Aziz Nesin, “Dam da Deli var”, “Civilization’s Spare Part”, “A Man of the People”, “Savulunuz Sosyializm Geliyor” Tomris Uyar, born 1941 “The Guests at the Moribund Hotel” Inci Aral, b. 1944 Two Stories Murathan Mungan, extracts from his Mardin memoirs Oguz Atay, “Demiryolu Hikayelerci”, “Unutulan” Orhan Pamuk, Black Book, White Castle
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2160 Jewish American Literature 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2170 Topics in Ethnic American Lit 3 Credits
Asian American film is really having a moment. From a Hollywood box-office smash to a bilingual film complete with English subtitles to a stake in the Marvel universe, Asian American films have become a more noticeable source of representation and information for a more expansive and mainstream audience than they ever have before.
But texts, like these films, are not only “sites of information,” but are also “calculated productions and transmissions of knowledge” as scholar Laura Hyun Yi Kang has argued (“A Contending Pedagogy” 130).
This course will examine several Asian American films not just as sites of information but as calculated productions in an attempt to understand how real cultural power is at work in the transmission of knowledge. We will do this, in part, by examining the following questions:
What, exactly, is it about a film that makes it an Asian American film?
How did a film tradition that began as a protest against negative representations of Asians by Hollywood come to embrace Hollywood?
How have Asian and Asian American film artists navigated the unsettling line between personal agency and institutional restrictions, both behind and in front of the camera?
What is the difference between cultural representation and cultural inclusion?
How can artists and audiences redefine cultural authenticity as present and ever-evolving instead of antiquated and motionless?
What role has genre played in the production of an Asian American film tradition? (silent film, documentary, short film, feature length film, independent film, animation, etc.)
What role can consumers play in ensuring an even greater variety of Asian American perspectives in films moving forward, particularly in the realm of the SVOD (subscription video on demand) and TVOD (transactional video on demand) models?
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 208, ENGL 2080
ENGL 2180 The Great American Novel? 3 Credits
This course interrogates the idea of “the Great American Novel” as a lens for considering how the novel, as a literary form, has or could reflect the complexity of and/or contribute to shaping American culture, drawing on questions of aesthetics, politics, and social change. Please see section details for specific information about this term's offering. Restrictions: NA
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2190 Topics in Race/Gender/Class 3 Credits
A special topics course for courses on race, gender, and class.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: ENGL 040 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2210 Studies in Hist of Film Media 3 Credits
The particular topic of this course in the history of film and media varies from term to term. In each case the course will center on the focused analysis of a particular media form or set of them, and aim to locate those formal and stylistic studies in social context. Please see section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2220 Studies in History of Poetry 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2230 Queer Memoir 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2240 Listening to Race 3 Credits
In this course, we will tackle the following questions: How do we listen to race? What methods, theories, and technologies can help us amplify or clarify the co-constitutions of race, gender, and sound? As critical listeners, how do our own identities and abilities shape our listening practices and values? We will approach these questions with cross-disciplinary analysis surveying the fields of feminist thought, media studies, musicology, critical race theory, performance studies, popular music, disability studies, and experimental aesthetics to understand sound and musical cultures as significant matters in the histories of race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2250 Poetry of Desire 3 Credits
What do poets want? Love, sex, fame, peace—sometimes just a good meal. Whatever poets desire, the power of desire itself generates much of their best work. This class explores the poetry of desire from a wide range of cultures and contexts. We’ll read poems of sex and seduction from ancient Greece, medieval Persia, postwar England, and the contemporary United States, as well as poems that broaden our sense of what we desire and how. We’ll investigate the range of poetic expressions that desire can produce, from envy and despair to ecstasy and joy. Poets on the syllabus will include Sappho, Rumi, Browning, Larkin, Hughes, Williams, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Myles, Giovanni, Gunning, and others.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2275 Medicine and the Muse 3 Credits
Medicine and the Muse: Writing Through Change Students will examine a variety of contemporary texts including fiction, essay, memoir and other narratives which deal with themes of change: illness and health, aging, climate change, displacement, employment and other changed circumstances, ideas or beliefs. Change is often resisted, but may also be embraced. From the health of our bodies to the borders of our nation states, change defines the arc of human existence. Coming in the wake of a global pandemic, the worst since the ongoing AIDS crisis, this course contemplates the ways in which change has impacted all our lives. We will consider, too, the role narrative plays in the creation of identity and a person’s personal history, and how that self-creation may be suddenly and dramatically reconfigured through change. Most importantly we will write! Creative writing will form a major part of this course. You will be encouraged to mine your own experiences and observations of people and the world around you to find and explore your voice and different styles of writing. Students will be given practical exercises focusing on elements of the craft of creative writing: perspective, point of view, voice, dialogue, narrative structure. All are welcome, from those who have never written before, to those with some experience and everyone in between. Be prepared to bring your work to the class and to give and receive feedback in classroom workshops. Through this approach you will hone your close reading abilities and writing skills while analyzing central themes of change in its many forms.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2290 International Short Story 3 Credits
This class is an introduction to short story as a literary genre through a broad selection of stories, written in English or translated from other languages. Although the assigned stories are written within the last two centuries, special emphasis is put on the continuity between earlier forms of story telling (such as myths, parables, epic tales, historical tales, etc.) and the modern form now designated as “short story.” Theoretical approaches will guide our interpretation of a variety of short stories with examples from a variety of different countries and styles, which will help to broaden and deepen our understanding of the genre. In evaluating each story, particular emphasis is placed on the elements of fiction, different critical and literary approaches, and individual cultural/social/political context that shapes and is shaped by these stories. Thematic and theoretical approaches to these stories will deepen our insight into interplays of different forces at work, and open up new inquiry into notions of authorship, originality, and textuality. The main objective of the course is to develop the analytical and critical tools necessary for reading, interpreting, and discussing short stories, to appreciate the formal and thematic qualities of both Western and non-Western literary works and to learn how to identify the relationship between modes of story-telling and socio-historical and cultural contexts. Class discussion and oral reports will serve to help you acquire presentation skill while written assignments will enhance your writing and critical skills.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: (WRIT 015 or WRIT 1150) or HUMW 011
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2300 The Contemporary Novel 3 Credits
This course offers an introduction to the contemporary novel, and will focus on longer-form narrative fiction written in English after the year 2000. Emphasis will fall on formal analysis, social and political contexts, and the changing media environment in which this time-honored literary from must now intervene. Particular focus and book list will vary from term to term; please consult the section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2310 Intro to Visual Literature 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2320 American Lit the World 3 Credits
In an era increasingly marked by globalization, is it still productive to think of American literature and culture as defined by national borders? conventional chronologies? This class asks you to think about American literary history a bit outside of the box—to understand American literature as inherently inventive and capacious, fed by cross-currents coming from afar and deeply connected to the rest of the world. We will explore lines of affinity forward and backwards in time and space, and along different levels of prestige, to relocate American writers both canonical (Irving, Poe, Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, Hemingway, Baldwin), and contemporary (Mengestu, Didion, Lahiri, Blasim, Alexie, Ali, Powers) in new global contexts. Readings will be organized around the essential themes of war, food & drink, differing spiritualities, and travel as we discover the remarkable juxtapositions and surprising literary conversations that jostle alongside one another.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2330 American Film Culture 3 Credits
To some, road movies are synonymous with American film - not just a product of American culture, but to some extent as defining visions of “America” itself. At the same time, the lens of road trips and travel has been used around the world to explore different cultures, perspectives and politics. One constant is that characters embark on a trip, whether intentionally or accidentally, which in some way proves transformative. Join in on journeys by car, by foot, by motorcycle, by boat, by plane and watch some of the greatest road films made in the 20th and 21st centuries. Members of the class will learn to read and analyze film, and to become aware of broader issues in popular film and cultural studies: myth, discovery, gender, sex, race, and more. No prior knowledge of film is necessary; we’ll learn as we go. Films will include: It Happened One Night, Paris Texas, Thelma and Louise, Mad Max Fury Road, Vagabond, La Jaula de Oro, The Hitchhiker, Easy Rider and others. There are no outside screenings; you will watch the films on your own.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2335 The Campus Novel in the US 3 Credits
The Campus Novel in the United States” surveys works of literary fiction written since the early twentieth century that use the setting of the university campus to explore a variety of political, economic, cultural, and philosophical questions. A key but not the only focus will be on the opening of higher education to communities historically excluded from such access (women, people of color, indigenous, first-generation, immigrant, lgbtq students, and students with disabilities), as well as its opening to the study and production of knowledge about those communities. Possible key readings include Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, Ellison’s Invisible Man, DeLillo’s White Noise, Smiley’s Moo, Smith’s On Beauty, Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Capo-Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, and Taylor’s The Late Americans. Supplementary work in other genres and media will include, for example, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (play and film), film texts like The Graduate, Animal House, and Legally Blonde, and the television series Community. The course satisfies the HALC and Diversity-Domestic requirements and should be cross-listed with AMST, WGST, and JUPS.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2340 Science Fiction Fantasy 3 Credits
This course will investigate the concept of the future within a global cultural imagination, examining a wide range of literary and cinematic genres in science fiction & fantasy. The class will read a short selection from earlier science fiction writers—from H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke to Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. We will discuss how speculations of the future have evolved over time and address how such classic works speak to contemporary issues about time and space, the science of geophysical disasters, the destruction of the environment, financial Armageddon, pandemics and contagions, governmental control and the chilling prospects of nuclear war and global terrorism. Other topics will encompass Afrofuturism, utopia and dystopia, myths and legends, zombies, epic quests in historical and fantasy novels and Japanese anime. Other writers may include Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Max Brooks and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 213, ENGL 2130
ENGL 2345 Speculative Fiction 3 Credits
This course offers an introduction to and/or focused topical analysis in the genre of speculative fiction. Please see section description for details of specific offerings this term.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2350 Detective Fiction Film 3 Credits
Looking for a genre that is simultaneously and fantastically intellectual, fun, and important to current human rights discussions? The solution is elementary, dear Watson - Detective Fiction! On the one hand, all readers of literature and visual media are detectives, training our sights and minds on the evidence we find in characters’ minds and behaviors, details of time and place, and the ideas brought forth by our discoveries in all of these. On the other hand, detective fiction (tv series and film) raises the knowledge stakes in making us aware of how important a keen perception is to active looking, finding, and adding it all up as the Truth or as close to the Truth as we can get. San Francisco detective novelist, Dashiell Hammett wryly observes in The Thin Man, “The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.” Not all detectives perform quite as Bogartian a wit as Hammett’s Sam Spade, but detectives of any time and place are a rather singular breed, empowered by a second sight often blind to their own natures, ranging from theatrical performers to cynical smart alecks to brainy wizards to awkward outsiders to knights errant. Some wield a gun, others yield to the girl (or guy), while still others fascinate with their “little gray cells” or exude a mystique almost as alluring as following the track of their gum shoes in pursuit of evil. Our own game’s afoot as from beneath the fedora, we enjoy clandestine encounters with several detectives, such as the famous Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and contemporary lesser known sleuths, such as the British Ellie Miller and the Swedish Saga Norén. The range of investigation this genre provokes is quite amazing, noted here in just a sampling of those questions awaiting your responses in this summer’s crime scenes: To what effect does the genre provoke awareness of borders between or crossing genders, insiders and outsiders, international perspectives and trust? Since many contemporary fictional detectives are police, how does this genre expose the complexity of serving justice, including carefully respecting the suspect’s rights? Why do detective stories stand in for popular culture and political wars as well as brain exercise, historical re-enactment, and ethical catharsis? At least one of the episodes of Sherlock reveals the detective at work in a terrorist attack, and a Norwegian tv series prompts us to study detectives’ responses to the immigrant’s story, even as one of the Truth Terrorist’s attacks is his outrage on behalf of the immigrants. As detectives have become glamorized (as well as “realized”) in fiction and film, what is the significance of drawing attention to the detective as both hero and human? What are the uncanny effects of the Janus-faced relationship between detective and villain? As the home (the familiar, safe, and secure) is often invaded/threatened in this genre, what is the significance of perceiving the detective as an exile, a tourist, or traveler? How are human rights and the detective story comrades in arms? What are the intersections between historical violence and despair and detective fiction? How does the detective story provide a site for indignation, rage, and solace against reality (of injustice and prejudice especially) even as it re-enacts reality? Why is detective fiction FUN? ----- Novels will include Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Tana French’s Broken Harbor, and Philip Kerr’s The Lady from Zagreb. Films and TV series include Sherlock, L.A. Confidential, True Detective, Broadchurch, and the Danish original, The Bridge.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 165, ENGL 1650
ENGL 2360 LGBTQ+ YA LIT Literacy 3 Credits
How do LGBTQ youth learn to read, write, and transform the world? In this course, we will draw on intersectional queer and literacy studies frameworks to analyze recent LGBTQ Young Adult literature – paying special attention to how the genre reimagines queer and trans pasts, presents, and futures. In addition to analyzing literary works (often authored by adults for a youth audience), we will also analyze ways in which LGBTQ youth are employing digital media for activism, storytelling, and community-building purposes. We’ll connect with local educators and librarians who work with LGBTQ youth and consider how we can respond to the current cultural moment in which LGBTQ Young Adult Literature is burgeoning as a genre at the same time as queer and trans texts are increasingly being challenged and banned in K-12 schools. Along with writing analytical and personal responses to works of literature, students will also compose digital writing for public audiences in a genre of their choice, such as book reviews, book trailers, annotated book lists, teaching resources, editorial columns, activist videos, and/or educational policy memos.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2370 Pulp Fiction 3 Credits
This course will investigate the highly stylized world of popular fiction, including the literary genres of the western, the adventure story, hard-boiled detective fiction, true crime, the historical romance, the suspense thriller, sci-fi and fantasy. We will observe the beginnings of pulp fiction from the dime novels and the penny dreadfuls in the 19th century to the literary boom of pulp fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. We will be connecting major themes in popular fiction to the growth of old time radio programs and to the study of manga, media, television and film and will be watching a series of documentaries and analyzing pulp magazine jackets. Pulp fiction writers may include Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, Ted Chiang, Koushun Takami, Truman Capote, Margaret Atwood and J. K. Rowling.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2380 Young Adult Lit. 3 Credits
Harry Potter. The Hunger Games. Of late, many books written for a young adult audience have become widely popular with readers of all ages. What is Young Adult Literature (YAL)? What differentiates it from fiction written for adults and traditional coming-of-age stories? What’s the source of its appeal? Why are some YA novels immediately considered “classics” and others banned from public school districts? To answer these questions, this course examines the genre of Young Adult Literature from its mid-twentieth-century origins to its recent blockbusters. To ascertain the genre’s contours and defining characteristics, we will read novels, scholarly articles, and popular discourse on the topic. Assignments will center on the writing process (prewriting, drafting, responding, revising, editing, and publication) to develop critical thinking skills that can be used across disciplines.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2390 Literature of Exploration 3 Credits
This course will introduce students to the literature of travel and exploration. Reading poetry and fiction, we will pay close attention to certain recurrent themes in the genre of the exploration narrative, such as the fascination with the unknown; the threat of monsters, savages, or barbarians; the voyage into the self; the attraction of the “other”; and the mingling of beauty and violence at the scene of discovery. What is the purpose of exploration? How is exploration both a personal and a national project? Who benefits in the end? What is gained and what is destroyed? We will read a wide range of fiction and poetry, beginning with Homer’s _Odyssey_, concentrating mainly on texts from the nineteenth and twentieth century, including Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Henry Stanley’s African travel narratives, Joseph Conrad’s _Heart of Darkness_, Jean Rhys’s _Wide Sargasso Sea_, and Michael Ondaatje’s _The English Patient_. In discussing and writing about these works, we will place a great deal of emphasis on the use of textual evidence. Students will acquire a basic vocabulary and understanding of literary devices, and will be asked to incorporate this new knowledge into their shorter and longer analytical essays.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2391 Multispecies Fictions 3 Credits
What does it mean to be an animal? And what does it mean to be a person? Humans, after all, are one species among many—particularly in America, where a wilderness of nonhuman creatures looms on the edges of the social imaginary. American ideas about other species—how they think and feel, act and react—involve categories such as race, gender, class and ability in often-surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animal life and human identity in American fiction, from the advent of Darwinian thought to contemporary animal advocacy. How do discourses of race and indigeneity shape Jack London’s canine characters? How might contemporary gender politics play into stories about eating animals? How do narratives about the subjective experience of other species impact our attempts to imagine the mental lives of our fellow humans? In exploring these and other questions, students will receive an introduction to important themes of twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, as well as to key concepts and debates in the growing field of critical animal studies and a variety of methods for approaching the study of literary narrative.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2392 Lit of Climate Change 3 Credits
What can literature contribute to the challenges of climate change and ecological devastation? In this course, we’ll tackle the issue head on, as a pressing question for both our historical moment and for the discipline of literary studies. In light of our institutional context at Georgetown Qatar, we will focus on aspects of environmental crisis that serve as points of contact between America and Qatar, including resource extraction, colonial encounters, and water. In the process we’ll encounter landscapes and stories that have been doubly transformed, both by the defamiliarizing work of fiction and by the changing climate. Primary texts for the course will come mainly from American literature, and students will have the opportunity to write a final research paper on a text from any global literary tradition. We will also read some relevant environmental humanities scholarship and selected texts from the growing body of work on climate change fiction. Readings for the course might include such texts as Frank Herbert's Dune, Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, along with critical work by Amitav Ghosh, Rob Nixon, Adam Trexler, and others.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: (WRIT 015 or WRIT 1150) or WRIT 016
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2394 Exile:Estrangement/Enrichment 3 Credits
An increasingly dominant feature of contemporary reality, exile has a long and almost glamorous history, starting with the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden at the mythical beginning of human civilization. Throughout millennia, deposed leaders, subversive thinkers, rebellious artists as well as millions of ordinary people have endured exile at different historical periods and for different reasons, ideological, political, economic, artistic, social, and personal. In the words of Edward Said, “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (Reflections on Exile…, 2000). This course is designed to help students of international affairs develop a more nuanced approach to the issue of exile, exploring its various meanings and forms which include emigration, immigration, banishment, and its various ‘masters’: exiled poets and philosophers, internal émigrés, expatriates, and displaced political refugees. What is exile? Is it a place of hiding or hope? Does it bring about only estrangement or can it also offer enrichment? What does it mean for the exile’s identity? What are its metaphorical or symbolic layers? Students will attempt to answer these and other questions through a thoughtful examination of selected readings by exiled authors and/or texts about different forms of exile, including literature and poetry as well as non-fiction works. The course may also include watching movies and/or documentaries.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2400 20C Amer Nature Writing 3 Credits
This course examines key twentieth-century texts in the American tradition of writing about human relationships with the natural world. We will read canonical non-fiction nature writing by authors such as Also Leopold and Rachel Carson and we will tackle fiction that addresses environmental issues by authors not usually considered to be nature writers. The course assumes that nature is a social and linguistic construct and that depictions of the land and its inhabitants both reflect and influence the way Americans relate to the natural world. Aiming to deconstruct dualisms such as human/nature and civilization/wilderness, the course will explore a variety of questions: How is nature represented in the books we read? What characterizes nature writing as a genre? How have concepts of nature and wilderness changed over the century? How do contemporary environmental events and perceived crises impact the literary imagination? What relationship do the texts suggest between environmental degradation and human exploitation? To help us make sense of this literature, we will read ecologically informed criticism by scholars from interdisciplinary fields. In addition, we will write our own creative pieces inspired by the texts we are reading as another way to understand and appreciate nature writing.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2410 New York Stories 3 Credits
New York City is the cultural capital of twentieth- (and, thus far), twenty-first century America— the center of literature, music, art, architecture, and fashion as well as the focal point for political debates on the viability of cities, immigration, and the meaning of America itself. This course studies autobiographical, fictional, non-fictional, historical, poetic, and cinematic accounts of twentieth-century life in New York City in order to understand the dreams and nightmares embodied by the city in the American imagination. Beginning with historical readings from Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World and Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace and proceeding into the “New York Story” templates of Poe and Whitman, we will investigate the decline of “old guard” aristocratic society in the early 1900s and the nature of the immigrant experience in New York. The course will then focus on the Jazz Age when New York artists, writers, and architects shaped a new ethos of modernity that would define “The American Century.” Attention will also be devoted to New York City during WWII and the golden age that followed through the early 1960s when clashes between followers of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs debated the future of the city. As this course extends into the 1970s and beyond, we will consider the disparity of wealth that distinguishes New York today, as well as many of the country’s other great cities. The course will conclude with 9/11 and will consider contemporary dystopian and stubbornly utopian predictions about the future of New York City and urban life in America.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 249, ENGL 2490
ENGL 2420 Literary Representns: The City 3 Credits
By 2009, according to a United Nations report, more people around the world lived in cities than in rural areas. Nearly 80% of Americans live in cities. The city is where we live, but it is also the subject of creative, theoretical, and political engagement. In this course, we will consider how representations of the city reflect but also help to shape these engagements. What stories do people tell, what images do they create, about the experience and meaning of cities? And why do those representations matter? While we will draw on some sources and theories with European roots, most of our texts come from the US. We’ll read fiction and poetry from the 19th century to the 21st century; view documentary films and parts of contemporary television series, including The Wire; and look at visual and digital representations, as well. Along with informal writing in response to course readings, students will create multimedia projects about specific cities of their choice, combining their own writing with existing written, visual, and digital sources.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2430 Lit Environmental Crisis 1.5 or 3 Credits
Since at least Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (published in 1962), writers concerned with the environment have faced a rhetorical challenge: how to depict ecological threats as both urgent (requiring immediate action) and long ranging (requiring sustained attention while results may not be immediately tangible). In other words, how does the presence of an ongoing crisis (such as climate change) maintain its potency? In this course, we will explore the ways nonfiction and fiction writers have approached this challenge. How is nature writing entangled with the notion of crisis? How has the declaration of the “end of nature” shaped the ways writers have represented the environment? What techniques have writers used to portray a precarious environment and foster hope for the future? What options do we have as literary critics to interpret and understand representations of environmental crisis? Readings may include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood as well as other essays and critical texts.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2431 Zombie Law Literature 3 Credits
The course takes up issues of the living dead in a law and humanities context. Zombies appear in the law in a number of areas, including property law, abortion law, and constitutional law. Zombie laws and theories revivify to control legal discourse while legal scholars press the idea of the zombie apocalypse into service to reimagine constitutions and to debate rights discourse. The course focuses on representation, on examining how law is represented in this very different context, drawing on theoretical texts, case law, novels, poems, drama, courthouse architecture, the Supreme Court, films, and other cultural artifacts. Zombies are creatures with a drive to consume that crowds out all other emotions. Could one argue that the law itself has zombie qualities? Texts may include essays by Peter Goodrich, Susan Bandes, Duncan Kennedy, Patricia Williams; novels like Defoe’s Plague Year, Pride and Prejudice; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; World War Z; and Zone One; and films and tv series such as Night of the Living Dead; Z Nation; Black Summer; and The Walking Dead.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2432 Prison Literature 3 Credits
This course addresses prison literature—writings by established authors such as Franz Kafka and James Baldwin, as well as unpublished fiction by inmates. Many of the texts that we examine are written by people of color, women, or LGBTQ+ inmates. These stories, poems, and essays provide an impactful view of racial and socioeconomic injustice in the prison system. They provide a platform for critical analysis of mass incarceration and related policy issues. We also consider other carceral confinement, such as immigration detention, camps and internment. The course has an interdisciplinary reach and includes consideration of documentary and Hollywood film and other media.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2440 Topics in Representing Culture 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2450 Exploring Catholic Culture 3 Credits
An inter-disciplinary survey. After an introduction to current issues in Catholic theology we will explore ideas about human personhood, the structure of society, the arts, and the meaning of the physical world from a Catholic perspective. Cross listed with Theology and Catholic Studies.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core: Theology
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2455 Intro to Lit. Catholicism 3 Credits
This course engages the study of literature and Catholic religious discourse. We will approach Catholicism as one among many strategies available to makers of culture, those often unconscious traces of Catholic philosophy, aesthetics, theology, and worship at work in artists over the last century (c. 1900 to the present). We will engage artists who embody a “Catholic imagination” by exploring their work in light of the historical and aesthetic context of their time, suggesting the transnational character of this Catholic literary imagination.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2460 War Terrorism in Pop Culture 3 Credits
How are war and terrorism reimagined and imbricated into popular culture? What are the affects of aestheticizing violence? This course will examine the proliferation of artistic forms, which seek to address the issue of war and the attendant concern about terrorism in America by looking at contemporary conflicts and their impact on texts including literature, film, television, video song lyrics and poetry..
