| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMER LIT (VRTL REMOTE) | FAN, C. | Virtual Remote Course This course examines key works in Asian American literature, film, and political critique from the 1960s to the present, as well as key moments in Asian American history. |
| ENGLISH 10 | GLOBAL FICTIONS (VRTL REMOTE) | HATCH, L | Virtual Remote Course Uncertainty is the theme of this course on ancient and premodern world literature. Looking closely at stories and philosophy from across the world, we will explore strategies and modalities through which one conceives of the world and how one projects oneself onto it in the face of indeterminacy. Texts may include excerpts from The Ramayana of Valmiki , selections from The Analects and the Dao De Jing, Virgil's The Aeneid, Augustine's The Confessions, poetry by Li Bo and Du Fu, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, the lais of Marie de France, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. |
| ENGLISH 15 | COMMUNITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN | MORGAN, C | |
| ENGLISH 15 | THREE BLACK POETS (VRTL REMOTE) | JACKSON, V. | Virtual Remote Course In this class we will read only three poets. Rather than surveying a lot of different poems by a lot of different poets who wrote at many different times in many different places, we will drop down into the work of three black women. These women--Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Gwendolyn Brooks--each wrote poems for a specific place and time that is not our own: Anglo-Boston in the eighteenth century (Wheatley); Baltimore, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before and after the Civil War in the nineteenth century (Harper); Chicago in the middle of the twentieth century (Brooks). This class will teach English majors how to read poetry historically and how to think about American history poetically. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | HARRIES, M. | Theory begins with distance from what we contemplate. Contemplating a work of art, we may begin with the assumption that it represents something else: a tyrant, a historical period, a wheelbarrow. Some artworks seem to aspire to imitate the world as exactly as possible. Other artworks challenge our assumptions about representation entirely: they don’t seem to refer to something outside themselves or something already in the world. Theory is, among other things, a systematic way of contemplating the difference, or the distance, between the artwork and what we understand it to represent. Criticism puts theory to work in practices of close attention to artworks. Depending upon what theory we begin with, or simply take for granted, we may understand works of art very differently and we may therefore adopt very different critical practices. This course will survey aspects of the long history of theorizing literature and writing about it critically. While we will begin with ancient Greek examples from Plato and Aristotle, emphasis will fall on strands of theoretical thought and criticism that shape theory and criticism today. Topics will include racialized representation, feminist literary theory, and affect theory. A few literary works will provide touchstones. The aim of the course is to make participants aware of a range of theoretical modes, alert to the ways these are put into practice in critical writing, and self-conscious about their own theoretical and critical assumptions, aspirations, and critical practices. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE OFFICE NOVEL | BAUMGARTNER, J | Writing about the office, Nikil Saval observes that “No other workplace, no matter how degraded, has been such a constant source of hope about the future of work and the guarantee of a stable, respectable life.” Often traced back to Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” fiction about the frustrated lives of office workers has been a constant in American literature. Why does the stultifying environment of the office and the monotonous work associated with it continue to capture the attention of novelists and readers alike? Our course proceeds from this basic question. To get the most out of our brief survey, we will track recent developments in the office novel genre, focusing our attention on a set of novels written in the last fifteen years. If the office has historically been linked to “the guarantee of a stable, respectable life,” the novels in question depict this belief in crisis. To understand the significance of this shift, we will read novels by Joshua Ferris, Halle Butler, and Zakiya Dalila Harris along with some shorter readings to help contextualize the novels’ themes and broader concerns. Coursework will include three papers (one revised), weekly writing assignments, and a Canvas ePortfolio assignment. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (2006) The New Me by Halle Butler (2019) The Other Black Girl: A Novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris (2021) |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | This is a course in western drama’s Ur-genre, tragedy, whose profound idea of the human condition affects the literature that succeeds its Greek origin in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE (although Homer’s Iliad is often considered the first tragedy). Moreover, through Aristotle’s Poetics, tragic concepts and forms shaped the assumptions of much literary criticism. The readings include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Dante’s Inferno; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; as well as a modern or contemporary Irish example. Writing requirements are two takehome exams. |