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 187, ENGL 1870
ENGL 2470 Reading Lyrics 3 Credits
This course will study early modern lyric poems and present-day popular song lyrics. The argument of the course is that the same concepts, methods, and modes of attention are indispensable for understanding both. Course meetings will split time between the close analysis and interpretation of, on the one hand, the lyric poems of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, George Herbert, John Donne, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, and, on the other, the song lyrics of Olivia Rodrigo, Kendrick Lamar, Chappell Roan, Beyonce Knowles, Billie Eilish, SZA, and others selected from the top of the charts and the archive of contemporary popular music. In addition to poems and song lyrics, course readings will include critical texts that model persuasive and charismatic interpretation, define and explain key concepts, and theorize the history of lyric and its relation to music. Students will learn to identify tropes and figures, scan meter, parse syntax, and situate rhyme scheme and other formal features of lyrics in a larger genre system. Together we will practice the indispensable skill of attending closely to complex and finely wrought verbal objects without turning away. We will ask how an intense and sustained attention to detail can contribute to our understanding of these lyric objects’ social and political meanings. Multiple shorter written assignments will give students frequent opportunities to practice analysis and interpretation, while larger assignments will invite creative responses in a range of media. Students should expect to memorize lyrics and be prepared to read and/or sing them out loud. Familiarity with music and music theory is welcome but by no means required.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2480 History of Advertising 3 Credits
From the dawn of the 20th century advertising has shaped images, recorded events, and created a sense of what it meant to be an American. More than just a thriving industry, advertising is fundamental to the way Americans communicate with each other and perceive themselves. This course examines the many roles that advertising has played and continues to play in commerce, politics, culture, and society. From P.T. Barnum to Apple, this class will examine ads as texts, considering their formation, consumption, and regulation across a variety of media.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2490 Literature and Technology 3 Credits
THIS IS AN ONLINE COURSE.
In this course, we will not only explore how digital technology affects reading, but we will also examine technologies of reading, such as close reading, distant reading, and data mining, as strategies for literary interpretation. Our readings will be focused on literary texts that feature machines and artificial intelligence as part of an investigation of what it means to be human. Reading texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, we will pursue the following questions: What does it mean to read? What does it mean to be human? How do writers represent the relationship between reading and humanity? Can literary texts be treated as data, and, if so, what are the implications of such an approach?
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2500 US Film History 3 Credits
This course is a survey of US film history, focusing on its technological evolution, economic development, and cultural impact over the past 120 years. We will study the ways that different film technologies affect the movies’ social and political significance in the US and examine the role technology plays in the “culture industries.” Specifically, I want us to explore how innovations in film production and exhibition have been used to refresh or redirect the movies’ effects on their audiences. Film and the cinema may seem like well-established phenomena today, but they have been the newest of new media—multiple times! “New media” often seems synonymous with “digital media” in contemporary discourse, but in fact there is nothing inherently digital about newness. This course will study the evolution of film as a new medium, from its birth in the 1890s through its popular and technical reinventions and the (allegedly) spectacular future of digital cinema..
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2510 Intro to Film Theory 3 Credits
When is the last time you saw a film? “Well, that depends,” you might be thinking, “What do you mean by film?” Film can refer to a strip of celluloid, a sequence of still images projected rapidly to give the illusion of motion, a 90-120 minute motion picture, or a thin layer covering the surface of something. “Introduction to Film Theory” is itself a film in that last sense, because it covers all the ways that these different meanings of film have helped filmmakers, critics, and philosophers explain what motion pictures are, how they work, and what they make us feel. If you want to know why a movie makes you cry, even when you don’t want to cry, film theory is going to tackle that question. If you want to know whether Netflix videos still count as film, it will answer that too (or at least try to). If you want to know what is so special about motion pictures—why we love them, learn from them, and even revile them—then “Introduction to Film Theory” can help. The specific theoretical approaches to film we will study include ontology, phenomenology, semiotics, materialism, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and genre theory, among others.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2520 The Art of Publishing 3 Credits
This course is a hands-on, application-based seminar on the fundamentals of the book publishing industry, taught by an industry professional. Students will explore editorial acquisitions, production, marketing, subsidiary rights, and the business of publishing broadly construed. Readings and assignments will highlight these practical dimensions of the publishing industry. Students may, for instance, develop their own hypothetical book, then plan its release, marketing, and publicity strategies. This and other coursework will introduce students to the real world of publishing decision-making. A section of the course will focus on internships, job placement, and professionalization. Please see section description for further details about this semester's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2540 Television Amer. Society 3 Credits
This course examines the history of television and its complex relationship to American culture and society. As a source of information, a purveyor of entertainment, and a tool of socialization, television had a profound impact on almost every aspect of 20th century life. Over the past decade and a half, new technologies and media convergence have done little to erode its significance. Our investigation of the medium will begin with television’s origins in radio in the 1920s and trace its aesthetic and economic development in the ensuing decades. It will cover a range of topics from broadcast regulation to identity politics. Through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, we will consider how television shapes and is shaped by our national preoccupations.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2550 Topics in Film Media Studies 1.5 or 3 Credits
A special topics course for film and media studies courses.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2560 Documentary 3 Credits
To quote documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophüls, “Documentaries - or whatever you want to call them - are just not my favorite kind of movie watching. The fact is I don't trust the little bastards. I don't trust their claim to have cornered the market on the truth and I don't trust their unearned status of middlebrow respectability.” This class approaches documentary as any nonfiction film, video, new-media or animation (yes animation and documentary may seem like lunch box friends but they have become Bffs), that is susceptible to the question: “Might it be lying?” We will study approaches to documentary as a tool for public knowledge and action. We will also examine the social, cultural, political, and ethical aspects of documentary work, and the role emergent technologies play in shaping both production and distribution of nonfiction-media. No prior media or film experience is necessary.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2580 Film Noir 3 Credits
This course will offer a detailed historical, stylistic, and cultural study of film noir. It will explore the thematic, visual, and narrative forms that characterize both the original cycle of films in the aftermath of World War Two, its roots in German Expressionism and hard-boiled detective fiction, and its numerous revivals from the 1970s to the present. It will look at how figures such as femme fatale, the city, and criminality are represented across the historical span of film noir. The course will be especially attentive to the ways in which these films represent social realities of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation. We will consider films by directors such as: Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Robert Altman, and Nicolas Refn.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2590 Introduction to Game Studies 3 Credits
This course will serve as a gateway into the study of games and other interactive media from an analytical humanities perspective. While “interactive media” often signals “video game” in the contemporary moment, our readings will contextualize present-day digital gaming within a framework that includes important analog precursor and contemporary texts in order to better understand where video games fit into a broader media ecology. Because reception, design, and, ultimately, interpretation are intimately entwined in gaming culture today, students will also engage the popular and corporate discourses surrounding gaming, particularly as they address issues of social justice, gender, race, and sexuality. These are some of the most pressing issues in U.S. society at large, and they have an increasingly important impact on entertainment industries.
Over the course of the semester, students will fine-tune interpretive skills that have been developed in other humanities courses (such as film studies or English) for the unique challenges presented by video games and other interactive texts.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2600 Intro to Critical Theory 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2610 Intro to Queer Theory 3 Credits
n/a
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2620 Topics in Government Lit 3 Credits
This course offers a focused examination in the broad domain of Government and Literature. Topics and texts will vary from year to year; please consult the section description for information specific to this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2630 Law and Literature 3 Credits
Law and Literature offers us the opportunity to consider the impact of law on those Othered by our society, to obtain an empathetic understanding of how law affects those who are most marginalized—the poor and powerless; racial minorities, prisoners; drug addicts, immigrants, and Native Americans. The readings range from canonical texts (Antigone, Merchant of Venice) to science fiction to Outsider fiction by prisoners and drug addicts. Many of the readings are by African American authors and are relevant to the Black Lives Matter Movement. We will also consider some outstanding film adaptations related to the assigned texts. The texts examined here invite us to consider important questions of public policy and criminal law, including civil disobedience, collateral damage in war, the insanity defense, domestic abuse, and the death penalty.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2640 Topics in Critical Theory 3 Credits
A course for special topics in Critical Theory, including Queer and Feminist Theory, Disability Studies, Environmental Humanities, and others.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2650 Intro to Cultural Studies 3 Credits
This course will focus on a history and examination of the set of theories, practices and methodologies that define the field of Cultural Studies. By reading and situating the theory, we can critique the production and consumption of cultural objects, including popular culture and avant-garde art. In order to pursue critical analyses of our own in the class, we will interrogate concepts such as culture, ideology, representation, taste, style and subculture, with attention to the specific tensions between language and visual images. Texts will draw from critical and cultural theory, literature, film, video, music and the graphic novel, with a particular emphasis on contemporary artistic modes of expression.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2660 Intro:Environmental Humanities 3 Credits
This course introduces students to key problems and core concepts in the area of hybrid intellectual activity known as the “environmental humanities.” Specific focus and texts will vary from term to term, but primary texts may include novels, poetry, films, artworks, philosophical texts, and digital media objects ranging from the early fossil fuel era (c. 1780s) to the present day. Secondary readings will vary too, but may draw on research in literary studies, art history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, history, and the environmental sciences. Please see section description for details about this semester's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2665 Special Topics in Env Hum 3 Credits
Special Topics in Environmental Humanities. This topics course focuses on an area of particular inquiry in the broader multidisciplinary area known as the Environmental Humanities, which combines the humanistic study of literature, art, and human culture alongside attention to the nonhuman world in a period of often volatile geophysical transformation. Please see section description for information on this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2670 Narratives of Disaster and Apo 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2680 Disability and the Arts 3 Credits
In this dynamic practicum, we will explore the rich relationship between disability and the arts. Using case studies drawn from the literary, visual and performing arts—including design—we will employ disability studies approaches to studying these masterworks. Your own interests and questions will shape what we do as a group, as well as your individual semester-long project.Invisible disabilities, competing/contested definitions of disability, access, and self-advocacy will be central to our conversations. We will also consider art as a form of healing justice. Project-based learning and disability justice will form the core of our praxis, which we will collectively create.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2690 Religion and Literature 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2700 Disability Studies 3 Credits
This course explores disability from an interdisciplinary perspective: first-person accounts, fjction, public policy advocacy, and film. We begin the course with an introduction to Disability theory: What is Disability? How is disability socially constructed? How does disability intersect with gender identity? We integrate film study with our readings to critically examine how pop culture represents, and misrepresents, disability and bodily difference. We examine statutes that significantly impact the disability community including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Family Medical Leave Act. We hear the voices of the disability community, focusing in particular on Deaf Culture, the blind, individuals with autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and mental illness. Addressing contemporary policy issues, we examine intersections between disability and the opioid crisis and the role of prisons as a “new asylum” for the mentally ill. We examine disability from the perspective of aging, in illustration that “able-bodiedness” is generally a temporary condition. We conclude with a discussion of caregiving and the potential for empathetic and often reciprocal interdependence between cared for and carers. This course is part of a disability studies cluster, which will include lectures and interactive workshops with leading disability scholars, artists, and activists.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2702 Grief Grievance 3 Credits
In this class we will explore the politics and poetics of loss in 20th and 21st century American literature and culture. Grounded in psychoanalytic and sociocultural theories of grieving, we'll study artistic and political movements galvanized by loss on both small and grand scales, including: the ongoing multi-genre tradition of Black artistic responses to racist violence, the poetry and performance culture of HIV/AIDS, work on "racial melancholia" and the Asian American immigrant experience, and the poetics of climate grief and eco-justice activism. The course will cover elegiac poetry, fiction, visual art, theater, film, and digital media. We will also explore political funerals and direct action activism.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2710 Reading Motherhood 3 Credits
Motherhood is deemed one of the most ‘natural’ experiences binding women together across time and space. But as feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich famously argued in her landmark work Of Woman Born, it is also a social institution with its own history and ideology. Our course examines this institution as a shifting, historically and culturally specific phenomenon given particularly potent life in cultural representations: that is, the literature, film, television, advertising, video, comics, etc. that surround us in everyday life. Analyzing foundational criticism and theory about motherhood alongside a variety of predominantly U.S. cultural texts—from I Love Lucy, Imitation of Life, and varieties of poetry to Roseanne, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the recent documentary Google Baby—we explore how differing notions of motherhood are constructed, contested, negotiated. One premise of the course is that motherhood cannot be universalized as an experience or as a right (not all women are urged or even permitted to mother); it is not innate or necessarily a biological relation. And while the syllabus focuses largely on the U.S., its structure will address how western and non-western political relations are increasingly embedded in global circuits of motherhood via transnational adoption, surrogacy, and reproductive technologies.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 444
ENGL 2720 Women Writers,Feminist Readers 3 Credits
On surface, the academic field of feminist literary/cultural studies would seem to have a paradoxical status: moribund, in theory, but in practice? Thriving. Scholars, students, and everyday readers still avidly seek out and research creative works by women spanning genres, centuries, and platforms. Yet a crucial overhaul of methodologies and terminologies developing over several generations of feminist critical practice has ultimately been key to revitalizing the ways that such readers interpret cultural texts by those who identify as women. Gatekeeping by White, cis women scholars, creative writers, and publishers remains a strong concern, but this field’s decades-long series of conflicts have helped pave the way for key emergent interdisciplinary fields to revamp current approaches to cultural analysis, including critical race and ethnic studies, queer and trans studies, post-colonial studies, disability studies, and working-class studies. Scholars and teachers are revisiting women’s “classics” as well as promoting new ones to take stock and rethink their purpose. This introductory-level course will essentially do just that: explore shifting perceptions of what constitutes “women’s writing” and diverse feminist reception of that writing. This specific focus serves as one revealing in-road to the field’s history, aims, contributions, and problems. After exploring key concepts, issues, and debates, the course will take a two-pronged approach: we’ll read a series of cultural texts that now occupy a central—some might say “canonical”—place in evolving feminist critical archives while simultaneously examining diverse critical/theoretical approaches to each text (a mix of early and more recent work) as a way of charting the field’s development over time and assessing its more recent transformations. Probable authors include Phillis Wheatley, Charlotte Brontë, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Louise Erdrich, Julia Alvarez, Alison Bechdel...
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2725 Topics in Trans Studies 3 Credits
This is a special topics course in Trans Studies. Please see the section description for details about this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2730 Topics: Cultural Studies 3 Credits
Sections of this course will address topics in Cultural Studies.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2735 Special Topics in Game Studies 3 Credits
This special topics course focuses on an area of particular interest in the field of game studies. Please see section description for this term's offering. Note that this is the middle course in a sequence that includes Intro to Game Studies and Advanced Topics in Game Studies, but no prior coursework in Game Studies is required, and there are no prerequisites for this course.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2740 Italian Cinema 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Corequisites: SABR 0011
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2750 Cultures of Italian Migration 3 Credits
This course is offered at Georgetown's Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, Italy (just outside Florence) from June 5-27 2018. Surrounded on three sides by water, Italy has long been a zone of transit, refuge, and intercultural encounter and exchange. Tourists have visited Italy in large numbers from the mid-17th century to the present while Italians have also flowed out—13 million alone between 1880 and 1915, making Italy the scene of the largest recorded voluntary migration in world history. This class explores this dichotomy, examining cultural delineations of the global, the transnational, and the transatlantic by focusing on Florence and Italy. Specifically, we will address the three major categories of what scholars call “Italian mobilities”: tourism and the “Grand Tour”; emigration from Italy, especially to the U. S.; and the contemporary migration and refugee crisis. In addition to a range of scholarly essays on our subject, will read travel narratives, essays, and fictional works set in Italy by British and American writers who visited and sometimes lived in Italy; autobiographical narratives by Italian-American immigrant writers; and Italian narratives and films that depict contemporary immigration in Italy. Our study will be enhanced by train excursions to Lucca and Prato, visits to cultural sites and non-profit and community organizations in Florence (such as the RFK Human Rights Center)—as well as guided tours and guest lectures by local scholars and activists.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2760 Intro to Psychology Lit 3 Credits
This course approaches literary and cultural analysis through the study of human behavior. Building on the fields of psychoanalysis and psychology, the class investigates how literary interpretation informs our understanding of such topics as: mind, selfhood, difference, social norms, social values, and the critique of all these. The course surveys a range of literary and cultural materials, viewed through such key psychological concepts as repression, the unconscious, the mirror stage, sexuality, the male gaze, the father-child / mother-infant relationships, madness, hysteria, depression, anxiety, addiction, altruism, personality, language, memory, emotion, and intelligence. Students will consider the lives of writers and their works and observe how literature and culture represent conflicting states of emotion such as anger, fear, jealousy, love, hatred, lust, greed, hope, and despair, and place these into social and historical contexts. Please see section description for specific details about this term’s offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2770 Genres of the Anthropocene 1.5 Credits
All ideas have shape, and every story we tell, no matter its subject, has a literary form. This
Core Pathways module in the environmental humanities starts from the apparently simple question: what is the aesthetic form of climate change? To engage it, we will together approach our human-made, geological present (“the Anthropocene”) as a set of conceptual problems that generate productive challenges for telling stories. These intellectual dilemmas have to do with coordinating massive systems and individual action, mass extinction and possible regeneration, resource depletion and unevenly distributed disaster, all of it set along a radically extended timeline that links the present to a geological past far beyond the capacity of any single human to imagine. What genres can tell this impossibly long story? How best to fit human-scaled dramas–the stuff of regular lives–inside the enormous fluctuations in earth systems that make climate change a planetary challenge? And is all this best understood in terms of tragedy, in which futurity is foreclosed and possibility extinguished? Or could it be (as Darwin
thought) that it’s a strange kind of comedy too, always springing toward unimaginable futures?
Reading may include science fiction, “cli-fi,” and the eco-disaster film, but also Greek tragedy, the Victorian novel, and the sonnet. Our written work will be rigorous, multiform, imaginative. Creative thinking encouraged.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2780 Disabil, Cultr Ques. of Care 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2790 Literature and Controversy 3 Credits
Literature and Controversy: This class looks at controversial works of art and literature, weighing the various arguments surrounding the texts and considering the motivations of different participants. We will focus on 3 cultural “case studies”: the rise of the public sphere in Romantic-era Britain, race the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and sex and violence in contemporary literature and film. In doing so we will think about the relationship between art and society, the way that texts both participate in and transform social dialogue. How have race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality historically factored in critical reception? Why is art a continual site of cultural contestation? How do aesthetic controversies reflect fundamental beliefs that structure society?
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2800 Intro to Creative Writing 3 Credits
In this course, we study and produce multiple genres of creative writing, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose, and scriptwriting. We will explore published models of different forms, compose original work, learn fundamental elements of craft in prose and poetry, and write short analyses of the texts we study. We will also hear craft lectures from writers in our Department who produce these works, grounding students in foundations they'll build on in future workshops.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 324
ENGL 2810 Intro Poetry Prose Workshop 3 Credits
This workshop will help you write a portfolio of poems and/or prose pieces. We will read and discuss poems, short fiction, novels and creative essays; work over the drafts of our poems and prose; and write critiques of published works. There will be significant time set for workshopping these works during class once we get rolling on the writing. The goal of the workshops will to determine what the writer is trying to accomplish with the work as opposed to relaying our likes and dislikes (instead of expressing our disparate tastes). You will receive constructive criticism of your work in a group setting, and in conferences with the professor. This workshop offers you a chance to advance your writing skills, gain inspiration from provocative and engaging reads, invigorate your writing routine, and collate your work in a portfolio at the end of the semester. The semester will conclude with an inquiry into submission and publication of work that will equip you with resources to meet the challenges of publication.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2820 Creative Non-Fiction Writing 3 Credits
An intensive writing workshop focused on discovering, researching, and crafting first-person nonfiction, including memoir, personal essay, travel writing, literary journalism, and sports writing. Students should expect to read and write extensively, as well as share their own work often.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2822 Lit. Prose: 40 World Stories 3 Credits
Literary Prose: Around the World in 40 Stories. What can stories from around the world tell us about who we are, about humanity, about the world in general? As Americans, we tend to think that how we see the world is how everybody else does. We believe the U.S., like the pre-Copernican earth, is the center of the universe and everything revolves around us. Do writers from other countries have different concerns? How are the stories they tell different from ours if they are?
Basically, this course is about exploration, about the joys of discovery, and it is about reading and writing.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2830 Intro to Fiction Writing 3 Credits
In this course, we will produce compelling fiction and study how fiction works. We’ll look at published fiction, analyze the strategies that writers employ, and use these works as models for developing our own fiction. We’ll read and discuss our own short stories, and those of emerging/established writers from the pages of small literary journals and magazines. Some readings will be paired with craft talks, interviews, or critical pieces that ask: What does contemporary fiction look like? What might it become? We’ll use the full-class workshop format, but also incorporate other methods of response and dialogue. In addition to producing two short stories for workshopping, we will produce a series of lower-stake assignments, such as imitations, storyboards for adapting fiction to film, book reviews, and responding to readings on campus or in the DC area. Students enrolled in the Creative Writing minor will develop a portfolio of revised fiction as well as an artist’s letter describing your writing process and how your work might grow from here. By special work arrangements with the instructor, this course can count as an advanced genre course for the Creative Writing minor.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2832 The Power of Storytelling 1-3 Credits
The aim of this course is to intensively study the craft of fiction by evaluating texts, completing writing exercises, and producing fiction. In this course, students will become familiar with many styles and forms of fiction; students will further define their voices as writers and learn to critically regard their own work as well as the work of their peers. Specific focus will be given to literary voice, point of view, structure and plot, and character development. Stories will be discussed, critiqued, and revised; by the end of the course students will possess a broad awareness of the strategies and styles employed by successful contemporary writers of fiction.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2840 Intro to Script Writing 1 or 3 Credits
Intro to Script Writing serves as the first rung in a three-course ladder designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of writing for the large (film), rather than the small (television), screen. It is a prerequisite for Intermediate and Advanced Script Writing, the middle and final stages.
The course starts from the Aristotelian precept that plot is character in action. But it also insists on the primacy for film of the image and of montage. From the beginning students are encouraged to see how the camera invariable lies, and how the frame functions at the same time to display and to conceal, to reveal and to mislead. To illustrate this complexity, during the term the course reviews a broad selection of the major films of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of classic American film syntax. Those films are supplemented by a smaller number of others from the Studio Sound Era, 1935–1985. The films are screened for the class on Sunday afternoons; all screenings are mandatory.
Interested students are advised to approach ENGL-284 primarily as a writing course, and only secondarily as a film course. They can expect to write regularly, at least once and sometimes twice a week, responding to specific, craft-oriented prompts that cover incrementally an increasingly complex menu of script techniques and topics.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2850 Writing for a Cause 3 Credits
This class will provide an introduction to the craft of fiction writing. Using short stories and prose excerpts by various writers as models, this course will show you how to create fiction for the purpose of social action. You need not be an experienced fiction writer in order to take this course; you need only be excited by the opportunity to advocate for a cause through thoughtful and intentional storytelling. You will write a brief (2-3 pages) response paper for each of 8-10 assigned readings, examining how these artists identify and address injustice in their work. You will also complete a few writing exercises to practice technique and approach. The primary goal of the course, however, will be for each student to produce, through extensive drafts, one solid, 20-page piece of short fiction that takes a position on a public issue.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 333
ENGL 2855 Writing to Be Heard 3 Credits
“So what?” and “Why should anyone care?” are the two fundamental (and most irritating) questions that anyone writing for a diverse audience must address: by necessity, public intellectuals must explicitly confront these questions within their writing and throughout their careers. As a matter of professional survival, public intellectuals also must develop a writing style that negotiates between high and low cultures, addressing themselves to audiences composed of educated non-specialists, as well as erudite insiders. Whether explaining architecture or health care policy to a wide audience or arguing for the cultural significance of zombies without overstating the case, public intellectuals must draw on substantive backgrounds and acrobatic language. This course will also consider crucial questions of elitism, identity politics, and the balkanization of popular discourse in relation to the role of the public intellectual.
“Writing to be Heard” explores selected moments in the twentieth-century history of American cultural criticism as well as the practice of writing criticism in an accessible, yet intellectually rigorous manner. Students will study critical writing and investigate its influence; they will also practice the art of critical writing in regular assignments. The course will begin by exploring the elusive and changing definitions of “the public intellectual” and reading “Politics and the English Language”—Brit George Orwell’s classic essay on language that obfuscates, rather than illuminates. We will then study twentieth-century American culture critics such as H.L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, the rise of the New York Intellectuals (Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald), the early stirrings of the Second Women’s Movement (Betty Friedan) and the work of African American intellectuals of the Civil Rights Movement (James Baldwin). It will continue with the emergence of outliers like Susan Sontag and urban studies pioneer, Jane Jacobs. The formal curriculum will conclude with the writings of contemporary public intellectuals, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jill Lepore, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Roxane Gay.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2860 Intro to Poetry Writing 3 Credits
This writing-intensive introductory workshop offers close study of a wide range of published poetry alongside poetic terms and techniques. We build a working vocabulary of poetry craft through reading and writing. Students compose, discuss, and revise original poems throughout the semester. This course prepares students for further genre-specific study in poetry and other advanced creative writing workshops. See section description, below, for details specific to particular sections.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2870 Experiments in the Essay 3 Credits
Of the Experimental Essay.
If you recognize the echo in that heading—or even if you don’t, but find yourself trying to figure out what it’s doing there--then you might want to try writing essays.
Right now is a sweet time to be an essayist, experimenting with the possibilities of that protean form as it stretches, bends, and blends with other forms to shape radically new pieces of nonfiction prose: associative essays, lyric essays, braided essays, “object lessons,” and essay sequences.
Following in the exploratory tradition of Michel de Montaigne’s first edition of his Essais in 1580, the contemporary essay offers an ongoing experiment in form. While the course will include readings in the history of the genre and a broad sampling of recent essays and essayists, the workshop will focus on writing produced by the class. Workshop sessions will engage participants as both writers and close, critical readers.
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: ENGL 040 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 043
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2880 Topics in Creative Writing 3 Credits
This special topics course in creative writing varies focus from term to term; please see individual section descriptions for further details about the section(s) currently being offered.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2900 Writing and the Museum 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Equivalent to ENGL 290
ENGL 2930 Tutorial:Read/Teach/Reflect II 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.
ENGL 2950 Ital Lit:Modernity/Its Parody 3 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2960 CBL: Reading/Teachng/Soc Refle 4 Credits
Reading, Teaching and Social reflection is intended for students interested in teaching, and besides the usual classes, involves working for two hours one morning a week (the morning is chosen by the student) as a teacher's aide in one of three inner-city Catholic schools. These schools include Immaculate Conception School in Shaw and Sacred Heart Bilingual School in Mount Pleasant, all of which have been welcoming Georgetown students for the past 22 years. The focus of the course is on teaching reading in the primary grades, and students from this class have gone on to Teach for America, the Inner-City-Teaching-Corps and to degree programs in Education at Berkeley, Columbia Teachers College and Harvard, among other places.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attributes: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul, SFS/CULP Humanities
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 479
ENGL 2970 CBL: Issues in Education 4 Credits
This course is attached to working, twice a week, with a K-6 child at Golden Rule Apartments, about 5 miles from campus, on reading and the language arts, and attending a seminar in which teaching, pedagogy, and related matters are discussed. Students will keep a journal relating to their work, and also write a course paper on a topic to be agreed and negotiated with the instructor.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2980 CBL: Sursum Corda 4 Credits
This course involves getting to know and teaching reading and the language arts to a school aged child living in Golden Rule Apartments in Washington D.C. The teaching will be done either face-to-face, as we have done in the past, which involves travelling to Golden Rule twice weekly, or teaching virtually, as we did during the last academic year, 2020-2021, in which case we will avail ourselves of the Raz-kids reading program, so as to allow tutor and learner to address the same text from different locations. Traditionally, the course involves readings in pedagogy and literature, two tutorial sessions, a weekly seminar, a journal, a midterm and a final exam and a course paper.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 2990 Lit Journalism DC 3 Credits
(Note: this class is co-listed as JOUR 373)
Washington, D.C., the nation’s center of politics and government, attracts many of the best and the brightest, people who come here for a time to “brand” themselves through press conferences, photo ops and tweets that demonstrate proximity to power. But is also a place where real people live, as did their forebears, and where history’s ghosts dwell. This course explores how some of the premier writers and journalists of the last 150 years have read the capital city. Why do novelists, poets and filmmakers portray Washington the way they do? It is a place that engenders fiction that masquerades as non-fiction and vice versa. Roman a clefs and anonymous sources abound. Do journalists in this town approach the exercise of power – played out in the corridors and back rooms of deal making-- fundamentally differently than novelists? What is it about this city that lends itself more readily to being immortalized by journalists than novelists and poets? How is Washington politics and the powerbrokers who practice it represented in literature and journalism? How are the butlers, the nannies, the refugees, the undocumented, the ghostwriters, the maître ds, the body men, the interns – those behind the scenes and on the margins – used in literature and journalism to tell stories? How is Washington as a character itself portrayed in these various genres? Taught by English professor and book critic Maureen Corrigan and journalism director and former political ghostwriter Barbara Feinman Todd.
Level: Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 3024 AI Professional Writing 3 Credits
Used ethically and with savvy, AI is a valuable tool for professional communication. Yet even in academic settings, where there are explicit policies and expectations governing its use, it can be difficult to understand how best to harness AI’s potential. In the professional world where such policies are often more ambiguous or even absent, navigating when and how to best make use of AI tools can be even more challenging. This course examines how AI is used in a range of professional settings, helping students understand how to evaluate workplace norms surrounding its use, how to navigate the transition from academic expectations for AI use to professional ones, and how best to capitalize on its potential in their post-college careers.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students with the Capitol Applied Learning Lab attribute.
ENGL 3032 Topics in 18th C Lit Culture 3 Credits
This course examines a special topic in the literature and culture of the 18th Century (1700-1800). Please see section description for details about this term's offering.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4000 Capitalism and Mysticism 3 Credits
The aim of the course is to examine – across a truly wide range of disciplines (religious studies, theology, philosophy, history, literature, cultural studies, political science, cinema) two central points: the political possibilities of resistance within certain forms of the mystical, with specific reference to insurgencies/revolutions/uprisings which comprised some form of mystical language, as well as the way the language of certain mystics (Rumi, Eckhart, Hildegaard von Bingen, and others) spoke about material questions of power, capital and the wealthy; secondly, the extent to which contemporary capitalism has been able to appropriate mystical notions of incommensurability, resistance to conceptualization, invocations of the sublime in order to lubricate the structure of late capitalism. Medieval German mystics (along with Marxist commentators on them), Turkish communist poetry, mysticism within anti-colonial movements, twentieth century American fiction will all feature amongst our sustained analysis of the relationship between the mystical and the political. Figures from theory – Zizek, Jean Luc Marion, Derrida, and others – will also feature as a supplementary framework within which to analyse notions of exchange and the radically incommensurable.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4010 South Asian Lit 3 Credits
A literature course on modern South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Nepali, Bangladeshi) fiction, broadly covering the 20th century, and involving political and postcolonial aspects.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4030 Medieval Sexualities 3 Credits
To what extent do social, religious, and political institutions form and deform erotic choices and definitions? This course aims to understand the variety of medieval sexualities and their impacts from a comparative sampling of varied textual types and social institutions in Irish, Welsh, English, French, and German texts. We will study depictions of sexualities and gender issues they raise, with some background on classical and medieval biological and medical texts, religious thought and law, depictions in art, and the cultural variation present across regions and periods from c. 500-1500. Students might expect, for example, to learn more of Anglo-Saxon attitudes concerning masculinity from penitentials or Beowulf, to think about the implications of Irish monastic attitudes for reading women in Irish myth, to read courtly literature through the lens of contemporary medical knowledge, or to consider the connection between prosecution of heresies and accusations of deviance. Those interested in material culture may extend their work to include art, manuscripts, and archaeological evidence. You will be expected to build up your understanding of medieval contexts and to learn to research sources in medieval studies and in the fields of sexuality and gender studies, working on a shorter paper and research during the term and culminating in a longer, final written project on a topic developed in consultation with the professor.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4035 Chaucer 3 Credits
In this course, we will engage with the works of one of the most brilliant, frustrating, perceptive, funny, and creative writers in the English literary tradition. We will read selections from the celebrated Canterbury Tales, but we will also take up Chaucer’s lesser-known masterpiece, Troilus and Criseyde, as well as some of the lyrics and shorter poems, all in the original Middle English. Contextual and critical essays (including approaches from postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist perspectives) will guide our discussions. No prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval literature is required.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4040 Medieval English Literature 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4045 Medieval European Literature 3 Credits
In this course, we will we read many of the finest works of the European literary tradition, including The Song of Roland, El Cid, troubadour lyrics and their Arabic models, the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Lais of Marie de France, and selections from Juan Ruiz’s Book of Good Love, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Our focus will be on close readings of the literary texts themselves, but we will also bring cultural contexts to bear in our efforts to better understand and enjoy them. All readings will be in modern English translation.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4050 Tolkien and Medieval Roots 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4055 Adv. Topics in Early Lit 3 Credits
A Special Topics course for Advanced Early Literature sections.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4060 Shakespeare:Historical Context 3 Credits
In this class we will read very carefully four of Shakespeare’s comedies (early, middle and late) in conjunction with a selection of non-literary early modern texts. Our attention will focus on the plays, but we will spend a good deal of time on texts written by other authors contemporary to Shakespeare. These other texts address central issues raised in the plays – class, gender, sexual identity, marriage, religion, among others – and help provide an understanding of the variety of opinions available in the period. By familiarizing ourselves with the plays’ cultural contexts, we will develop a historically grounded perspective from which we can view more clearly Shakespeare’s formulation of these issues, and deepen our understanding of both the literature and the culture of early modern England. We will also read and analyze recent essays of literary criticism that take a historicist approach in their interpretation of the plays; these will serve as models for the final project.
This course assumes some familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays and with literary theory; while not a pre-requisite, I strongly recommend taking ENGL-090 before enrolling in this course. Students will have the opportunity to contribute to the syllabus by researching and selecting a critical essay with a historicist approach on one of the plays we are reading. In addition, you will undertake primary research on a non-literary context of one of the plays, making use of secondary historical sources and early modern texts through the database Early English Books On-line.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4065 Race/Relig in Early Mod Drama 3 Credits
As is the case today, a wide range of cultural representation circulating in pre-modern England engaged with ideas of race and racism. A study of the longer history of racism demonstrates continuities with and divergences from our current reckoning with this problem. Understanding the legacy of racial representations helps clarify its contemporary forms. This course will consider pre- and early modern formulations of racism, noting the importance of religious identity and belief as well as physical features. We will analyze a range of non-literary medieval and early modern texts as well as images to encounter pre-modern racial thinking. We will also read a number of plays representing racialized difference in conversation with these other cultural forms to explore the development and articulation of racial fictions.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 467
ENGL 4070 Wordsworth and Byron 3 Credits
This will be a rigorous, demanding course that will focus on the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron. The emphasis throughout will be on disciplined, close analysis of text, and group discussion in which everyone is expected to participate. The elements of prosody are essential concomitants, and all members of the class should be aware of them. Students should be prepared to write regular short essays on aspects of the poetry. Each essay will contribute to your overall assessment, as will your attendance record and performance in class. Students are expected to attend one-to-one tutorials with Professor Wu in order to discuss their written work. There will be occasional tests on technical aspects of prosody and frequent quizzes on the historical and cultural background. All these various activities will contribute to each student’s final grade.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4075 Masterworks of Wordsworth 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4080 Keats Byron 3 Credits
From doilies and ornate wallpaper to the stiff-necked curates and gossiping parlor ladies of Masterpiece Theater, the Victorian period (1837-1901) has long been stereotyped as an age of conformity. Criticism has replayed these popular images of Victorian orthodoxy by charting the powerful forces of normalization in this era: the rise of the middle class, the ascent of commodity capitalism, the establishment of modern gender hierarchies, and the consolidation of heteronormative “decency,” to name just a few.
But where canonical approaches to Victorian literature and culture have focused on literature’s ability to produce sameness, this class will focus on difference -- and on how literary thinking helped imagine it. Rather than attending to those modes of Victorian life seemingly most characteristic of the age, we will explore forms of being and thinking that were counternormative, antihegemonic, insurgent, queer, and strange. Our concern, in other words, will be on the possibility for otherness in an age of homogenization. When mass culture and social sameness threaten to subsume all difference, how might literature imagine the new?
Because these questions are simultaneously historical and theoretical, our readings will be organized along two axes. First, we will examine literary and critical writing from the Victorian era: canonical novels, key poetry, political theory, and items of erotica, ephemera, philosophy, and orientalism. Second we will sample modern thinking about difference by literary and cultural critics from a variety of traditions, including feminist theory, queer theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, among others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4085 Masterworks of Romanticism 3 Credits
The focus of this course varies from term to term; please see section description for specific content.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Prerequisites: CPLT 043 or CULP 043 or CULP 044 or (CULP 045 or CULP 2100) or (GERM 043 or GERM 2500) or RUSS 043 or GERM 042 or ENGL 043 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 040 or IDST 003 or FREN 043
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4090 The Other Victorians 3 Credits
This will be a rigorous, demanding course that will focus on the poetry and non-fiction prose of two second generation British Romantic poets: Byron and Keats. The emphasis throughout will be on disciplined, close analysis of text, and group discussion in which everyone is expected to participate. The elements of prosody are essential elements to our study, and all members of the class will be expected to memorize them. Students should be prepared to write regular short essays on aspects of the poetry. Each essay will contribute to your overall assessment, as will your attendance record and performance in class. Students are expected to attend one-to-one tutorials with Professor Wu in order to discuss their written work. There will be occasional tests on technical aspects of prosody. All these various activities will contribute to each student’s final grade.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4091 Situationships of the 19C 3 Credits
A "situationship" is a relationship that breaks norms of monogamy, intimacy, or commitment and is defined by its being UNdefined. This class will take a look at the power dynamics of personal, social, and global "situationships" of 19th century British literature. Each text will engage with this subject in one or more of the following frameworks:
1. On the level of narrative - The text has a classic romantic and/or sexual "situationship" between two(ish) people. 2. On the level of politics/context - The text overtly engages with questions about the British empire/power relations between metropole/colonies and/or globalization. 3. On the level of form - The text uses the classic situationship (1) as a screen to covertly engage with questions about power relations (2). Ex: Persuasion is a ~romance novel~ that just so happens to spend most of its time talking about how great the British navy is...
1. On the level of narrative - The text has a classic romantic and/or sexual "situationship" between two(ish) people. 2. On the level of politics/context - The text overtly engages with questions about the British empire/power relations between metropole/colonies and/or globalization. 3. On the level of form - The text uses the classic situationship (1) as a screen to covertly engage with questions about power relations (2). Ex: Persuasion is a ~romance novel~ that just so happens to spend most of its time talking about how great the British navy is...
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4092 Senses of Brown 3 Credits
While it has become increasingly common to talk of brownness as a racial and cultural category in the U.S., brownness remains largely under-theorized. This course invites students to take part in an emerging conversation about the meanings of brownness, its conceptual and material histories from to the nineteenth century, which witnessed the popularization of race science and rapid colonial expansion, to the present day. In what ways, if any, does the idea of brownness cohere as a concept, and how does it relate to more commonly discussed ideas of whiteness and Blackness? In what ways does the term work for or against rigid notions of racial difference? And, perhaps most important, what, if any, emancipatory potential does the term offer us?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4095 Dickens 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: SFS/CULP Humanities
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4100 Oscar Wilde 3 Credits
In this class, we will read Wilde’s work in several genres--poetry, narrative, non-fiction prose, drama, essays, and letters--analyzing his notions of gender, sexuality, nation, religion, and literary style. We will consider how the texts construct a literary persona and how that persona interacts with and challenges Wilde’s contemporary culture as well as our own. How does Wilde produce--and undermine--our notion of “Wilde”? In addition to reading Wilde’s own literature, the class will also read extensive contextual works, including other nineteenth-century literary texts, the transcripts of the trials, as well as recent critical, theoretical, and literary accounts of Wilde’s work and life. There will be both formal papers and in-class writing assignments in the course of the semester.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 474, ENGL 4963
ENGL 4102 Cosmopolitanism 3 Credits
This course considers the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in literatures from the 19th century to the present. Begins with theories of “world-citizenship” in British Romanticism and looks at the development of these ideas across a range of cultural contexts, drawing on examples from across the Anglophone world. Authors include James Joyce, E.M. Forster, V.S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4105 Reading Emily Dickinson 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4110 US Culture: The Depression Era 3 Credits
In the United States, the phrase "Great Depression" calls to mind itinerant sharecroppers and ramshackle houses, unemployment lines and labor strikes, fireside chats and WPA murals. Drawing on a wide variety of primary source materials, this course examines the Depression Era (1929 to 1941, roughly) in myth and reality. It also considers why this period retains a powerful hold on national memory, particularly in our era of renewed economic uncertainty. Writings by Carlos Bulosan, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright; photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorthea Lange; films by Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges--among many others. Students interested in interdisciplinary approaches to American culture and history are particularly encouraged to enroll.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4115 The Life of Objects:1880-1930 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in American Studies, American Studies, American Studies, American Studies, English, English, English or English.