| ENGLISH 101W | GOTHIC REVAMPED | LEWIS, J. | How many vampires does it take to change an avid reader into an accomplished critical writer? Exactly as many as you will meet in this upper-division writing seminar, which will track the charismatic figure of the vampire from its arrival in early nineteenth-century fiction (the physician John Polidori’s 1816 short story The Vampyre) to its most recent dusting as a staple of young adult romantic fantasy (Twilight). Vampires can’t see their own reflections. But over the last two centuries, their place on the uncertain border between life and death has made them mirrors for a number of uniquely modern fears and anxieties: about contagion, immigration, female empowerment, collective action, queer and transsexuality, racial mixing, social change, and religious crisis. Meanwhile, the male vampire’s charismatic melancholy suits him perfectly to the artistic role of the tragic hero, even as female vampires band together to drain authority from myths of feminine propriety. But why is the vampire’s story need to be revamped so many times? How does that story change to reflect the fears and fantasies specific to unique historical moments? What critical approaches can we drive into the vampire’s undead heart? Just what—pardon the pun!—is at stake in the vampire myth??? Our central text will of course be Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but others include Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and some select short stories starring our fanged friends and the people they kind of love. Three papers (one revised), a Week 10 collaborative project, and short, fun weekly writing assignments. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RACE AND RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN LIT | GRADY, K. | This course will explore how issues of race and religion were rendered in early modern English literature. Before England was a colonial power, it was beset by worries of infiltration by “others” both foreign and domestic. At the same time, it imagined a variety of ways of assimilating those “others.” In this course, we will read poetry and plays written by Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, examining how Elizabethan and Jacobean literature became a site for exploring assimilation and conversion, as well as one that fostered racism and religious intolerance. Along with situating this literature in relevant historical context, this course will ask broader questions about racism, nationalism, and “multiculturalism” in our own moment. Coursework will include reading responses, quizzes, a short paper, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | THE RESTORATION WORLD | STEINTRAGER, J. | In 1660, Charles II returned to England as king after many years of exile. Puritanism was out; play going, partying, and philandering were in. We will look at the Restoration era (1680-1689) from several literary angles: witty and often obscene satirical poems by John Dryden and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; bawdy comedies such as Wycherley’s The Country Wife; novels depicting the sexual underworld of the nation’s capital such as The London Jilt; and diary entries from John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, who chronicled epochal events such as the Great Fire of London in 1666 as well as everyday life of in a burgeoning global trade hub and market-driven cosmopolis. Lecture with some scope for discussion; grading based on a combination of exams and short papers. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LITERATURE OF (THE) ENLIGHTENMENT | LEWIS, J. | “What is enlightenment?” asked the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784. Writers in the decades leading up to his famously unanswerable question—a period that knew itself as “the” Enlightenment—often believed they were shining the new "light" of reason, experiment-based scientific knowledge, and toleration on the old darkness of superstition and political oppression. The result? A radically new understanding of–and interest in–what it means to be human. But was "the Enlightenment" all it claimed to be? What were its limitations, contradictions, and unique possibilities? Why did “the” Enlightenment—whose scientific advances included a new understanding of light itself—also give rise to the first gothic novels, set in a shadowy past? Most important for our purposes, how did English-speaking poets (Rochester, Pope, Finch, Wheatley), playwrights (Wycherley), satirists (Swift) and writers of romance (Behn, Haywood, Walpole) engage core Enlightenment values, such as equality, independence of mind and body, and the rightful pursuit of happiness? How can their often comic writing help us to understand our present-day quest for freedom, justice, and joy? You’ll be writing one long essay, producing one shorter piece of writing, and producing a comprehensive reading journal that charts your own quest for enlightenment through the insights of some fascinating works of literature. Kant, by the way, decided that “’have the courage to use your own understanding’ is the motto of the enlightenment.” Here’s a chance to see if do! |
| ENGLISH 102C | TRANSATLANTIC ROMANTICISM (VRTL REMOTE) | JACKSON, V. | Virtual Remote Course In this class we will read British and American literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. The novels, poems, plays, essays, and accounts we will read all fall into the general category of "Romanticism," though the definition of Romanticism will be part of the subject of this class. Did Romanticism emphasize individual expression? Yes, but that emphasis depended on what kind of individual you were. Did Romanticism emphasize the beauty of Nature? Yes, but that emphasis depended on emerging industrial threats to the natural world, particularly in the Americas. Did Romanticism emphasize ideas of liberal democracy and personal freedom? Yes, but can political aims be achieved on the basis of ideas expressed in plays, poems and stories? When Romanticism crossed the Atlantic, could it survive the genocide and slavery that were the conditions of the New World? What is “Romanticism” when genocide and slavery become its subjects? |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM | MARTIN, T | This course will introduce you to two of the most significant and widely discussed modes of literary expression in the twentieth century: modernism and postmodernism. Focusing on novels, artistic manifestos, and political manifestos, we will trace the ways that modernist and postmodernist writers sought to make literature new in response to the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. How did these writers see themselves as radically breaking from the aesthetic and political norms of the past? And how did they justify the need for new, experimental literary forms as responses to the new and disorienting experiences of world war, racial oppression, gender inequality, government secrecy, and multinational capitalism? Taking these questions as our starting point, we will seek to understand modernism and postmodernism as key chapters in the history of how writers have imagined the link between radical aesthetics and radical politics. |