ENGL 4120 Modern Irish Novel 3 Credits
Ulysses: In this course we will read just one novel: James Joyce's Ulysses. We will move slowly and deliberately through one of the best and most difficult of modernist novels, paying close attention to its form, style, historical and philosophical contexts, and more. A range of class visitors will help us to understand the novel's resonance in present-day critical and cultural debates.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4125 Lit in the Time of Empire 3 Credits
The British Empire was the dominant world power for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this course we will study six English-language writers of diverse national and geographical backgrounds whose texts show a distinct awareness of the Empire as a political and cultural force. Beginning with a brief consideration of the literary representation of empire in previous eras, we will turn our attention to the prose and poetry of Alfred Tennyson (born in England), Joseph Conrad (born in Ukraine), Rudyard Kipling (born in India), W.B. Yeats (born in Ireland), T.S. Eliot (born in USA), and Derek Walcott (born in St. Lucia, West Indies), to see how the cultural power of England and the English language figure variously in their works.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4128 East Africa the Indian Ocean 4 Credits
This seminar introduces students to the study of the Indian Ocean World, focusing on East Africa. The course engages multidisciplinary perspectives in the humanities.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4129 Indian Ocean Research Colloq 4 Credits
This is a multidisciplinary research colloquium on the Indian Ocean with an experiential learning component, designed to allow students to develop independent research projects.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: XHIS name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4130 Migration, Detention, Asylum 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4132 SouthAfrica inthe Indian Ocean 4 Credits
This is a multidisciplinary research colloquium on the Indian Ocean with an experiential learning component, designed to allow students to develop independent research projects.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4133 Latinx Literature Now 3 Credits
This course surveys Latinx literary and other cultural and media work created in the past 5 years to gauge the state of Latinx life in the US during our epochally momentous "present," the one unfolding since 2019. While focusing on works of fiction. poetry, and drama, the course will also feature works from the visual and media arts, including film, television, and music. Writers may include Ada Limón, Carmen Maria Machado, Carmen Giménez Smith, Natalie Diaz, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Javier Zamora, and Hernán Díaz.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Equivalent to ENGL 6410
ENGL 4134 Reading James Baldwin 3 Credits
This seminar will examine the life work and the afterlife of James Baldwin, one of the 20th century's most important writers, activists, and social justice advocates. His work spans a number of genres (essays, short stories, plays, novels) and engages topics such as race, racism, music, film, politics, love, nation, gender, history, sexuality, and intimacy. A self-proclaimed witness, Baldwin offers a critical view of American society from the 1940s to 1980s.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4135 Reading Invisible Man 3 Credits
This course considers Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel "Invisible Man" within and against the literary, philosophical, and vernacular traditions that influenced its composition. Not only will we read Ellison’s writings (both fiction and non-fiction) in detail, we will also examine many of the cultural sources on which "Invisible Man" draws: music by Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rushing, and Charlie Parker; fiction by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Wright, Mark Twain, Ann Petry, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; and writings by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and T.S. Eliot. We will have two main goals throughout the course of the semester: first, to understand Ellison’s complex vision of the African American experience; second, to understand the centrality of that experience to modern American life and art.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4138 Writing Black Love 3 Credits
This course explores how various forms of love are imagined in contemporary Black writing on a global scale. From parent-child affections, to romance and marriage, to the closeness between friends, "love" is a central theme in literature and a crucial part of how we define humanity. Focusing on contemporary texts such as Justin Torres's We the Animals, Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Dee Rees's Pariah, Toni Morrison's Love, and the works of poets and lyricists including Yusef Komunyakaa, Warsan Shire, Big Freedia, and Cardi B, we will consider how various forms of intimacy are written and read in the African Diaspora. We will read these works alongside key short works from earlier moments in Black literature, as well as theoretical and critical texts in Diaspora feminism, sexuality studies, affect theory, and queer theory to consider several questions: What do literary love relationships reveal about cultural notions of gender, sexuality, class, (dis)ability, embodiment and spirituality? How are intimacy and human connection evoked differently through magic realism, experimentalism, and other Diasporic poetic and aesthetic techniques? What forms and media do black artists use to evoke the love of place, nation and home? What visions of love do these black writers develop, and how do such visions impact how freedom is imagined in Black literature?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: XAFA name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4140 Reading Toni Morrison 3 Credits
In 1993, Toni Morrison became the eighth woman, first African American, first African American woman, and first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the most coveted literary prize. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised her as one "who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." This senior seminar–Toni Morrison–seeks to identify and to examine that "essential aspect of American reality" in Morrison's novels and short story—Black lives. For Morrison, Black lives have always mattered, and the essential aspect of her work is her commitment to the experiences, intricacies and complexities of Black lives in American society. In her novels, Morrison chronicles African American experience from slavery to post-integration. In so doing, she has added not only to the African American literary and cultural landscape but also to the American literary and cultural landscape. We will explore the ways Morrison writes history, nation, family, race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. As she explains in her Nobel lecture, "official language" represents dominant ideologies, including ideologies that can prevent the circulation of new and generative knowledge and can also hinder the exchange of ideas. Morrison’s works, in many ways, challenge and complicate hegemonic institutions and ideologies that oppress, suppress, and/or exclude non-majority groups. Reading critical essays by scholars as well as Morrison’s own criticism and interviews will assist our understanding of Morrison's literary goals. Specifically, we will explore the ways Morrison constructs discourses that expand, refute, resist, and complicate historical discourses and ideologies about Black life. Students will be able to discuss aspects of Toni Morrison’s writing, including, but not limited to, the differences and similarities between Morrison’s texts and how those similarities and differences reflect changing historical, social, and political perspectives. We will examine Morrison's works from a variety of critical approaches, particularly critical race theory, Black feminist theories, and African American cultural studies. Reading critical essays by scholars as well as Morrison’s own criticism and interviews will assist our understanding of Morrison's literary goals. The politics of race will foreground our discussions. This course is discussion, reading and writing intensive. Students may expect blogging, short papers, quizzes, and a research project.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4145 Black Home Spaces in the US 3 Credits
What does it mean to be at home? How do home and nation intersect? What are some of the ways African Americans have cultivated home spaces, and within what societal conditions? Using these questions and drawing from literature, geography, black feminism, and film, we will explore home space as a force and factor in shaping black identities in the U.S.
As microcosms of cities and the nation, home spaces are structured by the social, economic, political, and historical landscape of a society. As places of individual and communal living and dwelling, home spaces shape and are shaped by people. To study home is necessarily to study nation, family and affective ties, gender, and built space. In the United States, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, restrictive covenants, and gentrification have targeted and disproportionately affected black lives, communities, and home spaces. In the face of this dehumanization, devaluation, and discrimination, black people have found ways to claim, make, and obtain spaces and senses of home, whether fleeting or permanent, conceptual or concrete. Modes of homemaking serve as a lens through which to ascertain the challenges, triumphs, and banalities of black life in the U.S. throughout history.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: XAFA name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4150 Black Queer Feminisms 3 Credits
This course will explore the writing, music, art, media and cultural thought of queer feminist figures of the African Diaspora. Pairing important creative works with key texts in black queer and feminist theory from various Diaspora locations, we will explore the landscape of contemporary cultural production among black queer feminist communities on a transnational stage. Our work will take us through several genres including poetry, fiction, hip-hop music and videos, blogs and web communities, film, web series, and drama, and will take up the work of contemporary black LGBT and queer feminist artists from several Diaspora locales including South Africa, the UK, Germany, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Canada, Cuba, the U.S. and others. Throughout our discussions, we’ll examine the shifting meanings of terms like “black,” “feminist,” and “queer” in each of the settings, and consider how they expand and challenge our own understandings of difference and power. Assignments include regular participation, in-class writing, a short paper, a final paper, a final project, and some creative work. Prior coursework in WGSS, Afro-American Studies, and/or English will be helpful.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4151 Staying Cool:Race Femininity 3 Credits
The concept of cool comprises many meanings from composure to popularity; but cool also offers a dynamic and conflicted optics or surface where race, gender, capital, illness, violence, and resistance, come together or fall apart. This course introduces students to
theories and iterations of “cool” as it crosses contemporary African American, Asian American, and Afro Asian history, art, activism, and culture. Students will consider a range of cultural texts and histories such as the iconic Civil Rights-era images of Elizabeth Eckford
and her children’s memoir; the Indian philosophy of non-violence and Black Civil Rights direct action; experiments with race and endurance in the performances of artists like Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Ayana Evans, and William Pope.L; the popular culture of Eastern spiritual practices and martial arts; and the composed women of color characters in the sensational television shows of the Shondaland franchise.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4153 Writing Asian Diaspora Revltn 3 Credits
How do Asian American writers use fiction to reimagine revolutionary politics? And what enduring struggles and contested meanings do they reveal over history, identity, form? This course explores how contemporary Asian American and Asian diasporic writers engage with 20th century revolutionary movements both real and speculative, intimate and large, exceeding single-nation readings. Our readings may traverse topics such as the influence of Marxism on revolutionary activity in Asia, Korean anarchist opposition against Japanese colonial rule, student agitation for ethnic studies in U.S. universities, feminist, queer, and trans resistance, as well as other nodes in the assemblage of revolutionary thought and struggle.
Through these narratives, students will examine how fiction reconfigures the meanings of revolution across diasporic space and time. The course foregrounds how writers experiment with genre and novelistic form to grapple with revolutionary history, affect, memory, and failure. In addition to critical analysis, students will engage in creative writing exercises inspired by the texts. Authors may include H.T. Tsiang, Ed Park, Karen Tei Yamashita, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kai Cheng Thom, Nishant Batsha, Monique Truong, among others.
Through these narratives, students will examine how fiction reconfigures the meanings of revolution across diasporic space and time. The course foregrounds how writers experiment with genre and novelistic form to grapple with revolutionary history, affect, memory, and failure. In addition to critical analysis, students will engage in creative writing exercises inspired by the texts. Authors may include H.T. Tsiang, Ed Park, Karen Tei Yamashita, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kai Cheng Thom, Nishant Batsha, Monique Truong, among others.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4155 Fitzgerald AmericanMythmaking 3 Credits
The career of F. Scott Fitzgerald — and the decade of “The Roaring Twenties”— started off with a bang in the spring of 1920; indeed, some scholars say that Fitzgerald “invented” the ‘Roaring Twenties with his best-selling debut novel, This Side of Paradise. This Side of Paradise is a college novel based on Fitzgerald’s undergraduate years at Princeton. In it, and in many of the novels and short stories that followed, Fitzgerald largely defined “The Jazz Age” — a phrase that he himself coined.
This course examines Fitzgerald’s most important works of the 1920s, as well as many of those of his contemporary friends and mentors such as Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett and Zelda Fitzgerald. The course will also investigate the cultural context of the 1920s—an era marked by Prohibition, The Scopes Trial, The Great Migration, the imposition of immigration quotas, the widespread introduction of the assembly line, the democratization of car ownership, the rise of skyscrapers in American cities, the advent of radio, air travel, and advertising, greater freedom in sexual behavior, and, ultimately, The Great Depression—when the “great national party” came to an abrupt halt.
Among the texts we’ll be reading are:
This Side of Paradise
The Beautiful and Damned
The Great Gatsby
Selected Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Selected Short Stories of Ring Lardner
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara
The Vintage H.L. Mencken
The Portable Dorothy Parker
Essays and Reviews by Edmund Wilson
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
Selected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald
Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill
Terrible Honesty by Ann Douglas
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4160 Katrina Culture 3 Credits
“If you weren’t angry after Katrina, you had to be in the market for a soul”—Patricia Smith, poet and former Boston Globe reporter Today, “Katrina” signifies much more than the name of a particularly devastating hurricane that hit the Gulf coast nearly fifteen years ago. While those outside its immediate path of destruction may have paid scant attention or have now largely forgotten the news media’s harrowing images of its impact, t anniversaries of what scholar Nicole Fleetwood calls the “Katrina event” has instructed all of us to “remember” but also, akin to 9/11 commemorations, to study the myriad economic, social, environmental, and cultural conditions left in its wake: a veritable diaspora of displaced and evacuated populations--some of whom have never returned to New Orleans and other Gulf Coast towns-- who are largely poor and working-class African-Americans; the loss of inhabitable land, communities, literal and psychic ‘homes’; the disruption and recasting of musical and literary traditions that have constituted, for many, a kind of cultural imaginary of this unique region in the southern United States. This course will take a broadly interdisciplinary approach to understanding “Katrina” as both a natural and humanly-engineered disaster—as some have argued, a biopolitical crisis. We will marshal theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Geography, Race and Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Working-Class Studies, Environmental Humanities, as well as Literary/Cultural Studies, to unlock the complexity of what happened and why. But we will focus particularly on media and cultural representations of the storm and its aftermath to examine how a variety of artists as well as journalists have attempted to document or rewrite the event itself through imagery, narrative, and poetics. At the same time, we will situate such texts within a larger framework of cultural politics that questions the binaries of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction,’ destabilizes the convenient shorthand of a definitive “pre-“ and “post-“ traumatic socio-cultural landscape, and considers how cultural forms themselves shape analysis. Together, we will explore the significance of local cultural practices like Mardi Gras and jazz funerals, read memoir, graphic nonfiction, novels, and poetry, watch plays and films. Music (jazz/brass band, hip hop, Cajun, protest) will be a constant presence in our course but will also close out our course in the final weeks.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4165 Storytelling Hip-Hop 3 Credits
Storytelling and Hip-Hop: Traditions Remixed
This course uses an intersectional lens to explore narrative and poetic forms and themes in hip-hop’s literary cultures. Through intensive analysis of hip hop lyrics, audiovisual performance, digital media, and film informed by Black Queer Feminist perspectives, we will consider how artists from the late twentieth century onward have used hip-hop to extend, engage, and complicate key concerns of African American and African Diaspora literature, particularly around questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power. How do literary tropes such as the cautionary tale, the coming-of-age narrative, the quest narrative, the redemption tale, the protest narrative, legal storytelling, and the queer coming-out story influence hip-hop texts? What possibilities do these forms of hip-hop storytelling open for our analysis of cultural and political life in our current moment? We will take up these questions through an analysis of hip-hop texts from the late 1970s to today, including works by Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., Krudxs Cubensi, Nitty Scott, 2Pac, KripHop Nation, OutKast, Young M.A., Megan Thee Stallion, GloRilla, and others. Reading these alongside stories by writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Walker, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Janelle Monáe, we will examine how hip-hop intervenes in narratives about nation, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic location, disability, and power across space, time, and genre. Through a series of visits with contemporary artists, writers, and community organizers, we will consider how hip-hop’s cultural and poetic complexity allows for a rich intersectional analysis of multiple storytelling traditions.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: XAFA name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4170 Race, Law, Lit 3 Credits
This course explores the intersections between race, law, and literature. We will consider how law has defined racial identity according to strict boundaries, and how literature enables us to push against those boundaries and envision new realities. We will study carefully fundamental Supreme Court decisions regarding slavery, civil rights, whiteness, immigration, citizenship, and native sovereignty and trace the rhetorical work needed to render race legally comprehensible but often illegal with respect to the national body. We will also look closely at the testimony given in the grand jury trials of the Ferguson shootings and of the Rhinelander case and watch a film by Jose Antonio Vargas on being an undocumented immigrant. And finally we will read literature by authors such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, John Okada, Luis Valdez, and Nella Larsen, all of whom tell us what it means to live outside the law.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4172 Afterlives of US Imperialism 3 Credits
In its almost 250-year history, the United States has been at war for over 90% of that time. With currently over 750 military bases in 80+ countries, US military efforts abroad have had profound and devastating political, economic, and cultural effects on the countries and peoples that the US has invaded and fought. Despite this violent history and present reality, the US has disavowed its imperial identity. As George W. Bush in 1999 declared in an echo of many presidents who preceded him, “America has never been an empire.”
This class concentrates on the effects of US military invasion on what was once named the “Orient”—the Near, Middle, and Far East. Beginning from Edward Said’s theorization of “Orientalism,” we will read and analyze Arab, Asian, and Pacific Islander American writers and filmmakers who reimagine and remember what has nationally been repressed. How do these artists construct identities, histories, and cultures that testify to their own racialization as “foreigners,” “aliens,” and “enemies” within the United States itself and to the US “conflicts,” “interventions,” “assistance,” and wars abroad that America has worked hard to erase?
This class concentrates on the effects of US military invasion on what was once named the “Orient”—the Near, Middle, and Far East. Beginning from Edward Said’s theorization of “Orientalism,” we will read and analyze Arab, Asian, and Pacific Islander American writers and filmmakers who reimagine and remember what has nationally been repressed. How do these artists construct identities, histories, and cultures that testify to their own racialization as “foreigners,” “aliens,” and “enemies” within the United States itself and to the US “conflicts,” “interventions,” “assistance,” and wars abroad that America has worked hard to erase?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4175 Winning Fictions 3 Credits
To our knowledge, Homer never won any literary prizes; neither did Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, the Brontes, Nella Larson, Agatha Christie, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald or thousands of other important writers, most of whom wrote before the rise of the age of literary prizes. And, yet, somehow these writers and their works have persisted. What does it mean to anoint one work of fiction as "the best" of its year? How is such a judgment determined? What effect, if any, does such a distinction have on the sales of the honored work? Do such prizes ever have a detrimental effect on their recipients and how do they affect (or not) the lasting life of a book? This course explores how we assign literary value to works of fiction through both the gradual process of canon formation and through the swifter (and, frequently, incompatible) process of reviews, "best of the year lists," and, above all, literary awards. The particular prism for our investigations will be the Man Booker Prize-- a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK. Taking the controversial year 2005 as a focal point, students will read the 5 novels nominated that year (which culminated in John Banville's The Sea being chosen as the winner that seemed to please almost no one, with the certain exception of Mr. Banville). To follow the prize process in "real time," Students will also choose one book from the 2018 Man Booker Prize "long list" (announced in August) and, finally the 2018 Man Booker Prize winner (announced at the end of October). We will also explore questions and controversies in the awarding of other prizes-such as The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2012 for which this professor served as a juror, and the 1988 and 1998 National Book Awards in Fiction. Simultaneously we will read and discuss critical works on value and evaluation. Among them: Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Dwight Macdonald's Midcult and Masscult, Zadie Smith's "Some Notes on Attunement" and "The I Who Is Not Me," "Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Contingencies of Value" and John Guillory's Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4180 Death in the Digital 3 Credits
Death comes to all of us eventually. This course will examine the role of digital technologies in shaping our understanding of death and dying in the networked world. As scanning and simulation technologies make us increasingly knowledgeable about the body's fragility, entertainment media like video games and digital animation offer new ways to play with dying and killing. Rapidly spreading social media circulates news and images of death in record time while simultaneously preserving the lives of the departed in the form of profiles and online memorials. Of particular interest during our study will be the unequal distribution of death across the population. Death comes to all of us, but not at the same time. Race, disability, class, gender, and geographical location leave people vulnerable to death at different rates. Can understanding the role of technology in our contemporary death worlds help us to intervene in these injustices?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4181 Adv Topics in Game Studies 3 Credits
This is an advanced course in the field of Game Studies. Specific topics and materials will vary from term to term; please see section description for details about this semester's offering. It is strongly recommended that students have training in the study of video games or other media before enrolling in this course. Relevant course experience includes (but is not limited to) ENGL 1095, ENGL 2590, and FMST 1100.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4185 Literature in the Digital Age 3 or 4 Credits
Ours is the first generation to study literature in the digital age. E-books are outselling
paperbacks; online scholarly databases are superseding library stacks; new works are being
composed, distributed, and consumed electronically. How fundamental is this shift toward
digitization? How does it affect the nature of the literary text, and how does it impact our
work as readers and critics? Engaging with digital archives and computational techniques in
literary analysis, we will ask what new insights we can gain into literature once it is digitized.
Is the digital age making literature more accessible, more inclusive, and more interactive? Or
will the digital age, with its many multimedia distractions, make literature obsolete?
This course explores the interpretive and creative possibilities opened up by the shift from
print to digital forms, as well as the social consequences of this transition. We will use
computer-assisted analysis and visualization to ask new questions about literature. By
studying the technical foundations for the production of digital texts, we will learn how the
encoding of literary texts affects the questions we can ask of them. By analyzing digital-born
forms such as webcomics, hypertext, interactive fiction, flash poetry, and video games, we
will question how such texts alter the role of the reader, change the nature of narrative, and
affect the task of interpretation.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4188 Literature of AIDS 3 Credits
What can the literature/art of previous pandemics tell us about how we will write about future ones? Will the writing about the AIDS epidemic be able to shed any light on how we will be writing about Covid-19? What are the differences and similarities?
In this course, we will look at various works that deal with AIDS. We will read across genres: fiction and nonfiction, journalism and poetry, film and theater. We’ll study Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, Thom Gunn’s incredible poems in The Man with Night Sweats, Marlon Riggs’s film Tongues Untied, Susan Sontag’s story The Way We Live Now, among many others.
In this course, we will look at various works that deal with AIDS. We will read across genres: fiction and nonfiction, journalism and poetry, film and theater. We’ll study Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, Thom Gunn’s incredible poems in The Man with Night Sweats, Marlon Riggs’s film Tongues Untied, Susan Sontag’s story The Way We Live Now, among many others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4190 Horror: Tech Techniques 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4195 Queer Cinema 3 Credits
“To queer” means to spoil or ruin—at least according to most dictionaries. To queer theorists, it means to analyze, contest, or subvert the power of “the normal.” “Queer Theory, Queer Cinema” will begin by reading canonical texts of queer theory, essays and book chapters that collectively established a zone of inquiry around anti-normative sexual acts and identities, including but not limited to LGBTQIA affiliation. Using films to jumpstart our conversations, we’ll explore how queer theory destabilizes and challenges traditional and restrictive ideas about sexuality and gender. But writing is only one way in which people think, and the second half of this course will shift the balance from theory-with-film to film-as-theory. While we’ll continue to read writers who can help us understand film better, we’ll examine queer filmmaking as a way of staking arguments about this world and imagining other worlds. Writers we’ll engage include Gayle Rubin, José Muñoz, Adrienne Rich, E. Patrick Johnson, and Susan Stryker, who will help us consider concepts like sexual politics, disidentification, compulsory heterosexuality, intersectional and queer of color critique, and trans knowledges. Films we’ll watch include Tongues Untied, Scorpio Rising, Funeral Parade of Roses, Dyketactics, and A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica). If these names aren’t familiar to you already, don’t worry. Our goal in this course is to familiarize ourselves with the ways that queer theory and queer cinema can change our lives!
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4200 Female Bildungsroman 3 Credits
Coming of Age in Contemporary U. S. Women’s Writing This course will examine the bildungsroman, or novel of development, as a mainstay of U.S. women’s writing, focusing especially on texts from the last few decades of the twentieth century and on into the contemporary moment. We will also watch a number of films organized around this thematic as well. Examining narrative depictions of coming of age by a diverse group of writers and filmmakers, the course will explore ways in which gendered subjectivity is shaped by historical context and historical “memory”: indeed, many of these texts deal explicitly with issues of history, historiography, and remembrance, and depict the act of recovering some sense of the past as central to the formation (or re-formation) of personal and/or collective identity. In addition, we will examine how specific social differences of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality shape the narrative paradigm of “coming of age”; toward that end, we will pay special attention to coming-of-age texts and films by “ethnic,” working-class, and LGBTQ authors and filmmakers. We will also become familiar with some important critical debates about the bildungsroman as a major subgenre of the novel form, and we will read a number of contemporary critical and theoretical essays on cultural constructions of gendered subjectivity. Some questions we will consider: how do cultural texts (visual, literary)—particularly narrative texts—both represent and constitute what we think of as gendered “identities”? What defines “coming of age” in the contemporary U.S., and how is this paradigm inflected by social differences such as race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, region, and/or nation? What are the governing, dominant “narratives” or “scripts,” psychological and/or cultural, that define female maturation, and how are these scripts inscribed, registered, engaged with, and /or contested and disrupted in the literary texts and films under consideration? Indeed, how/why do we imagine female maturation as “development,” as a continuous, linear narrative with a particular teleology (often culminating in marriage and motherhood)—and how have those expectations been shaped by literary and cultural texts? How are female embodiment and sexuality represented in these texts? How do these writers and filmmakers re-construct, and enable us to re-imagine, what it means to “come of age” in the U.S.?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4205 Intersectional/BrontesMorrison 3 Credits
ENGL 422: Intersectionalities: Brontës to Morrison – Boylan Spring 2023 Imagine the ghost story newly conjured to understand how we inhabit and move through spaces creating our identities. Participants in this course will read a variety of 19th-21st C novels, films, and visual art to appreciate how ghosted identities embody the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. Texts will include some of the following: novels by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, and Toni Morrison. Films under consideration include Parasite, Get Out and the 2021 West Side Story. Cameron, Whistler, Matisse, Basquiat, Riis, and Parks offer us some visual art/photography portraits underscoring the many and varied nuances of lived experiences. We will benefit from Kimberlée Crenshaw’s insightful call to recognize meaning in how our own and each other’s plethora of personas connect as well as Moya Bailey’s reading of misogynoir that results in traumas and caricatures. The course invites participants a timely and fresh consideration of intersectionality as a symbiotic dialectic between self-perception and the culturally constructed other. Further, we will reflect on the significance of the humanities in exposing the tragically innocent complicity in marginalizing spaces that are courageously resisting falsely easy readings of who we are.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4210 Amer Poetry:Aftrlives of Lyric 3 Credits
What was lyric poetry? This course reads an array of US poets whose work negotiates the question of genre in the period of the lyric’s afterlives, roughly since 1914. We will also explore how the belatedness of the lyric has shaped the work of recent critics and theorists. Does the idea of the lyric as a lapsed genre reshape our view of poetry’s relation to history? Or of the time in which a poem happens? If electronics have altered our approaches to textual and archival studies, do these technologies render an idea of the lyric that is compatible with ongoing experiments in digital poetics? We’ll read poetry by Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others; as well as theory and criticism by Virginia Jackson, Northrop Frye, Barbara Johnson, John Stuart Mill, the Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo, and others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4215 Disability Studies Seminar 3 Credits
What is disability? Who counts as disabled? How do we – or should we or can we – think about disability and bodymind differences and divergences in society? Whose bodies or brains are considered healthy, sane, or normal, and whose are considered disordered, defective, or abnormal? The course will explore notions of disability through critical disability theory, crip culture and arts, and disabled community building and organizing, including examining critiques of disability representation and advocacy as articulated by neurodiversity, mad pride, psychiatric survivorship, independent living, deaf culture, disability rights, disability justice, and self-advocacy movements. This course serves as a core course for the Disability Studies minor and an upper level elective in English. Students will also read the work of visiting speakers in the Disability Studies spring lecture series and engage with the speakers in a seminar format. Students will also design their own independent research projects in disability studies throughout the term.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 314
ENGL 4220 Performing Identity 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4225 Contexts for Sexuality Studies 3 Credits
This course provides an overview of the theoretical, historical, and political contexts of queer theory. It highlights topics such as the emergence of modern sexual identity, LGBT rights, queer community-building and world-making, and transgender politics. Specific attention will be paid to the relationship between feminist and queer thought, and to the raced, gendered, and classed dimensions of sexual politics. This class is reading-intensive; students will write regular short papers, engage in both in-class and online discussions, and complete an independent research project.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Prerequisites: (ENGL 090 or ENGL 1090) or (ENGL 091 or ENGL 1091) or (ENGL 092 or ENGL 1092) or (JUPS 123 or JUPS 1010) or (WGST 140 or WGST 1140) or (WGST 141 or WGST 1141)
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4227 Class at the Intersections 3 Credits
In a 2006 article on intersectionality, historian David Roediger argued that the solution to the difficulty of studying “more than two things at once” was literature. Imaginative representations, he suggested, could enable us to trace how class worked with, and sometimes against, race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference, identity, and inequality. To do this, we must wrestle with two key problems related to the study of class. First, class is an especially complex, contested, and slippery concept, one that defies stable definition and that carries deeply conflicted meanings. Is class a matter of economic position, social relations, or cultural practices and expressions? How should we think about a category of identity that is widely seen as temporary and self-determined, especially in a country with relatively low levels of class mobility? Second, while the phrase “working-class” often brings to mind a straight white man who works in an industrial setting – a clearly outdated image -- in reality the working class has always included people of all races, ethnicities, gender and sexual identities. At the same time, the working class has long been divided along these lines of difference, a pattern that seems to have intensified, or at least become more visible, in the current political moment. Clearly, the intersectionality of class is a site of complication and conflict. Through analysis of literary and media representations by and about working-class people, we will consider how theoretical and contextual approaches can help us make sense of class and examine how class works with and against other categories of difference, identity, and inequality. Throughout, we will deploy interdisciplinary methods, incorporating ideas from sociology, history, anthropology, geography, and psychology into our discussions of literary and cultural texts. Most of our primary texts will reflect the U.S. context, across periods and genres, likely including works by Herman Melville, Tillie Olsen, Pietro DiDonato, Lynn Nottage, Lolita Hernandez, and others. Students will complete individual research projects focused on specific texts or questions, resulting in academic or public-oriented analyses. We will use both seminar and workshop approaches, with students leading class discussions, presenting their own work, and consulting with each other as their projects develop.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4229 Understanding the Pornographic 3 Credits
This course examines the concept of "the pornographic" in contemporary media and culture. As students learn about the changing aesthetics, production, and distribution of pornography as a media genre that spans human history, they will also understand "the pornographic" as a concept that exceeds sexuality and connotes excess and inappropriate affect more generally, as seen in popular designations like "food porn" and "house porn" on social media, "warporn" and "poverty porn" in discussions of the news media, "inspiration porn" in disability studies, and more. We will pay special attention to the social and political conflicts that attend pornography and the pornographic, particularly as these conflicts have been used to control marginalized populations including women, queer and trans folks, and people of color.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4230 Testimonial Fictions 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4235 Queer Pixelation, Trans Coding 3 Credits
This course covers a range of texts and topics on queer and trans embodiments, representations, and productions in computational and digital media. We cover questions of identity and performance in networked spaces like YouTube and Tik Tok, queer histories of computing, artistic movements like the queer games avant-garde, and key representations of queerness and transness in digital film, games, and other media. Core questions of the course include: Are computers and digital media fundamentally queer? What do these technologies teach us about gender and embodiment? How have queer and trans people influenced the history and development of computing? How has the development of computing influenced the history of queer and trans communities? How do queer and trans people use digital media to explore their own identities and connect with one another?
This class is grounded in queer of color and trans of color critique and approaches these topics from an explicitly anti-racist position.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4240 Lit the Archive 3 Credits
How does the archive inspire and ground literary texts? How can literature fill out gaps in the archive? In this course, we will interrogate the complementary nature of literature and the historical archive. We will pay particular attention to the imperatives, as well as the challenges, of engaging the archive in literature, especially pertaining to silences around the experiences of Black, LGBTQIA, women-identified, and other marginalized and oppressed populations. Students will engage in both archival research and literary analysis.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4245 Humanities at Work 3 Credits
“What are the humanities good for? And what can you do with that degree?” These are questions that most if not all people in Literature, History, Philosophy, Art History, and Rhetoric have faced at some time or another. What’s more, as STEM fields seem only to grow in prominence and funding, and career options for those with humanities degrees become murkier, university leaders and public commentators continue to cite the “humanities crisis.” It is in this context specifically that this course will ask 2 immensely important questions: What are the humanities for and what are they capable of? What does humanities training equip you to do in the world and how can you most effectively tell that story? This course explores these questions through what is known as the “public and engaged humanities,” the application of humanities ideas and perspectives to enduring questions and complex problems. Through case studies, guest lectures, and public engagement, we will explore how the humanities help tell the most important cultural stories, present persuasive and meaningful narratives, and make visible the multiple histories of our society. By doing so, we will forge new ways of telling our own stories while also articulating the value of humanities knowledge and methods throughout one’s career. In this course, students will read in and around the public humanities in order to understand the breadth of its possible applications, as well as attend panels of industry experts and visit the sites of public humanities projects (virtually and IRL). Assignments, in text and other media forms, will include project/organization audits, informational interviews, personal statements, and project proposals.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4250 Poetry and Poetics 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4255 GenderCare in Mod. US Poetry 3 Credits
In this class, we’ll explore modern and contemporary American poetry through the lenses of gender and disability theory, particularly as they center the question of care. We’ll examine the way a range of poets, with and without disabilities, take up critical questions in their work, including: how do we care for one another from childhood through aging? How are our relationships of care charged with the power dynamics of race, class, immigration status, and gender? Does the work of care conflict with or engender creativity in poetry? And how might understanding ourselves through our dependency on others reframe such core American values as independence and rational individualism? Since much of the work of care (both familial and non-familial, unpaid and inadequately paid) has been assigned to women and femme-identified people, they will make up the bulk of our syllabus. We’ll examine the writing lives of selected 20th and 21st century women poets who played significant roles in shaping the literary fields in which they worked, and we’ll think about poetic community as a form of care. Some poets we'll consider include: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Alice Notley, and Lucille Clifton. We'll also cull new canons of work from movements and communities such as HIV/AIDS, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and immigration rights. This course participates in the Disability Studies Program event series. Students will attend lectures and performances by renowned disability theorists, advocates, and artists.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4257 Disability Narratives 3 Credits
Disability Narratives will explore what a “disability narrative” is, has been, and could be. To contextualize this journey, students will consider how the category of disability operates culturally and politically. The course asks about the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are co-constitutive with disability and political invisibility and/or invalidation. That is to say, the class interrogates how the mark and category of disability appears in intersectional oppression and in relation to the category of citizen and human within cultural discourse, particularly in the context of the United States. Following this broad introduction, the course considers the politics and processes of self-writing, and asks about the politics and ethics of disability disclosure and narratives as they emerge from lives and experiences within the category of disability.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4260 Lannan Seminar 3 Credits
Lannan Seminar (ENGL-450 & ENGL-650) Lannan Poetry Seminar encourages dynamic critical thinking and creativity with a view to examining literary forms and practices; the work of individual authors; the relationship between writing and other arts; and the place of writing in contemporary culture. Fellows study and discuss the work of the year’s scheduled guests in the Lannan “Readings and Talks” series, participate in conversations with the guests, and attend their readings and performances. Fellows then produce an independent final project (creative or critical) under the guidance of the instructor. There are also opportunities for students to develop and share their own writing in several genres. Enrollment in this seminar is limited to the Lannan Fellows. Prerequisites: Permission of Instructor
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4265 Adv PoetryShortProse Wrkshp 3 Credits
Course Title: Adv. Poetry & Short Prose Workshop This workshop will help you write a portfolio of poems and/or short prose pieces. In class we’ll read and discuss poems, creative essays, and short fiction intensely; work over the drafts of our own poems and prose; write critiques of published works; study and steal the forms of poems, and the maneuvers of creative prose. We’ll give and receive helpful criticism of our work in a group setting, and in conferences with me. This workshop offers you a chance to develop the early promise and challenge of your poems and prose, and to build a longer manuscript. Prerequisites: one college-level course in creative writing (any genre), or an equivalent background, or a passion for writing. Permission of instructor required.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 339
ENGL 4270 Adv. Creat. Nonfict. Writing 3 Credits
Advanced Creative Nonfiction. Please see section description for details about current version of the course.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4275 Adv. Fiction Writing 3 Credits
This is a workshop-based, advanced course in the writing of fiction. Readings and approaches vary from term to term; please see section description for details of the current offering. ENGL 2800, Intro to Creative Writing, is a prerequisite.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 328
ENGL 4280 Advanced Writing Topics 3 Credits
A special topics course for Creative Writing sections.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4285 Experimental Fiction Workshop 3 Credits
In this advanced writing workshop, we will read key texts of 20th and 21st-century experimental fiction. Using these writings as springboards, we will create our own weekly experiments. The class is student-led, and demands enormous commitment from its members. Expect to read sexually transgressive, politically charged, mixed media works. Expect to expand your notion of what constitutes a text. Expect to exceed your own expectations of your writing.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4290 Intermediate Script Writing 3 Credits
Students who did well in Intro to Script Writing may apply for permission to take Intermediate Screenwriting. Intermediate moves from the standard American paradigms for screen story-telling, covered in the introductory course, to new and current models developed by non-American auteurs over the past twenty years. Directors include: Pawel Pawlikowsi, Michel Piccoli, Alexander Sokurov, Ruben Ostlund, and Abbas Kiarostami.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4295 Advanced Script Writing 3 Credits
An individual tutorial offered to students who have successfully completed Intermediate Scriptwriting. The student will complete an original, full-length feature script in a genre and with a story line of the student's choice.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4300 Advanced Topics in Writing 3 Credits
Writing from its beginnings has always transcended the conventional borders of genre. From Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek pattern poems, Medieval illuminated books to the experimental forms of the 20th-century Avant Garde to reggae Dub Poetry, the mixing of the word with other forms of representation has enjoyed an enduring appeal. In this course we will study and (attempt to) practice the poetics of hybridity, the ways in which verbal art is amplified, invaded, distorted, refashioned, and restaged in the fusion with other arts—the arts of sound and noise, the arts of graphic expression and visuality, the arts of digital media. The course will be run as an experimental workshop and reading group. Works by Johanna Drucker, Susan Howe, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Anne Carson, Emmett Williams, Kurt Schwitters, Apolinnaire, and many others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4310 Special Topics in Law Lit 3 Credits
This is a special topics course in the area of Law & Literature. Subject matter varies from term to term; please see section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4360 The Other:Questions/Interprets 3 Credits
This course is designed to help students of international affairs understand and apply the concept of the Other, situating it in different contexts: literary, cultural, and socio-political. While mostly literature-oriented, the course surveys selected literary as well as non-fictional texts from various historical and cultural backgrounds, examining authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Martin Buber, Z.D. Gurevitch, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, and Ulrich A. Boschwitz, with emphasis on conceptual parallels and contradictions as reflected in different cultures and writing traditions.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 445 Disability Narratives 3 Credits
Disability Narratives (ENGL 445) will explore what a “disability narrative” is, has been, and could be. To contextualize this journey, students will consider how the category of disability operates culturally and politically. The course asks about the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are co-constitutive with disability and political invisibility and/or invalidation. That is to say, the class interrogates how the mark and category of disability appears in intersectional oppression and in relation to the category of citizen and human within cultural discourse, particularly in the context of the United States. Following this broad introduction, the course considers the politics and processes of self-writing, and asks about the politics and ethics of disability disclosure and narratives as they emerge from lives and experiences within the category of disability.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Equivalent to ENGL 4257
ENGL 4940 Tutorial for Thesis Writers 3 Credits
The course is open to those who successfully completed ENGL 495 and who intend to complete their honors thesis in the spring semester. Students should expect to meet regularly as a class, to contribute to critiquing each other's work, and to successfully complete a thesis. Presentation of the thesis at the honors colloquium is required.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Prerequisites: (ENGL 040 or ENGL 041 or ENGL 042 or ENGL 043) and (ENGL 495 or ENGL 4989)
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4949 Tutorial: English 0-4 Credits
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4960 SrSem:ShakespeareWhat You Will 3 Credits
Senior Seminar: Shakespeare, or What You Will Senior seminars offer senior English majors the opportunity to pursue a topic of their own choosing that reflects their intellectual and/or creative preoccupations. In this course, Shakespeare, or What You Will, students will collaborate with the instructor not only on the development of their own projects, but also on the content of the course, which is open to a wide range of Shakespeare-related topics. Participants will meet with the instructor at the beginning of the semester to select a Shakespeare text and an area of interest. Some possible topics include: literary or popular re-writings of Shakespeare’s plays, including the student's creative adaptation of a Shakespeare play or poem, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare in film, editing Shakespeare, digital Shakespeare, theoretical approaches to Shakespeare (genre, race, gender, queer, disability, historicist, psychoanalytic, material culture, religion, animal studies, eco-critical, etc.), global/translation of Shakespeare, etc. We will begin the semester by reading a play and considering it from the perspectives of literary criticism, theater history/performance, and adaptation. In the course of the semester, students will learn research skills from a library instruction, develop an annotated bibliography, select a reading deriving from their research interests to place on the syllabus, make presentations of their project in class, and produce a substantial final essay/adaptation on a topic of their own devising.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
ENGL 4961 Sr. Sem: Early Modern Animal 3 Credits
What role did “the animal” play in the construction of Renaissance humanism, the humanities, even the concept of the human? This course will explore the strategies that early modern texts used to represent, categorize, know, and speak for non-human animals. We will study poems and plays, religious and scientific tracts, works of political philosophy and first philosophy, in order to understand the shifting and contested place of beasts, fish, fowl, and creeping things in the early modern cosmos. The course will also introduce students to foundational texts and recent critical work in the burgeoning field of Animal Studies. Our questions will be literary, but also ethical, political, ecological, and metaphysical.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
ENGL 4962 Sr. Seminar: Oscar Wilde 3 Credits
In this seminar, we will read Wilde’s work in several genres--poetry, narrative, non-fiction prose, drama, essays, and letters--analyzing his notions of art, gender, sexuality, nation, religion, and literary style. We will consider how the texts construct a literary persona and how that persona interacts with and challenges Wilde’s contemporary culture as well as our own. How does Wilde produce--and undermine--our notion of “Wilde”? In addition to reading Wilde’s own literature, the class will also read extensive contextual works, including other nineteenth-century literary texts, the transcripts of the trials, as well as recent critical, theoretical, and literary accounts of Wilde’s work and life. Students will take active responsibility for leading seminar discussions, and they will write both shorter and longer works of independent research and analysis. **NB: Students who have taken this course under a previous course number (e.g. ENGL 363) are not eligible to enroll in this course.**
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 363, ENGL 4100
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in African American Studies, African American Studies, African American Studies, African American Studies, English, English, English, English, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies or Women's and Gender Studies.
ENGL 4963 Sr. Sem: Black Women Writers 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 203, ENGL 2030
ENGL 4964 Sr. Sem: Latinx Literature Now 3 Credits
ENGL4964, a senior seminar for English majors, focuses on literary and other cultural material produced by writers of US Latinx heritage published in the decade-plus between 2010 and 2024, as well as works of scholarship and criticism in Latinx literary and cultural studies that will help us frame the literary and creative material. The Anglo-US signifier “Latinx” already announces that our work can only be happening “now,” in the current moment of the mid-twenty-first century, and in a United States cultural and political context that struggles violently to know and to manage itself in the face of its increasing complexity and diversity. It also signals the necessarily intersectional as well as interdisciplinary nature of this course, since “Latinx” demands being read not just as a complex marker of ethnicity and/or race, but also of gender, and of sexuality, and of class, nation, and even political orientation. Key writers and artists featured in the course will include Elizabeth Acevedo, Daniel Alarcón, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Ada Limón, Valeria Luiselli, Carmen Maria Machado, Manuel Muñoz, and Justin Torres.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4965 Sr Sem: Seer Seen 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
ENGL 4966 Sr. Sem: Toni Morrison 3 Credits
In 1993, Toni Morrison became the eighth woman, first African American, first African American woman, and first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the most coveted literary prize. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised her as one "who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." This senior seminar–Toni Morrison--seeks to identify and to examine that "essential aspect of American reality" in Morrison's novels and short story—Black lives. For Morrison, Black lives have always mattered, and the essential aspect of her work is her commitment to the experiences, intricacies and complexities of Black lives in American society. In her novels, Morrison chronicles African American experience from slavery to post-integration. In so doing, she has added not only to the African American literary and cultural landscape but also to the American literary and cultural landscape. We will explore the ways Morrison writes history, nation, family, race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. As she explains in her Nobel lecture, "official language" represents dominant ideologies, including ideologies that can prevent the circulation of new and generative knowledge and can also hinder the exchange of ideas. Morrison’s works, in many ways, challenge and complicate hegemonic institutions and ideologies that oppress, suppress, and/or exclude non-majority groups. Reading critical essays by scholars as well as Morrison’s own criticism and interviews will assist our understanding of Morrison's literary goals. Specifically, we will explore the ways Morrison constructs discourses that expand, refute, resist, and complicate historical discourses and ideologies about Black life. Students will be able to discuss aspects of Toni Morrison’s writing, including, but not limited to, the differences and similarities between Morrison’s texts and how those similarities and differences reflect changing historical, social, and political perspectives. We will examine Morrison's works from a variety of critical approaches, particularly critical race theory, Black feminist theories, and African American cultural studies. Reading critical essays by scholars as well as Morrison’s own criticism and interviews will assist our understanding of Morrison's literary goals. The politics of race will foreground our discussions. This course is discussion, reading and writing intensive. Students may expect blogging, short papers, quizzes, and a research project.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in African American Studies, African American Studies, African American Studies, African American Studies, English, English, English, English, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies or Women's and Gender Studies.
ENGL 4967 Sr. Sem: Film Studies 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in American Studies, American Studies, American Studies, American Studies, English, English, English, English, Film and Media Studies, Film and Media Studies, Film and Media Studies or Film and Media Studies.
ENGL 4968 Sr. Sem: Craft Studies 3 Credits
What is 'craft'? How have diverse writers articulated and deconstructed the very notion of craft? Students will develop creative writing projects in all genres while critically investigating theories of genre, craft, creativity, and textuality. Readings on contemporary poetics and narratology will be key to our endeavors. Deepening their mastery of the craft of writing, students will have the opportunity to workshop with peers while working closely with the professor on their individual writing projects. Extensive revision will be a significant part of the course. Each student will also write a short framing paper situating their creative project. Students will discover their own questions regarding craft, form, genre and more. Deeply practical and profoundly theoretical, this capstone is intended for creative writing minors, as well as other students who have already done significant course work in a creative writing genre.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in E, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Writing, English, English, English, English, English, English, English or English.
ENGL 4969 Sr. Sem. Topics 3 Credits
A variety of topics will be explored in different course sections; Senior Seminars are required for completion of an English degree.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Mutual exclusion: ENGL 711, ENGL 7110
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in African American Studies, African American Studies, African American Studies, African American Studies, English, English, English, English, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies or Women's and Gender Studies.