| ENGLISH 105 | RACE & THE ART OF WRITING (VRTL REMOTE) | WILDERSON, F | Virtual Remote Course African American Studies 144, "Race & the Art of Writing,” is a literature and writing class. While being introduced to seminal texts in the Black literary tradition, as well as to narrative theory, students will develop creative writing skills and produce a short piece of fiction of creative nonfiction by the end of the quarter. Admission by instructor approval. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINX FEMINISM | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | In this course we will trace the development of a United States Latinx feminist tradition in literature, film, and television from the early twentieth century to today. Our course, for example, might analyze the performance of early Hollywood starlet Lupe Vélez in Mexican Spitfire alongside the 2017 documentary about activist Dolores Huerta or episodes from shows like Gentefied or Pose. We will read early twentieth century authors like María Cristina Mena, seminal Chicana theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa, and contemporary writers like Jeanine Capó Crucet and Gabby Rivera. Some of the guiding questions for this course will be: • What are the stakes of representation? How does equitable representation make us feel and does it actually create or reflect sociopolitical change? What does Latinx feminist history teach us about Afro-Latinidad, LGBTQIA Latinx communities, and economic justice for Latinx people? • What are some of the central debates that have shaped current understandings of the Latinx community? Why Latinx and not Chicana/o, Hispanic, or Latina/o? • What kinds of histories do stories provide? What do we learn by retracing the stories and (her)stories of the feministas who have come before us and who write for us now? Course requirements include participation, occasional low-stakes reading and writing assignments, and two projects (midterm and final). |
| ENGLISH 105 | BLACK TV & CHILL | MURILLO, J | From The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, A Different World, Martin, and Chappelle’s Show to Dear White People, Atlanta, Blackish, and Insecure, the cultural singularities of Black television shows are inescapable, creative phenomena. In profound ways, they entertain us, tether us to one another, and facilitate critical conversations about Black existence in an antiblack world. In this course, we will sit, chill, and dialogue with these shows in order to consider how and why they work in these ways, thinking especially critically about the nature of our enjoyment and its relation to their critical potential to shape our everyday discourse. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WRITING RACE IN US | TOBAR, H. | This course is a survey of nonfiction writing about race and ethnicity in the United States of America; it will culminate in a practicum in which students will work on a literary project focused on race matters. We will examine how writers have tackled issues of racial inequality and discrimination, and constructed narratives centered on the lives of people of color in various nonfiction genres, including: journalism, investigative reporting, essays, criticism, documentary film, and memoirs. The class will begin with the work of scholars and essayists whose work discusses how race and “whiteness” have been constructed socially. Readings will include works by Nell Irvin Painter, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. How do writers construct works that cut through the falsehoods of prejudice and the distortions of history? How do they work to defend the humanity of those who have been marginalized or oppressed by dominant cultures? How do they express the joy and fortitude unseen or unknown by outsiders? As a final requirement, students will produce a work of cultural reportage or criticism, producing a 2,000-word piece by finals’ week. In addition, students will produce four, 300-word “responses” to the readings. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LITERATURE AND THE MIND | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | In her well-known work on the fictional representation of consciousness, Dorrit Cohn argues that the “singular power possessed by the novelist” is that the author is a “creator of beings whose inner lives [they] can reveal at will” (4). This course will introduce you to scholars, like Cohn, who have studied how and why novelists represent the inner lives of characters. We will read scholarship that analyzes the narrative strategies authors use to represent cognition (like free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, unreliable narration, and description) in order to ask questions about the nature of literary imagination, the relationship between fiction and reality, and the uses of fiction. Because the study of the mind has never been objective or neutral, though, we will also think critically about how gender and race have impacted the representation and theorization of fictional minds. Primary sources are likely to include women authors like Jane Austen, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Maria Cristina Mena, and Jean Rhys. Course requirements include participation, occasional low-stakes reading and writing assignments, a midterm and a final. |