ENGL 4989 Capstone: Honors Thesis 3 Credits
This course is for students accepted into the Honors Program. Students will be expected to read and comment on critical and theoretical texts related to the honors projects, to read and comment on each other's work, and to present their own work for critique. Attendance and engagement as well as periodic written responses are required. Student should expect to complete about 25 pages of the honors thesis by the end of the course. Permission of the department.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 4999 Grad Topics 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 5030 Literatures of Medieval Women 3 Credits
European women’s experiences and behaviors varied across the space of Europe in the period known as the Middle Ages, as they still do now. Many of these women’s issues are our own: economic disparity, domestic abuse and exploitation, parenting and custody concerns, limitations and penalties related to reproductive options and choices, problems of being heard and having a voice. Nevertheless, a rich archive of works by women writers and texts featuring memorable female characters survives to interrogate and assess. We can look at Old English and Norse materials for Germanic views, or the better known French romances that created the genre we still recognize. Early Irish and Welsh texts let myths open up social anxieties about reproduction. The religious dramas of a 10th century German canoness look at a variety of sexual situations imposed by political and religious institutional expectations; a mother writes advice to her son despite her abusive and unloving marriage; a character called Silence asks us to wonder what changes when a girl is raised as a boy; the deaths of captured women evoke Halberstam’s shadow feminisms. Was the sexual binary of male/female hardened as a default in the medieval period, or was queering always already there? Did the heteronormative exist in the medieval period, or is it a modern description? How did institutions, whether political, religious and/or social, form and deform how women were understood and how they acted, or could not? How do we understand the contradiction that misogyny is the other side of the tradition called refined or courtly love? How did intelligent women of the past depict and think about their options, their bodies, their lives? We will read literatures of Europe, Britain and Ireland between 800 and 1500 with an eye to exploring these questions, as well as those we discover along the way.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5040 Medieval Sexualities 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 5050 Worlds of Beowulf 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5080 Crit Approaches to Chaucer 3 Credits
In this course, we will read Chaucer’s major works, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, in the original Middle English, while engaging with a wide variety of critical approaches to these works. Part of our work will include training in metacriticism, the ability to critique the assumptions, methods, and productive value of criticism issuing from feminist, deconstructionist, postcolonial, paleographical, historicist and other approaches, including those related to the burgeoning fields of affect criticism and the history of emotion. Contextual material will focus on fourteenth-century England, but we will conclude by taking a global perspective, asking how contemporary authors and critics from Nigeria to China have sought to “make Chaucer new” and relevant to the modern world. No prior knowledge of Middle English (which is really quite easy and fun) or medieval literature is required.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5110 Global Medieval Literatures 3 Credits
Our focus in this course on global medieval literatures will be on the cultural construction of emotion -- in particular, romantic love -- in the courtly literatures of medieval Europe, Persia, and Japan. Each set of texts will give rise to its own set of issues, but abiding preoccupations will include the relationship between “artificial” conventions and “real” emotion (is this a valid distinction?); the cultural construction of the desiring and desirable body; the role of women as writers, court patrons, or courtly audience; conflicting ideals of masculinity; erotic love as religious experience; love in relation to arranged marriages, incest, and polygamy; the function of “noble” emotions as a marker of aristocratic distinction; love and the poetics of public and private spaces; the place of same-sex desire in relation to heterosexual love; and the use of irony as a destabilizing challenge to the reigning amatory system. Since religious practices and belief systems strongly inflect emotional constructs in each of the three cultures we will be exploring, our work will involve attention to Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Shinto and Buddhism.
No previous exposure to medieval literature is required or assumed. All readings will be in modern English translation. European texts will include Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, the Lais of Marie de France, and Gottfried von Strassbourg’s Tristan and Isolde. Persian texts will include the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and Majnun and Khusrau and Shirin, and poems by Rumi and Hafez. Japanese texts will include the abridged version of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, the poems of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, and excerpts from The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon and similar poetic diaries by women of the Heian court. We will seek to embed these literary works in a wider cultural matrix by reading extracts from additional primary sources such as chronicles and conduct books as well as brief selections from secondary sources. Methods from the anthropology and history of emotion will also guide the kinds of questions we ask about an emotion that seems so “natural”; do our literary texts from different cultures suggest, as one scholar (Lutz) puts it, that “emotions are not precultural, but pre-eminently cultural”?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 5130 Crit Approaches to World Lit 3 Credits
In this seminar, we will read a wide range of classics world literature -- including the Thousand and One Nights, the Kebra Negast, the Shanameh, the Tale of Genji, the Popol Vuh, and the Song of Roland-- while engaging with contemporary critical debates about world literature by critics and theorists such as David Damrosch (How to Read World Literature), Lawrence Venuti (The Translator's Invisibility), Zhang Longxi (From Comparison to World Literature), and Emily Apter (Against World Literature). We will also consider connections between literature and material culture; to that end, our weekly seminars will be supplemented by several excursions to area museums, including the Freer/Sackler Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, and Dumbarton Oaks.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5300 New Approaches to Shakespeare 3 Credits
While recent critical evaluations of Shakespeare's plays and poetry have developed new perspectives from which to view his work, scholars have also revisited older approaches to his corpus, as evidenced in the New Formalism and reconsiderations of historicism. The first few weeks of this course will provide an introduction to the history of literary theory and criticism as it formulated itself in and through the works of Shakespeare. We will also consider new or renewed literary criticism in response to several of Shakespeare's poems and plays. You will attend a library instruction presentation that will enable you to research the current critical and theoretical conversation on Shakespeare. The rest of the semester will be determined by your interests, as you will be asked to a select play or poem and research the current state of Shakespeare criticism on this text. You will select an essay or chapter found in your research, which we will place on the syllabus to be read in conjunction with your play. Assignments will include: an oral presentation to the class, weekly short written responses to the reading, and two longer essays.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5310 Shakesp: Text Performance 3 Credits
The course examines the relationship between Shakespeare’s scripts and the performances actors and directors develop from them. It gives students the opportunity to attend six productions of Shakespeare’s plays, three in London and three in Stratford-upon-Avon. The course begins in London, where students will spend a week focused on Shakespeare’s theatre, past and present. The second part of the course takes place in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. In Stratford students attend classes taught by scholars of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In both London and Stratford-upon-Avon students visit historic sites associated with Shakespeare’s life and work.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Course attribute: Core:HALC - Hum, Art, Lit, Cul
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 5312 Shakespeare or What You Will 3 Credits
MA Course: Responding to Shakespeare, or What You Will This course will introduce students to a wide variety of critical and creative responses to the works of William Shakespeare and ask students to collaborate with the instructor on the development of their own projects and the content of the course. Participants will meet with the instructor at the beginning of the semester to select a Shakespeare text and an area of interest. Some possible topics include: literary or popular re-writings of Shakespeare’s plays, including the student's creative adaptation of a Shakespeare play or poem, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare in film, editing Shakespeare, digital Shakespeare, theoretical approaches to Shakespeare (genre, race, gender, queer, disability, historicist, psychoanalytic, material culture, religion, animal studies, eco-critical, etc.), global/translation of Shakespeare, etc. We will begin the semester by reading a play and considering it from the perspectives of literary criticism, theater history/performance, and adaptation. In the course of the semester, students will post weekly responses to the assigned reading, produce a close reading of their chosen play, learn research skills from a library instruction, develop an annotated bibliography, select a reading deriving from their research interests to place on the syllabus, make presentations of their project in class, and produce a substantial final essay/adaptation on a topic of their own devising.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5340 Shakespeare and Film 3 Credits
Shakespeare’s lasting role in public culture is due in large part to his openness to interpretation: there are always new Shakespeares to discover. This seminar is about the interpretations of Shakespeare we find on film and in video captures of stage performance. We will review what we know about Renaissance stage methods and their approximation in today’s “original practices” movement, and we will sample the three genres—comedy, history, tragedy—recognized in Shakespeare’s First Folio. We will undertake “close readings” of the choices made by directors, actors, designers, and cinematographers. Many literary-critical approaches cut their first teeth on Shakespeare—psychoanalytical theory, historicism, feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, disability studies—and we will seek out the ways in which these approaches inform the stage and screen. We will take up such specific issues as color-blind casting and color-conscious casting, single-gender casting (all men or all women) and gender-switched casting, cultural translation and cultural adaptation. If circumstances permit, we will attend one D.C.-area theatrical production to experience the live as well as the cinematically archived.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
ENGL 5420 Race/Religion Early Mod Drama 3 Credits
As is the case today, a wide range of cultural representations circulating in pre-modern England engaged
with ideas of race and racism. A study of the longer history of racism demonstrates continuities with and
divergences from our current reckoning with this problem. Understanding the legacy of racial
representations helps clarify its contemporary forms. This course will consider pre- and early modern
formulations of racism, foregrounding the importance of religious identity and belief. We will begin the
semester by familiarizing ourselves with some of the current scholarship on the intersection of race and
religion in pre-modernity. We will also analyze a range of non-literary primary texts as well as images to
encounter pre-modern racism. In addition, we will read a number of plays representing racialized
religious and gender difference in conversation with the scholarship and pre-modern cultural forms to
explore the development and articulation of racial fictions.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5460 Milton His Readers 3 Credits
If the New Criticism found the ideal objects for its analysis in the well-wrought urns of John Donne, and the early debates of New Historicism played out on the Shakespearean stage, then reader response criticism, reception history, and the study of interpretive communities developed largely in debates over to the epic poetry of John Milton. The aims of this course are twofold. First, we will examine the critical turn from the study of texts to the study of readers. What prompted this turn? To what kinds of critical practices did it give rise? Why did earlier versions of reader response theory give way to approaches like reception studies, book history, and media studies? Second, we will use the critical and theoretical tradition as a way of thinking more deeply about the poetry and prose of John Milton. Why did Milton’s poetry prove particularly susceptible to approaches that turn attention from texts to readers and interpreters? How does Paradise Lost structure and manipulate the responses of its various readers? We will use Milton’s writings as opportunities to practice and analyze the modes of literary criticism pioneered by late twentieth-century critics such as Fish, Iser, and Jauss, as well more recent successors including Chartier, Stallybrass, Achenstein, Lewalski, Trettien, Wilburn, and others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5470 The Early Modern Animal 3 Credits
What role did “the animal” play in the construction of Renaissance humanism, the humanities, even the concept of the human? This course will explore the strategies that early modern texts used to represent, categorize, know, and speak for non-human animals. We will study poems and plays, religious and scientific tracts, works of political philosophy and first philosophy, in order to understand the shifting and contested place of beasts, fish, fowl, and creeping things in the early modern cosmos. The course will also introduce students to foundational work (Derrida, Foucault, Thomas) and recent scholarship (Shannon, Fudge, Boehrer, Steel) in the burgeoning field of Animal Studies. Our questions will be literary, but also ethical, ecological, and metaphysical. Readings will include Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Marvell, Cavendish, Pico, Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Browne, Hooke, and others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5790 Race and Racism in the 18th-C 3 Credits
This course, on race and racism in the long eighteenth century, traces a philosophical lineage from Francois Bernier's “The Division of the Earth" (1684) to William Lawrence's "On the Natural History of Man" (1819) in order to examine how Enlightenment- and Romantic-era Europeans understood and theorizes human difference. We consider debates surrounding monogenism and polygenism, the legality and morality of slavery, and the relationships between colonizing and indigenous peoples as they are taken up by a range of historians, political economists, natural scientists, and, importantly, poets, playwrights, and novelists. How did philosophical questions about difference inform eighteenth-century aesthetics, and how did literary form open up new avenues of inquiry into the meaning of race?
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the English department.
ENGL 5800 British Romanticism 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5802 Wordsworth Coleridge 3 Credits
This course will introduce students to the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth with particular attention to the political, religious and literary context. The culmination of their collaborative work, Lyrical Ballads (1798), will be examined in detail.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5890 19C US Lit: Class/Amer Dream 3 Credits
As scholars routinely note, class remains an under-studied category in 19th-century U. S. literature and culture. This course will examine literary and cultural representations of social class, and will explore how class as literary construction is inseparable from discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and empire. Overall in the course, we will explore the American Dream of unencumbered class mobility as a particular instance of what critic Lauren Berlant terms "national fantasy," a utopian national ideal at once deemed universally accessible and inscribed by a variety of social differences. We will examine the way 19th-century literary texts both reproduce, and expose contradictions within, this governing ideology of “Americanness”: we will consider the ways in which these texts measure the distance between utopian ideal and historical “reality” and register what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb term the “hidden injuries of class”—invisible psychic and social costs of subscription to this national ideal. Course readings include literary texts by George Foster, Frank Webb, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Skidmore, Sarah Bagley (and other New England millworkers who contributed to antebellum labor periodicals), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet E. Wilson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Horatio Alger, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, and Anzia Yezierska. We will also read selected theoretical, critical, and historical articles addressing various aspects of class formation and the construction of class subjectivities in the nineteenth-century U. S. We will end the course by considering cultural representations of class in recent decades, to assess how (to quote the title of the influential series of articles in the New York Times) “class matters” in contemporary U. S. culture, and to situate U. S. class relations and identities in a global context.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5900 Dickens 3 Credits
We will read three novels written at the height of the novelist’s mastery: Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. We will take the time to read each carefully, to consider how Dickens’ art emerged from his time and place, and we will survey some of the most recent criticism and analysis about these books. Students will prepare brief presentations for our in-class discussions, and will write substantial essays as we end our consideration of each novel.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5920 British Novels of the 1840s 3 Credits
A Masters Degree Seminar. We will explore the historical context, and then read closely three major novels: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray [January 1847 – July 1848], Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë [October 1847], and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens [May 1849 – November 1850]. Students will explore and report upon recent essays in analysis and interpretation of these novels and will be encouraged to consider a wide range of analytical approaches for reading them. Short essays through the semester will lead to a longer final paper shaped by the individual writer’s specific interests.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5930 British Gothic Novel 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5932 19C British Lit: The Brontës 3 Credits
This course will survey the work of the most famous literary family of all, the Brontës, and use the test case of this literary ensemble to ask questions about collaborative authorship, historical interpretation, and formal analysis that continue to animate literary studies today. Are the Brontës plural, or singular? One author, or a loose set of individual ones? Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne: these famous writers, along with their parents, Patrick and Maria, and two sisters who died young (Maria d. age 11, Elizabeth d. age 10), will be at the core of our investigations. Together we will track this unusual family across the dynamic social and political contexts that brought it into being – from occupied Ireland, the site of Patrick’s birth; to Haworth, at the ragged edges of a rapidly modernizing, fossil-fueled global empire; to London, where Charlotte first brought the family’s literary productions to market; and to the slave plantations on the British sugar islands, engines of exploitation that supply Jane Eyre with its imaginative conditions of possibility. Throughout we will read deeply from primary texts, focusing on the novels, poetry, and juvenilia about imagined worlds written on tiny scraps of paper. Novels will include: Jane Eyre (1846), Wuthering Heights (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1948), and Villette (1853); poetry will be covered in full, including published editions and manuscript originals; we will read from the juvenile Gondal and Angria sagas, and take coordinates from Juliet Barker’s family biography (1994) and Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2001). Short theoretical interventions by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and others; ample criticism too. Lots of reading, lots of thinking; be ready.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5944 Global Romanticism 3 Credits
In this course we will be discussing methods and approaches to world literature with a focus on Romanticism. We will identify the formal characteristics common to romantic literatures and the historical circumstances that give rise to them. Was Romanticism potentially a global project or does it identify a moment in the development of national literatures? How useful, ultimately, is the category of “Romanticism” once we move away from familiar, canonical texts? Key concepts will include race, nation, and empire; cultural capital and the construction of the “poet” in the 19th century; audience and reader relations; and the formation and revision of literary canons.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 5950 Tragic Ecologies 3 Credits
Since the Greeks, tragic form has given shape to stories of irreversible and unwilled catastrophe. Starting in the Victorian era, the term ecology began to name intricate systemic interactions from which no single phenomena could be extracted without loss. With tragedy and ecology as its coordinating principles, this course in environmental humanities takes the now-irreversible climate catastrophe of our late carbon era as the starting point for surveying the literary history of disaster. How have literary writers of the fossil fuel era imagined system-wide failures, “natural” cataclysms, and calamities that seem to exceed the power of any single individual to alter them? Amid early and more recent premonitions of the world’s end, might literature offer models not just for writing the disaster --but also for thinking beyond it? And could attention to the longer history of our present moment --extending our sense of the contemporary-- help us generate, from the jumbled relics of past thought, a resource for engaging with the present? This course will focus primarily on British literature from the Age of Coal, circa 1800 to the present. The work to be considered will be “tragic” only in the broadest sense: we’ll start with theories of that form from Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and others, but spin off to survey a variety of genres, modes, and media platforms. We’ll examine pseudo-scientific treatises and geological catalogues of “deep time”; look at poetry, verse drama, film, and the novel. We’ll move from unstaged Romantic plays about utopia to Victorian pastoral elegies, shipwreck poems, and triple-deckers about interconnection; from tiny, handmade books to video games that generate endlessly variable new worlds. Throughout, we will work to see nineteenth century thinking as a resource for engaging the present. Readings may include some or all of the following: Charlotte Smith; John Clare; William Wordsworth; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Charles Darwin; George Eliot; Charles Dickens; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Matthew Arnold; the Bronte siblings; Christina Rossetti; Robert Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Thomas Hardy; H. Rider Haggard; Jorie Graham; Robinson Jeffers; Juliana Spahr. Films and video games may include: Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Into Eternity (2010), and No Man’s Sky (2016). Criticism and theory in generous doses. Graduate students (ENG 595) will produce weekly response papers, an 8-page conference paper, a 15-page seminar paper (an extended version of the conference paper); present the reading and lead class for one session; and curate a special collections object for the course blog.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 5960 19C Ecologies 3 Credits
Nineteenth Century Ecologies
The Victorians invented ecology. The term first entered English usage in 1875, in a British science journal, and while the word had been coined in German a few years before, that term had itself been adapted from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Even earlier than this, British scientists, economists, and literary writers, among other thinkers, had begun to imagine human life as intimately related to other forms of being, and these entangled groupings to be themselves related to yet other entities across vast swaths of prehuman time. This course surveys England’s most modern century, the nineteenth, to track how the conceptual dilemmas of a world newly understood (in Darwin’s terms) as evolving, relational, and holistic generated dilemmas of aesthetic presentation. By what figural means could one hope to represent, in a coherent literary or artistic work, an entire ecosystem, where no single thing can be abstracted from that system of mutual codependence? Our readings will touch on nineteenth century scientific, literary, and political writing from across the period of early fossil-fueled industrialization; of special concern to us will be the vastly exploitative hierarchies enabled by the interplay of race and gender in this period, in particular as those categories played out in what is arguably the central institution of the British nineteenth century, the Empire. Coordinates will come from the recent volume of scholarly essays, Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, whose authors we will engage with in a series of Skype discussions. Primary readings will include work by Mary and Percy Shelley; Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others; theory and criticism from Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Timothy Mitchell, Gillian Beer, and others.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 5970 Victorian Sexualities 3 Credits
Recent criticism of the literature and culture of the middle and late nineteenth century has pointed out that the famous Victorian prudery meant not so much that people stopped talking and writing about sex and sexuality but that people talked and wrote about it more—if only to describe precisely what it was that people weren’t supposed to be thinking about. In this course, we will examine the different ways that Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose addressed the many questions of normative and transgressive sexualities that arose in the period, including divorce, adultery, bigamy, homosexuality, and prostitution. It will focus on the Victorian novel, exploring how central sexual and erotic cross-currents are to the development of the canonical novel itself, but alongside the novels we will also be reading from a wide selection of other prose genres, from the short story to the newspaper exposé to the diary to the case study. Throughout the entire course, we will devote particular attention to the ways that the prose of the period relates sexuality to such other questions as gender roles, national identity, the class structure, religion, and literary history. Authors may include Anne Lister, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, Henry James, Michael Field, Sarah Grand, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
Enrollment limited to students in a Master of Arts degree.
ENGL 6010 Aqueous Modernities 3 Credits
The imagination of the waters as immense, sublime spaces of adventure, peril, and exploration has fueled literature and art for centuries. This course focuses on how such imaginations were re-made in global literature and visual culture across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, during modernist eras defined by British maritime contraction and U.S. naval expansion as well as two world wars, and during postwar, postcolonial, and contemporary eras shaped by treacherous water-crossings under pressure of migrations and asylum seeking; new forms of piracy; deep-sea exploration for oil and gas; “natural” disasters such as spills; and climate crisis. This course participates in the current “hydro-critical turn” in literary and cultural studies by analyzing how the scientific, political, and economic systems of modernity that were tied to the waters inform our understandings of literature and visual cultures. We will frame our readings of literary and visual texts with critical scholarship in political theory, infrastructure studies, and eco-criticism. Anglo-European authors such as Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf will appear alongside lesser known but equally influential figures of the modernist era including James Hanley, Malcolm Lowry, and B. Traven. Poetry, novels, and short fiction by Caribbean and African authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Helon Habila, M. NourbeSe Philip, Monique Roffey, and Nuruddin Farah will be considered along with documentaries, art, and poetry by U.S-. and Euro-based artists and writers such as Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Ellie Ga, and Chris Jordan. Course requirements include a final research project, presentations, and regular postings on Canvas.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6050 Global Modernisms 3 Credits
This seminar explores novels, films, manifestos, and photography from the first half of the twentieth century. We will frame our analyses of canonical and non-canonical modernist and avant-garde works within contemporary critical discussions of the global, worldly, and planetary, as well as within influential theories of colonialism and imperialism, and race, class, gender, and sexual politics. Primary texts include works by authors and artists from the U.S., the Caribbean, India, Continental Europe, and the British Isles. Requirements: presentations, paper proposal, a final seminar paper, postings on electronic bulletin board, participation.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
Enrollment limited to students in a Master of Arts degree.
ENGL 6060 Katrina Culture 3 Credits
“If you weren’t angry after Katrina, you had to be in the market for a soul”—Patricia Smith, poet and former Boston Globe reporter Today, “Katrina” signifies much more than the name of a particularly devastating hurricane that hit the Gulf coast nearly fifteen years ago. While those outside its immediate path of destruction may have paid scant attention or have now largely forgotten the news media’s harrowing images of its impact, t anniversaries of what scholar Nicole Fleetwood calls the “Katrina event” has instructed all of us to “remember” but also, akin to 9/11 commemorations, to study the myriad economic, social, environmental, and cultural conditions left in its wake: a veritable diaspora of displaced and evacuated populations--some of whom have never returned to New Orleans and other Gulf Coast towns-- who are largely poor and working-class African-Americans; the loss of inhabitable land, communities, literal and psychic ‘homes’; the disruption and recasting of musical and literary traditions that have constituted, for many, a kind of cultural imaginary of this unique region in the southern United States. This course will take a broadly interdisciplinary approach to understanding “Katrina” as both a natural and humanly-engineered disaster—as some have argued, a biopolitical crisis. We will marshal theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Geography, Race and Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Working-Class Studies, Environmental Humanities, as well as Literary/Cultural Studies, to unlock the complexity of what happened and why. But we will focus particularly on media and cultural representations of the storm and its aftermath to examine how a variety of artists as well as journalists have attempted to document or rewrite the event itself through imagery, narrative, and poetics. At the same time, we will situate such texts within a larger framework of cultural politics that questions the binaries of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction,’ destabilizes the convenient shorthand of a definitive “pre-“ and “post-“ traumatic socio-cultural landscape, and considers how cultural forms themselves shape analysis. Together, we will explore the significance of local cultural practices like Mardi Gras and jazz funerals, read memoir, graphic nonfiction, novels, and poetry, watch plays and films. Music (jazz/brass band, hip hop, Cajun, protest) will be a constant presence in our course but will also close out our course in the final weeks.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6100 The Culture of the Thirties 3 Credits
In the United States, the phrase “Great Depression” calls to mind an unusually vivid mix of images: itinerant sharecroppers and ramshackle houses, unemployment lines and labor strikes, fireside chats and WPA murals. Drawing on a wide variety of source materials, this course examines the Depression Era in myth and reality. It also considers why the period retains a powerful hold on national memory in our era of economic uncertainty. Writings by Carlos Bulosan, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Tillie Olsen, and Richard Wright; photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange; films by Busby Berkeley, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Pare Lorentz, and Preston Sturges—among many others. Students interested in interdisciplinary approaches to American culture and history are particularly encouraged to enroll.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6110 Toni Morrison 3 Credits
In 1993, Toni Morrison became the eighth woman, first African American, first African American woman, and first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the most coveted literary prize. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised her as one "who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." This graduate seminar - Toni Morrison - seeks to identify and to examine that "essential aspect of American reality" in Morrison's novels and short story—Black lives. For Morrison, Black lives have always mattered, and the essential aspect of her work `is her commitment to the experiences, intricacies and complexities of Black lives in American society. In her novels, Morrison chronicles African American experience from slavery to post-integration. In so doing, she has added not only to the African American literary and cultural landscape but also to the American literary and cultural landscape. We will explore the ways Morrison writes history, nation, family, race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. As she explains in her Nobel lecture, "official language" represents dominant ideologies, including ideologies that can prevent the circulation of new and generative knowledge and can also hinder the exchange of ideas. Morrison’s works, in many ways, challenge and complicate hegemonic institutions and ideologies that oppress, suppress, and/or exclude non-majority groups. Reading critical essays by scholars as well as Morrison’s own criticism and interviews will assist our understanding and analysis of Morrison's literary goals. Specifically, we will explore the ways Morrison constructs discourses that expand, refute, resist, and complicate historical discourses and ideologies about Black life. Students will be able to discuss aspects of Toni Morrison’s writing, including, but not limited to, the differences and similarities between Morrison’s texts and how those similarities and differences reflect changing historical, social, and political perspectives. We will examine Morrison's works from a variety of critical approaches, particularly critical race theory, Black feminist theories, and African American cultural studies. The politics of race will foreground our discussions.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6130 Reading Race in Amer. Culture 3 Credits
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6140 James Joyce 3 Credits
In this class we will read just one novel: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Published one hundred years ago, on February 2, 1922, the book has delighted and infuriated readers, as well as become a magnet for literary critics, from feminists to marxists, and ecocritics to disability studies scholars. We will move slowly and deliberately through the book, paying close attention to form, style, and historical contexts. At the same time, we will survey the range of critical approaches and responses to the novel over the past 50 or so years, while also asking what the next hundred years of the novel’s life will look like. All students will write a 20-25-page final critical paper on one particular episode in the novel.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6150 US Lit Commodity Culture 3 Credits
This seminar focuses on depictions of “things” in a diverse group of U.S. cultural texts from the late-19th and early-20th century, a period widely recognized as pivotal for the emergence of a culture of mass consumption and an era of U. S. external imperialism and economic expansion. Surveying various representational forms--including literary and film texts, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and promotional and documentary materials about the display of “things” in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair--alongside a range of critical and theoretical writings, we will examine interrelations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and nation in U. S. commodity culture. In particular, we will unpack the diverse desires and identifications articulated through commodities in U. S. cultural texts, and the complex ways individuals use commodities to construct (and deconstruct) individual and collective identities. In the final weeks of the semester we will turn to examples from early-21st century television and film, in order to consider crucial developments in U.S. commodity culture in our contemporary moment. Although the content of our discussions each week will substantially be shaped by the interests of seminar members, topics addressed will include: the "feminization" of the consumer, and the relationship between feminism and consumption, during this period; representations of "Americanization" through consumption in immigrant fiction and the links between commodity and nation; the international, imperial significance of images of American "abundance" and "conspicuous consumption" in advertisements and narrative prose; the relationship between consumption and "passing" in African American fiction, and the saturation of commodity culture, including advertising, with racial signifiers and meanings; the ways that commodity culture is haunted by gendered and racial histories of commodification (especially female sexual commodification and the commodification of black bodies under slavery); the complex relationship between cinema and commodity spectacle; and the expansion and intensification of commodification and what Henry Giroux calls “disposability” under contemporary neoliberalism—processes especially evident in visual cultural texts.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6170 Race, Law, Lit 3 Credits
This course explores the intersections between race, law, and literature. We will consider how law has defined racial identity according to strict boundaries, and how literature enables us to push against those boundaries and envision new realities. We will study carefully fundamental Supreme Court decisions regarding slavery, civil rights, whiteness, immigration, citizenship, and native sovereignty and trace the rhetorical work needed to render race legally comprehensible but often illegal with respect to the national body. We will also look closely at the testimony given in the grand jury trials of the Ferguson shootings and of the Rhinelander case and watch a film by Jose Antonio Vargas on being an undocumented immigrant. And finally we will read literature by authors such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, John Okada, Luis Valdez, and Nella Larsen, all of whom tell us what it means to live outside the law.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6230 Black Popular Culture/Politics 3 Credits
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6250 Studies in Brownness 3 Credits
While it has become increasingly common to talk of “brownness" as a racial and cultural category in the U.S., the term remains largely under-theorized. This course invites students to take part an emerging conversation about the meanings of brownness, its conceptual and material histories from the eighteenth century, which witnessed the emergence of race science and rapid colonial expansion, to the present day. In what ways, if any, does the idea of brownness cohere as a concept, and how does it relate to more commonly discussed ideas of whiteness and Blackness? In what ways does the term work for or against rigid notions of racial difference? And, perhaps most important, what, if any, emancipatory potential does the term offer us? Readings include José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown; José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race; Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back; W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Kevin Young, Brown: Poems; Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk; and Moon Charania, Archive of Tongues.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6260 Asian American Lit Culture 3 Credits
In this class we will read a representation of Asian American literary texts and theory and consider the debates that have shaped the field of Asian American literary studies. What grounds the concept of Asian American identity, given that many Asian Americans identify as specific ethnic Americans? We will identify the major historical events that have shaped Asian American experiences, and discuss how Asian American authors have represented exclusion, internment, global capitalism, assimilation, alienation, and protest. In short we will investigate how authors have claimed and created Asian American identities in different times and places and using different forms, from novels and memoirs to graphic novels and films.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6262 Race and Surface 3 Credits
What is a surface? And why and how does it matter for race, criticism, and cultural critique? We will read and make connections across a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary engagements with race and surfaces, from analytic philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, cognition, critical race theory, performance studies, art history, film theory, digital studies, and literary criticism. From inscrutability, interesting, edgy, “mega,” shiny, accessory, or android, we’ll explore how methods of registering surface have ethical and political stakes in a spectrum of feeling humanity, beauty, love, disgust, curiosity, largeness, or smallness. In our readings, we will consider a variety of genres and forms from video art, performance, films, novels, and poetry to scrutinize surface as political and geographic aesthetic, scale, and racial marker.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6265 Afterlives of U.S. Imperialism 3 Credits
In its almost 250-year history, the United States has been at war for over 90% of that time. With currently over 750 military bases in 80+ countries, US military efforts abroad have had profound and devastating political, economic, and cultural effects on the countries and peoples that the US has invaded and fought. Despite this violent history and present reality, the US has disavowed its imperial identity. As George W. Bush in 1999 declared in an echo of many presidents who preceded him, “America has never been an empire.”
This class concentrates on the effects of US military invasion on what was once named the “Orient”—the Near, Middle, and Far East. Beginning from Edward Said’s theorization of “Orientalism,” we will read and analyze Arab, Asian, and Pacific Islander American writers and filmmakers who reimagine and remember what has nationally been repressed. How do these artists construct identities, histories, and cultures that testify to their own racialization as “foreigners,” “aliens,” and “enemies” within the United States itself and to the US “conflicts,” “interventions,” “assistance,” and wars abroad that America has worked hard to erase?
This class concentrates on the effects of US military invasion on what was once named the “Orient”—the Near, Middle, and Far East. Beginning from Edward Said’s theorization of “Orientalism,” we will read and analyze Arab, Asian, and Pacific Islander American writers and filmmakers who reimagine and remember what has nationally been repressed. How do these artists construct identities, histories, and cultures that testify to their own racialization as “foreigners,” “aliens,” and “enemies” within the United States itself and to the US “conflicts,” “interventions,” “assistance,” and wars abroad that America has worked hard to erase?
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6270 Literature the Global South 3 Credits
What is the Global South? How does it differ from the Third World? How does it relate to the idea of the postcolonial? How does thinking from the Global South offer new archives, methodologies, questions, and more? This class will trace literary and cultural formulations from and engagements with the discourse of the Global South. We will look at emerging and established critical questions, from environmentalism in the south to new decolonization movements, and from oceanic to planetary thinking. We will read a range of novels and theoretical writing, primarily from South Asia and the African continent, to help us to ask how thinking from and about the Global South might reorient our critical attention. Authors may include JM Coetzee, Sunjeev Suhota, Indra Sinha, Namwali Serpell, and more.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6280 African Amer Lit Criticism 3 Credits
Atlanta. DC. New Orleans. Flint. The South. The inner city. MLK Boulevard. The Black Belt. In the U.S., there is an abundance of case studies on the racialization of place. In this course, we will interrogate processes and histories of racialization, investigate how Black artists construct narratives of fictional and actual places, and analyze the work of representation in the staying power of racial narratives associated with place and space. Course material will draw from literature, geography, housing policy, Black feminism, film, and cultural studies.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6290 Race, Place, Representation 3 Credits
Atlanta. DC. New Orleans. Flint. The South. The inner city. MLK Boulevard. The Black Belt. In the U.S., there is an abundance of case studies on the racialization of place. In this course, we will interrogate processes and histories of racialization, investigate how Black artists construct narratives of fictional and actual places, and analyze the work of representation in the staying power of racial narratives associated with place and space. Course material will draw from literature, geography, housing policy, Black feminism, film, and cultural studies.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 6310 Black Women Writers 3 Credits
In her 1993 Nobel Lecture, Toni Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel prize in literature, stated: "Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge." If Morrison’s statement is true, what types of knowledge have Black women writers provided through their narratives? What "scenes of instructions," as S. Hartman theorizes, or "codes of conduct," as K. Holloway analyzes, are presented by Black women writers? What knowledge is proffered, indeed essential, "in the wake", as C. Sharpe posits, of the afterlife of slavery? From the eighteenth century to the present, Black women writers have certainly used the literary imagination not only as an epistemic tool to transmit cultural, social, political, and civic knowledge but also as an epistemic tool to interrogate the mainstream knowledge concerning Black life, generally, and Black women, specifically. In doing so, Black women writers also engage in the enterprises of self-definition and self-representation while challenging the socially constructed limited and limiting knowledge concerning Black women and Black life. In this seminar, students will analyze the following historical concerns for Black women writers: How can art be both beautiful and political? What role does art play in struggles for freedom and equality? How might art theorize democracy? How might cultural productions mediate the political and personal? For whose sake is art? We will also be concerned with the social, historical, political, and cultural texts, conditions and questions surrounding issues of racial and national identities, identities complicated by class, region, gender, and sexuality. A number of critical methodologies, including critical race theory and Black feminist theories, especially intersectionality, will assist our readings. Writers may include A. J. Cooper, T. Morrison, A. Walker, Z. N. Hurston, T. Bambara, A. Lorde, G. Naylor, J. Ward, L. Hansberry, S. Parks, A. D. Smith, M. Angelou, J. Kincaid, A. Petry, N. Larsen, L. Clifton, N. Giovanni, J. Jordan, and O. Butler.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6380 Reading the Indian Ocean 3 Credits
National literatures (American, English, French, Indian) are becoming increasingly less coherent in a world of forced and voluntary migration, travel and global trade—our experiences are less and less confined to the boundaries of nations. But none of this is new—for centuries the Indian Ocean has seen slave transports, movements of migrant workers, trade between East Africa and West Asia, mostly driven by European and Muslim empires. In many ways, the regional economy and culture of the Indian Ocean was a precursor to latter-day globalization. In this class we will read a series of novels that emerge from and represent Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia, India, and the waters that lie between them. Our focus will be on connections between the novels of the cosmopolitan world of the Indian Ocean and the legacies of global empires.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6410 Latinx Literature Now 3 Credits
This graduate seminar focuses on literary and other cultural material produced by writers of US Latinx heritage published in the second decade of the twenty first century, as well as works of scholarship and criticism in Latinx literary studies, and literary studies more generally, in order to accomplish a number of learning goals for students, including: familiarizing them with an emerging body of literary and cultural work by artists hailing from the largest (and still growing) cultural minority population in the United States; creating opportunities for critical reflection on how national, comparative, and “minority” literatures (and cultures) mutually interact and inter-implicate one another; modeling how forms of cultural production can both shape as well as represent the historical moments of their emergence, that is, how they participate in determining what “feels” contemporary, or what presents itself, at the matrix of time and space, as the *present* present, the here and now; tracing a genealogy of critical and scholarly work that, more than commenting on the “primary,” creative material, also creates positive conditions for the historical endurance of that material through rigorous interrogation of its own operations as a discipline and as a matrix of interdisciplinary fields; and, finally, offering students opportunities to put theory into practice in their own reading, thinking, discussion, and writing. The Anglo-US signifier “Latinx” already announces that our work can only be happening now, in the current moment, and in a United States cultural and political context that struggles violently to know and to manage itself in the face of its increasing complexity and diversity. It also signals the necessarily intersectional as well as interdisciplinary nature of the course's work, since “Latinx” demands being read not just as a complex marker of ethnicity and/or race, but also of gender, and of sexuality, and even of class, nation, and political orientation. Written assignments in the course will include opportunities to practice both close reading and critical analysis (of creative, critical, and scholarly work), as well as a longer research-based written study that will serve as the culminating term project for the course; the shorter assignments will also serve as the bases for in-class oral presentations.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Equivalent to ENGL 4133
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6500 Lannan Seminar 3 Credits
Lannan Seminar (ENGL-450 & ENGL-650) Lannan Poetry Seminar encourages dynamic critical thinking and creativity with a view to examining literary forms and practices; the work of individual authors; the relationship between writing and other arts; and the place of writing in contemporary culture. Fellows study and discuss the work of the year’s scheduled guests in the Lannan “Readings and Talks” series, participate in conversations with the guests, and attend their readings and performances. Fellows then produce an independent final project (creative or critical) under the guidance of the instructor. There are also opportunities for students to develop and share their own writing in several genres. Enrollment in this seminar is limited to the Lannan Fellows. Prerequisites: Permission of Instructor
Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6507 Studies in Hist of Film Media 3 Credits
The particular topic of this course in the history of film and media varies from term to term. In each case the course will center on the focused analysis of a particular media form or set of them and aim to locate those formal and stylistic studies in social context. Please see section description for details.
Level: Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 6540 Philip Roth, Meta/Autofiction 3 Credits
The Jewish-American writer Philip Roth is reckoned as one of the most important novelists in the American post-War literary canon. The historical, comic, pornographic, transgressive, and scatological dimensions of his work are well chronicled. Less has been said, however, about Roth’s enduring commitment to exploring genres of post-modern, metafictional, and autofictional storytelling. Additionally, the advent of the #MeToo movement has called into question Roth’s use of these genres and the alleged inherent misogyny of his art. In this course, we will read some of Roth’s self- reflexive masterpieces such as My Life As a Man, Deception and The Counterlife, among others. Aside from standing as some of the late 20th century’s most intriguing (and commercially popular) forms of narrative experimentation, these works problematize the question of the ontological status of the novel. What is a novel? What is it supposed to "do"? What is its relation to the Truth or truths? What will emerge is a meditation on the role of fiction itself, its curious rivalry with “reality,” it’s strained relation with both progressive and conservative conceptions of proper aesthetic practice, and its brazen insistence that it retains privileged insight into all departments of human existence
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6550 20C Poetry 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6590 Mod Contemp Poems Poetics 3 Credits
In this course, we’ll discuss and study terrific Modern and contemporary poems, and contend with some poets’ essays that (seemingly) advocate for such poems. Breakthrough Modernist poems have helped establish our sense of the world; we now drift through a murky era named “the Post Modern.” This course will test poems against their poets’ claims, and against our own, developed readings of poems. We may briefly consider some Romantic poems, then study the titanic Moderns—Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, WC Williams, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and others; then we’ll follow several of the outwardly spiraling clusters of significant poets since then. You need not be very experienced in reading poems; you may even find poems difficult, murky, or bewildering. I only ask, be ready to jump in! Text: Ramazani & Ellmann’s Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry (both volumes), and some short single books of poems. We’ll attend some of our Lannan poetry readings as well. Your written work will include: explication of texts; short essays; theatre review; (possible) in-class report; some poems composed by you (ungraded).
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6640 Amer Poetry:Aftrlives of Lyric 3 Credits
What was lyric poetry? This course reads an array of US poets whose work negotiates the question of genre in the period of the lyric’s afterlives, roughly since 1914. We will also explore how the belatedness of the lyric has shaped the work of recent critics and theorists. Does the idea of the lyric as a lapsed genre reshape our view of poetry’s relation to history? Or of the time in which a poem happens? If electronics have altered our approaches to textual and archival studies, do these technologies render an idea of the lyric that is compatible with ongoing experiments in digital poetics? We’ll read poetry by Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others; as well as theory and criticism by Virginia Jackson, Northrop Frye, Barbara Johnson, John Stuart Mill, the Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo, and others.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6750 Class Fictions in the Cont. US 3 Credits
“Economic inequality” has become a familiar term adopted by media pundits, academics, politicians, and activists to encompass the devastating consequences of the most recent U.S. economic recession as well as unions’ loss of power, crumbling public school systems, and the proliferation of hungry, homeless families (to name but a few). We rarely hear directly from those with the least power; more typically, we encounter a kaleidoscope of images, voices, stories—and ideologies to match—circulated by a wide variety of popular cultural as well as ‘elite’ texts hoping to make that population visible. This interdisciplinary course provides critical/ theoretical tools for navigating such representations but also expands the terrain by featuring writers/musical artists/filmmakers who claim membership in “low” classes and cultures: working-class/poverty class/’underclass.’ It provides a recent historical context—from the 1990s to the present—to demonstrate how class differences and conflicts have helped shape our current U.S. economic, legal, and social structures as well as to emphasize that “class” itself is a complex and shifting identity category experienced in tandem with other identity markers and positionalities such as race, gender, and sexuality. We’ll focus on exploring how particular cultural forms and genres, such as fiction, cinema, popular music, and memoir, may limit or expand an audience’s grasp of, engagement with, and resistance to, class categories. We’ll also take up a broad spectrum of issues, including theories of working-class identity, social/cultural resistance, and the notion of representation itself.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6800 Testimonial Fict US Lat Lit 3 Credits
English 680 traces the emergence on the US literary and cultural scene of a body of expressive work dedicated to the critical representation and analysis of the histories and legacies of mostly state-sponsored forms of political violence in the Latin American homelands of a collection of prominent US Latinx literary writers. The course understands this emergence as primarily a literary and cultural phenomenon operating within complex political, social and historical contexts. For this reason, much of the course’s focus will be on questions of a decidedly literary and discursive nature: how exactly should we understand the differing obligations to historical memory, and historical knowledge, of texts operating in the modes of fiction versus non-fiction? what kinds of differential “truth values” should we assign to texts across various genres, like the novel, the memoir, and what some Latin American studies scholars term testimonio? And, in addition to their engagements of the historical past, how can or should we understand these texts’ engagements of any possible futures to which they open or avail themselves? The course also insists on the US-specific situation of its primary objects of study; while most of the events remembered, represented or invented in the readings will have occurred in other national settings, most of the readings themselves appeared initially in the US, and in English. Thus, part of the course’s challenge will be to strike a balance between a critical excavation of the US presence in non-US “American” spaces, especially from the Cold War and into our contemporary era, and a strategic projection into the US’s own complex, multicultural future(s), thanks in part to the establishment in its domestic national space of the various diasporic and immigrant communities represented in and by our reading list. As a graduate-level seminar, English 680 will entail a considerable amount of reading, including (in addition to the primary texts) a broad selection of scholarly, critical and theoretical works, as well as a selection of cinematic pieces, both feature and documentary, that will augment and complicate the print material. Primary writers will include: Rigoberta Menchú, Reinaldo Arenas, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Héctor Tobar, Cristina García, William Archila, Carolyn Forché, and Daniel Alarcón.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6810 Intro to Film Theory 3 Credits
Film theory might best be described as an interdisciplinary set of interpretive frameworks that all try to understand what motion pictures are, how they work, and how they make us feel. This set is constantly growing and has no clear boundaries. It does have a history, however, and methodological roots in textual analysis, historicism, analytical and continental philosophy, even cognitive science. This course will introduce you to these and other approaches to studying motion pictures, including ontology, phenomenology, semiotics, materialism, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, and genre theory. It will explore how film theory informs readings of individual films as well as electronic media and other genres. Ultimately, “Introduction to Film Theory” is designed to ground you in a discipline and show how that discipline emerges from and gives back to other fields of the humanities and social sciences.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in Commun, Culture Technology, Commun, Culture Technology, Commun, Culture Technology, Commun, Culture Technology, English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
Enrollment limited to students in a Master of Arts degree.
ENGL 6820 Queer Cinema 3 Credits
“To queer” means to spoil or ruin—at least according to most dictionaries. To queer theorists, it means to analyze, contest, or subvert the power of “the normal.” “Queer Theory, Queer Cinema” will begin by reading canonical texts of queer theory, essays and book chapters that collectively established a zone of inquiry around anti-normative sexual acts and identities, including but not limited to LGBTQIA affiliation. Using films to jumpstart our conversations, we’ll explore how queer theory destabilizes and challenges traditional and restrictive ideas about sexuality and gender. But writing is only one way in which people think, and the second half of this course will shift the balance from theory-with-film to film-as-theory. While we’ll continue to read writers who can help us understand film better, we’ll examine queer filmmaking as a way of staking arguments about this world and imagining other worlds. Writers we’ll engage include Gayle Rubin, José Muñoz, Adrienne Rich, E. Patrick Johnson, and Susan Stryker, who will help us consider concepts like sexual politics, disidentification, compulsory heterosexuality, intersectional and queer of color critique, and trans knowledges. Films we’ll watch include Tongues Untied, Scorpio Rising, Funeral Parade of Roses, Dyketactics, and A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica). If these names aren’t familiar to you already, don’t worry. Our goal in this course is to familiarize ourselves with the ways that queer theory and queer cinema can change our lives!
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6880 Escapism 3 Credits
Everything you think you know about escapism is probably wrong. Escapism isn’t selfish or a waste of time; it is actually a worldbuilding form of self-care that bolsters our resilience and gives us the energy to imagine and pursue brighter futures. In this class, we will analyze what philosophers have said about the morality of escapism, why escapism has such a bad reputation, and how people have practiced escapism historically and at present. In addition to philosophy and critical theory, we’ll also study media and media theory to understand why some films and TV shows get called “escapist” and how that label reinforces specific ideologies and taste cultures. We’ll approach escapism as personal, subjective, and dynamic, and we’ll experiment with different forms of escapism, including bird-watching, daydreaming, and playing “idle” video games. We will consider escapism’s political potentials and whether and why it can become dangerous. Specific texts we’ll engage include I Saw the TV Glow, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and Bob’s Burgers as well as books and essays by Tricia Hersey, Audre Lorde, and Yi-Fu Tuan, not to mention Plato, Immanuel Levinas, and Theodor Adorno.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6900 Lit Commodity Culture 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6920 Mass Media the Amer. Mind 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6930 Intro to Digital Humanities 3 Credits
"Digital Humanities" has many different meanings, inside and outside academia. Whether praised as the next big thing in knowledge creation or derided as an empty buzzword, DH is an important and influential part of the contemporary landscape of the humanities. Indeed, it sits across both of these extreme characterizations: as a set of methodologies and practices, DH provides novel ways to think about meaning in our networked world; as a scholarly/institutional (social) network, it represents the best and the worst of what academia can accomplish. We will attend to its technical, methodological, and social complexities throughout the semester. This class will give students an overview of the field in its many different forms, from distance reading and humanities computing through game studies and social media. In addition to developing a sense of the field through reading and conversation, students will also gain experience with the tools of the trade through a combination of demo projects and the completion of a larger DH prototype.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 6932 Digital Humanities Rhetoric 3 Credits
Circuits and Discourse: Exploring Digital Humanities and Rhetoric This course examines how digital technologies influence communication, persuasion, research, and cultural analysis in the humanities. It's designed for students seeking to understand the impact of technology in their areas of research and practice. We will explore: 1) The intersection of digital humanities and rhetorical studies; 2) How digital tools are changing scholarly communication; 3) methods for sharing academic findings with wider audiences. The course also covers the theoretical foundations of digital humanities and rhetoric, the evolution of rhetorical concepts in digital environments, practical applications of digital tools in public humanities research, and strategies for making scholarship more accessible and impactful. Students will gain exposure to digital textual analysis, network visualization, data mining, and computational approaches to literary and cultural studies. We'll examine how programming languages and automated systems influence discourse, decision-making, and power structures, with special attention to AI-generated content. The course also addresses representation and inclusivity in digital spaces, considering technology's role in amplifying or silencing diverse voices. Throughout, participants will apply rhetorical and digital tools to deepen their engagement with various discourses, events, objects, and communities. Content will also be tailored to students' interests and ongoing projects, ensuring relevance to individual research goals. By combining theory with practical skills, the course aims to equip students with the knowledge and tools to critically analyze and contribute to the evolving landscape of digital humanities. During the semester, students will work on both collaborative and individual digital humanities projects. These hands-on assignments will allow students to apply what they've learned to practical situations. Project options may include: building interactive digital exhibits, creating data visualizations of literary works, and analyzing the rhetorical techniques used in popular social media campaigns. By the course's end, students will have a deeper understanding of how digital technologies are changing both humanities research and the practice of rhetoric in the real world.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 7060 GlobalCulture/PlanetaryChange 3 Credits
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7080 Trans Lit. of the Américas 3 Credits
Nested in the question “what is trans literature?” are two thornier ones: what is trans? And what is literature? Like the category “Literature of the Americas,” which has come to describe hemispheric literary production, the etymology of “trans” implies movement "across." How have the Americas been constructed and contested by trans writing and rewriting over history and across borders? What genealogies and genres of trans literature bear on representations of immigration, displacement, and belonging? What role does translating trans play in approaches to hemispheric histories of colonization, genocide, and slavery? Drawing on the intersections between trans and queer of color critique and cuir/trans/travesti studies of U.S. Latinx and Latin American literatures alongside decolonial, diasporic, and translation studies frameworks, we’ll investigate how varying geopolitics generate trans hemispheric imaginaries that encompass and exceed the Américas. Our studies will range across local contexts from the Caribbean to the Southern Cone, from South to North and beyond. Although all texts will be provided in translation, a working knowledge of Spanish and/or Portuguese will be helpful for approaching course content.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7110 Approaching the Anthropocene 3 Credits
The entirety of Western thought, and nearly all of literary history, has unfolded under the assumption that a category called “the human” could be opposed to another category called “nature.” This seminar in the environmental humanities tracks the productive breakdown of that distinction. First proposed by earth systems scientists in the year 2000, “The Anthropocene” names a new epoch in planetary history, a chaotic new present at the far end of the Holocene in which human activity – in the form of fossil fuel consumption, industrial farming, urbanization, and nuclear experimentation, among other innovations— has altered forever the course of biotic evolution and left a permanent record of this disturbance in the strata of the earth. In this catastrophic new reality, weather events, sea changes, and even evolutionary processes all derive at least elliptically from human causes, and “nature” can no longer separated comfortably from ourselves. The disastrous costs of these changes for human and nonhuman life mean that the Anthropocene takes the form of a practical challenge, one touching on all branches of culture, politics, ethics, and science. But it is a conceptual problem too, since it generates breakdowns in our most time-honored tools for thought and demands new models by which the present can be apprehended and perhaps even contested. The work of this seminar will be to see how (1) the multiple and interdependent environmental crises characterizing our present moment generate dilemmas for thinking that reverberate across multiple disciplines; and (2) how these conceptual crises crystallize in effects of literary and aesthetic form. This course will follow the program of the 2016-2018 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar, “Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change,” co-directed by Nathan Hensley, Dana Luciano, and John McNeill. Readings will span disciplines and genre, and include visual and installation art and film in addition to more conventionally literary works. Many will be derived from the work of Seminar guests and participants, with whom we will interact at events and as guest speakers. Requirements will include rigorous preparation, inventive reading, and attendance at all major seminar lectures. Assignments will include work in conventional and experimental / hybrid forms, with opportunities to write publicly for the Seminar blog. No prior exposure to environmental humanities is presumed or required. More on the Seminar is here: https://anthropocene.georgetown.edu/.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7120 Intro to Critical Theory 3 Credits
This course introduces students to a range of approaches to the interpretation of literary texts and other cultural artifacts. Although we cannot address the entire history of literary and cultural criticism, we will examine a range of important schools and key debates that continue to inform the study of literature. Readings will be historically contextualized and situated within the broader scholarly conversations to which they contribute. This class equips graduate students to think critically about the possible goals and methods of studying literature and culture. It emphasizes readings in critical theory but includes a range of poems, stories, and other artworks that will enable us to consider how our theoretical perspectives can inform textual interpretation. Readings include works of critical theory by Eliot, Derrida, Butler, Said, Benjamin, Sedgwick, and others; as well as literary texts by Poe, Frost, Brooks, Rich, and more. Written assignments invite students to develop their own theoretically informed interpretations of literature and to conduct independent research in the areas of critical theory that interest them most.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7140 Global Black Feminist Poetics. 3 Credits
This course focuses on the poetry and poetics of the African Diaspora with special emphasis on writing from the Caribbean, Canada, and Great Britain. We will be broadly concerned with the meaning for this poetry of the Atlantic slave trade, the plantation system, and colonialism; and more specifically with various problems pertaining to language, culture, tradition, race, and gender as articulated by the poets themselves and in recent literary criticism and cultural theory. Poets to be considered include Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Bennett, M. Nourbese Philip, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, and others. Readings in social and cultural theory will draw from the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, and Edouard Glissant to provide a context and point of reference for our study the diasporic imaginary after 1960.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7150 Black Queer Feminisms 3 Credits
This course will explore the writing, music, art, media and cultural thought of queer feminist figures of the African Diaspora. Pairing important creative works with key texts in black queer and feminist theory from various Diaspora locations, we will explore the landscape of contemporary cultural production among black queer feminist communities on a transnational stage. Our work will take us through several genres including poetry, fiction, hip-hop music and videos, blogs and web communities, film, web series, and drama, and will take up the work of contemporary black LGBT and queer feminist artists from several Diaspora locales including South Africa, the UK, Germany, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Canada, Cuba, the U.S. and others. Throughout our discussions, we’ll examine the shifting meanings of terms like “black,” “feminist,” and “queer” in each of the settings, and consider how they expand and challenge our own understandings of difference and power. Assignments include regular participation, in-class writing, a short paper, a final paper, a final project, and some creative work.
Level: Graduate
Course attribute: XAFA name
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
ENGL 7170 Disability, Art, and Culture 3 Credits
In this dynamic practicum, we will explore the rich relationship between disability, art, and culture. Utilizing critical theory as well as case studies drawn from the literary, visual and performing arts, we will employ disability studies approaches to examining how disability challenges notions of culture. Rather than viewing disability as something art overcomes or therapizes, we will examine how cultural workers deploy disability as a lens, an identity, an aesthetic, and a form of discourse to interrogate notions of power, representation, art, ability, and more. We will also consider our own assumptions about ability and art, and work to transform the classroom community and beyond. Issues of access will be central. Art- and culture-making will be used as methods of criticism. Project-based learning and disability justice will form the core of our praxis, which we will collectively create.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7200 Disability Studies 3 Credits
This course examines the role that disability plays in our culture. We will study the ways disability gets constructed in discourses ranging from law and policy, to film, plays, novels, memoirs, and poetry, and consider how changing conceptions of disability both ground and threaten notions of normality, identity, independence, productivity, and personhood. Some topics we will explore include disabled modernism/modernity, disability poetry and poetics; cognitive disability, dependency theory and the ethics of care; and the concept of "Deaf gain,” American Sign Language poetics, and new developments in Deaf Studies. Texts include Virginia Woolf’s *Mrs. Dalloway*, Larry Kramer’s *The Normal Heart*, poetry by Charlotte Mew, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Essex Hemphill, Hannah Weiner, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Alice Notley. This course participates in the Disability Studies Program event series. Students will attend lectures and performances by renowned disability theorists, advocates, and artists.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7220 Approaches to Teaching Writing 3 Credits
What should students learn in a writing class? And how can we best help them learn about writing? Scholars and teachers of writing have been debating these questions for decade. Everyone who teaches writing, whether as a subject in itself or as a core practice in a course focused on some other subject, has to decide how to do it. These questions will guide our exploration of research and theories about how people develop as writers, what they need to understand, and how to approach teaching. Through readings, reflections on your experience as a writer and a student, and some practice teaching, we’ll consider everything from what we mean by “writing” to how to design courses, class sessions, and assignments to strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ work. You’ll finish the semester by articulating your own theory of how to teach writing and designing your own course.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7230 Approaches to Teaching Lit 3 Credits
This course is intended to be a graduate introduction to the practice of teaching literature: its texts, its history, and its methods and theories. We will examine practical and theoretical issues related to teaching, including exploring the pedagogical experiences that have informed our own personal understanding of literature. Over the course of the semester, we will address practical issues such as developing course goals, creating a syllabus, and choosing primary and secondary texts, but we will also pay particular attention to a variety of techniques for reading and interpretation that will enable us to engage deeply with our students about the field and the works we have chosen to teach. Finally, we will look carefully at how different teaching philosophies and approaches play out in the literature classroom (e.g., what does active learning look like in a literature class? How can approaches to inclusive pedagogy, technology-enhanced learning or Ignatian pedagogy enhance the study of literature?) // As a graduate seminar, students will be asked to engage in a dialogue with each other and with the scholarship in the field about teaching and about literature. Course assignments will include weekly readings and critical writing, seminar presentations, a teaching practicum, and a final research project that develops an approach to teaching a particular of work of literature.This course is intended to be a graduate introduction to the practice of teaching literature: its texts, its history, and its methods and theories. We will examine practical and theoretical issues related to teaching, including exploring the pedagogical experiences that have informed our own personal understanding of literature. Over the course of the semester, we will address practical issues such as developing course goals, creating a syllabus, and choosing primary and secondary texts, but we will also pay particular attention to a variety of techniques for reading and interpretation that will enable us to engage deeply with our students about the field and the works we have chosen to teach. Finally, we will look carefully at how different teaching philosophies and approaches play out in the literature classroom (e.g., what does active learning look like in a literature class? How can approaches to inclusive pedagogy, technology-enhanced learning or Ignatian pedagogy enhance the study of literature?) // As a graduate seminar, students will be asked to engage in a dialogue with each other and with the scholarship in the field about teaching and about literature. Course assignments will include weekly readings and critical writing, seminar presentations, a teaching practicum, and a final research project that develops an approach to teaching a particular of work of literature.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7260 Digital Approaches to Lit 3 Credits
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7270 Narratives TeachingLearning 3 Credits
The university is the setting of many novels, stories, plays, and films. But how well do these texts represent the actual experience of teaching and learning? What do they tell us about what distinguishes an effective classroom from a bad one, or about what motivates or hinders learning? What do they get right, and what do they miss or distort? How have these texts changed as higher education has changed?
These and other questions will drive our work in this seminar, as we look at a range of novels, stories, plays, and films that depict the work students and teachers do together alongside readings on theories of teaching and learning. In addition, we will look at a selection of critical works on the history and evolution of higher education in order to put the fictional texts in dialogue with the larger critical conversation about how higher education works. You’ll be asked to write a series of brief responses to these texts, as well as to draft and revise a longer project.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English, English, Learning and Design, Learning and Design, Learning and Design or Learning and Design.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7280 Public Sphere Writing 3 Credits
As humanists, we study language, literature, and culture not only for their value in the academy but also because we believe they matter to society. For us and for those outside of the academy, the ideas and texts that we explore help us understand the world and prepare us to act in it. The question is, how can we deploy humanities-based knowledge beyond the academy and even beyond the classroom? How do we use it in the public sphere? This course will explore some of the ways that humanists work in public settings, with a focus on writing and multimedia communication. We’ll begin with some discussion of what we mean by “the public sphere” and “public rhetoric,” but we’ll spend most of our time analyzing and producing genres that are commonly used in public-facing organizations, like grant-writing, or to engage non-academic audiences, such as op-eds, podcasts, social media, and web-based exhibits and resources. You’ll choose the genres you most want to work in, and you’ll draw on your scholarly interests as you develop your projects. Along the way, you’ll have opportunities to talk with professionals about how they use their humanities training in public settings. This course is open to students in any humanities graduate program; advanced undergraduates may enroll with the instructor's permission.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students in the MA-ENGL program.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7290 Queer Memoir:Theory Practice 3 Credits
Is memoir always already queer? Are queers always already in a state of remembering/memorializing? How do historically bound, ever-changing notions of lgbtq identity and liberation alter what is remembered and how it is narrativized? In this practicum, we will examine 20th and 21st-century texts that collide queerness with memoir—or queer the very notion of memoir, memory, and a stable subject. The genre- and gender-shredding capacities of queer memoir will be interrogated, particularly as they are inflected by race, place, gender, sexuality, the state, and more. We will examine the relationship between the literary genre of the memoir and the radical practice of queer self-fashioning. The range of works examined will be broad, including those not usually read as either properly memoir or queer to complicate what we talk about when we talk about queer memoir. The literary world's memoirophobia and its intimate (possible self-same!) relationship to homophobia will be interrogated as we study both the ideas/memoirs of others, and create/interrogate our own. We will explore in a hands-on fashion the relationship between literary theory and practice, and investigate (and create!) works that blur the boundaries between them. Questions of form will be central to our inquiry as we explore the politics and poetics of the anti-genre of queer memoir. Expect to write weekly and rigorously.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7360 Professional Writing 3 Credits
This graduate course explores professional writing in our digital age. Designed for potential researchers, teachers and even practitioners of professional writing, this course will help you master the theories, strategies and common practices of 21st-century workplace writing. We will hear directly from top corporate and non-profit leaders, while also reading, discussing and writing about the latest research in the field. Options for your final project will include an authentic assignment for a local non-profit as well as a potential conference paper on professional writing. Throughout this course, we’ll explore how the approaches you have mastered as graduate literature students apply to teaching, researching and practicing non-academic writing. Specific lines of inquiry will include the following:
● How have professional writing theories and strategies evolved to meet the needs of an increasingly globalized workplace in which Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are more relevant than the interoffice memo?
● Can key literary theories about readers, including reader-response theory, help us understand the complex roles of audience in a world of approval processes, stakeholders and audience profiling?
● Can narrative theory help us understand, teach, and perform organizational storytelling in such genres as business case studies, legal briefs, and corporate social responsibility reports?
● Can a writing voice ever be corporate – even as companies such as Groupon and Kellogg spend millions to develop “authentic” and yet global brand voices?
● Are high-profile approaches to professional writing, including the Federal Plain Language Guidelines, supported by usability, cognitive science and other research into how people read in the 21st century?
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7400 Documentary Poetics 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7410 Hybrid Forms 3 Credits
What is a text? What is a literary genre? What links these two questions? According to Jacques Derrida, Lady Gaga, and other experts, all texts are always already hybrid. In this practicum, we will study—and create—texts that foreground their hybridity, dissolving and deconstructing the conventional boundaries of poetry, fiction, memoir, journalism, etc. Beyond literary hybridity, we will explore works that hybridize inscription with visual art, documentary evidence, film, digital media, t,v., theater, appropriated/found objects, performance, sound, music, noise, commerce, and protest. The politics, aesthetics, and ethics of hybridity will be examined as we conduct our own experiments in a range of derangements of genre. We will pay particularly close attention to works that explore theory/practice hybridity, including fictocriticism, autofiction, metafiction, documentary poetics, gonzo journalism. Ethnography, radical queer culture, and biology will make surprise appearances. Expect to write weekly, read critically, and engage in a variety of hybrid critical/creative practices.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7630 Intro to Public Humanities 3 Credits
An introductory, cohort-shaping proseminar that investigates and historicizes major concepts and issues in the humanities (interdisciplinarity, discipline, public(s), the relationship between humanities study and humanities practice, etc.) and invites students to explore an “interdiscipline” of interest (e.g., humanities and law, humanities and medicine, humanities and climate change, humanities and aging, humanities and global health) through a research project. The course introduces the public humanities as an emergent discipline unto itself, with a definable object of study and a distinct methodology.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7740 The Art of Justice 3 Credits
In 1791, a ship, the Zong, captained by Luke Collingworth, left the west coast of Africa with a cargo of 470 enslaved peoples. After some four months lost at sea, “sixty negroes died for want of water… forty others… through thirst and frenzy… threw themselves into the sea; and the masters and mariners… were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.” The question presented before an English court was not one of murder, or crimes against humanity, but whether the owners of the ship were entitled to collect insurance. But for these few words in Gregson v. Gilbert, an insurance case, this horror would have escaped history, passing without a trace. The opinion, in its grotesque limitation, was, before it galvanized the abolition movment, the only memorialization of the event. In her remarkable book-length poem, Zong!, published in 2008, the lawyer-turned-poet, NorbuSe Philip, asks, how we make meaning out of such an impoverished record? How can we talk about justice in the language of law, when it is the language of law that reduced dead men to property in the first instance? How might memory of legal wrongs nonetheless expand our imagining of justice?
By pairing a series of legal events with literary rewritings, this interdisciplinary seminar will offer students the opportunity to think critically and creatively about the limits of legal reasoning—its role in both the routine violence of slavery and conquest, expropriation and exploitation, displacement and repression and its role in shaping (or misshaping) public memory—and to expand our language and imagination of justice by engaging literature, film, and critical theory. Each of these pairings will bring into focus discrete legal episodes in American history—for instance, family separation under slavery, the policing of ‘wayward’ black women in new urban centers in the early 20th century, the suppression of political dissent among new immigrants during the same time, Japanese incarceration during World War II, the disappearance of immigrant children under Trump’s first term, the American colonization of Puerto Rico.
Students will be expected to draft short weekly reflections, to participate in leading our seminar discussion at least once during the semester. Students taking the course for 3-credits are expected to write a final paper on a topic of their own choosing.
Learning Objectives
Students in this class will be given the opportunity to
think critically about the law’s claim to neutrality and its differential effects on various subordinated groups
explore particular histories of racialized and gendered violence, specifically with respect to histories of slavery, conquest, and immigrant exclusion and displacement
think critically about the role of law in the production of public memory or collective history by exploring historical events through various legal and literary forms.
collaborate with other students by sharing presentations, engaging in close reading of difficult texts together, and sustaining classroom dialogue. I take very seriously the ethical dimension of seminar discussion: When we collaborate in constructing meaning from a common source, we practice world-building.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Students cannot enroll who have a program in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7941 Com Scholar Teaching Practicum
Must be an English major graduate student to enroll.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Pass/Fail Default
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7949 Tutorial: English 3 Credits
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7952 Folger Institute Seminar 3 Credits
Seminar courses offered through the Folger Institute.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 7990 MA Thesis Seminar 3 Credits
The seminar is required in the fall term of the second year for all English Master's students opting to complete their degree by producing the conventional research-based thesis project in the appropriate sub-field of their choosing. The seminar guides students through the early and foundational phases of producing the Master's thesis. By the start of the fall term all thesis writers must have chosen a topic and a mentor; they must also have spent the summer doing initial exploratory reading and research in preparation for the work of composing the thesis in the second year. The seminar prepares students for the production of the thesis in the following ways: early in the fall term students will submit a brief, formal thesis proposal to their thesis mentors and the seminar instructor for approval; class time early in the fall will model possible thesis topics, methodologies and strategies for production in a variety of ways, including shared readings on research and writing in interdisciplinary English studies fields, reading actual published projects in a sampling of those fields, and visits by Georgetown English faculty to discuss their own strategies of conceptualization and execution of research projects. Students will also devote time in the course of the term to consulting with Georgetown's library staff and others qualified to support them in their thesis work. The seminar devotes later weeks in the term to student presentations on their individual research topics; these presentations will prepare students for the oral defense of the thesis scheduled for the spring term of year two, and they will help shape students' thinking as they prepare to submit the first 20 pages of their thesis to their mentor and the seminar instructor at the end of the fall term. The fall thesis research seminar encourages students taking the thesis option to form an intellectual and scholarly community devoted to an ethic of collaboration and mutual support, and to sustain that community for their entire second year in the program.
Level: Graduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to students with a major in English, English, English or English.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 8999 Thesis Research
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: No Grade
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 9991 Continuous Registration
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: No Grade
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 9992 Continuous Registration
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: No Grade
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 9993 Continuous Registration
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: No Grade
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 9994 Continuous Registration
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.
ENGL 9999 Thesis Research
Graduate students enrolled in a master's thesis program or a doctoral program who have completed all coursework must register for Thesis Research - 999, section 1, in each Fall and Spring semester; the registration fee is currently $2,750 per semester. This includes students who have completed all course work and plan to take language proficiency examinations or comprehensive examinations before beginning research and writing of the thesis or dissertation.
Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
Grading: No Grade
Course registration restrictions:
Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.