| ENGLISH 106 | EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND THE WORLD | GRADY, K. | Before early modern England was a colonial power, it engaged in a period of broad exploration that brought it into contact with places as geographically distant as Southeast Asia. This course will examine this moment in England’s relationship with the world by reading travel narratives from the period. It will consider how these early encounters informed English colonial ambitions and constructions of race. We will contextualize these narratives by engaging key works from writers like Shakespeare, which will give us a sense of both how English ideas about different peoples and places were reflected in early modern culture, as well as how such ideas continue to circulate in our own moment. Coursework will include research and writing assignments meant to serve as the basis for a final project. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MELODRAMA! | SZALAY, M | For more than two centuries, “melodrama” has been the source code, the key genetic material, for a stunning range of popular culture: from stage dramas and sentimental novels to Hollywood films, radio and television serials, and true-crime podcasts. Most of what we read, watch, and listen to bears melodrama’s telltale features. And most of us have at least a broad sense of what the term indicates, whether it be virtuous maidens tied to railroad tracks by moustache-twirling villains, sensationalistic cliffhangers, or overwrought family stories characterized by intense sentimentality. But what else is melodrama, and where does it come from? And how has it varied from one national culture to the next? Specifically how have U.S. melodramas been both similar to and different from Korean ones? This course will begin with the Parisian stage during the French Revolution and end with K-Drama and Korean Cinema; along the way, we will read an early gothic novella and a long story by Henry James, and watch silent films like The Perils of Pauline and Douglas Sirk family melodramas like Written on the Wind. Throughout, we will study the variety and adaptability of melodrama, as we seek to distinguish it from other literary “modes” like realism and tragedy. Course Requirements: regular class participation, a medium length research paper, and a readiness to enjoy popular culture (popcorn optional). |
| ENGLISH 106 | CRIME AND FICTION | MARTIN, T. | In American society, “crime” is a codeword. Crime has long been a thinly veiled way of talking about race, class, gender, and sexuality. So what do writers really mean when they write stories—as they so often do—about crime and criminals? In this course, we will study how twentieth-century American writers have attempted to unpack the unspoken social and political meanings of crime. How, we will ask, has literature confronted the racism and sexism of police power? How did crime novels respond to the “tough-on-crime” polices and ideologies of the postwar era? And how have fiction writers sought to explain and to contest one of the most destructive developments of the past century—the rise of mass incarceration? Putting literary texts in conversation with the histories of criminalization and incarceration, this class will challenge what you thought you knew about the genre of crime fiction. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ASAM LITERATURE | FAN, C. | Course Code: 23804, Fridays 9:00 - 11:50 am This course will introduce students to contemporary trends in Asian/American fiction, debates in Asian/American studies, and issues in Asian/American cultural politics. Our horizon will be global, and our methodology will be materialist. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AFAM LIT&VISUALITY | MORGAN, C. | Course Code: 23806, Thursdays 2:00 - 4:50 pm How have African American writers engaged visuality in their work? How has the visual served as a focal point for the articulation of Black subjectivity? This seminar will trace the confluences between textuality, visuality, and selfhood that circulate through African American literature throughout the twentieth century. Focusing on literary texts, films, and collections of photographs, we will consider how differences in media variously determine the aesthetic limits of expression. These works will be mainly narrative, but at times we will also turn to media that think through more abstract representational techniques to investigate the link between aesthetic form and identity. |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTRO CRIT METHODS | JEON, J. | Course Code: 23808, Wednesdays 9:00 - 11:50 am This course, exclusively for and required of all first-year Ph.D. students, will touch upon a number of interpretive traditions within literary criticism with the aim of helping students become more self-conscious regarding their own critical methods. It will also discuss practical and professional matters, such as course selection and application to conferences. |
| ENGLISH 210 | POETIC OCCASIONS | IZENBERG, O. | Course Code: 23810, Mondays 6:00 - 8:50 pm For Master of English students only. An “occasional poem” is written as a public response to or commentary on a particular event: battle or inauguration; birth or death. Historically, critics have condescended to occasional art, discounting its value as art precisely because of its historical particularity (as though the poem was bound to its occasion, and could live only as long as that day lived). Recent criticism has reversed this judgment, valuing even the most “timeless” work of art precisely (and only) to the degree that it can be show to belong to some occasion—to be fundamentally responsive to the pressures of history, responsible to the world even in its most imaginative flights. The Poetic Occasion, then, names a problem: how should we think about the relation between the transformative powers of art and the determinations of fact? On what grounds should a poem that is made for a day endure? How can a poem that aims for eternity satisfactorily address any particular present? We will read a series of major poems (by Sir Phillip Sidney, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka and others) and reconstruct for each an archive, thinking practically about the multiple histories out of which the work of art emerges (the individual life of the poet; the history of a genre; the upheavals of war and nation formation; the traditions of a people or race) and theoretically about the multiple values to which art is answerable. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MONTAGE, COLLAGE... | HARRIES, M. | Course Code: 23802, Fridays 2:00 - 4:50 pm The key terms of this course begin with new techniques developed in various media in the twentieth century. Collage and assemblage describe new methods of putting objects and fragments together in visual art; montage describes the articulation of shots in cinema. Early accounts of the importance of these methods by practitioners and critics often stressed the challenge to existing forms of aesthetic organization: these formal innovations were, in these accounts, typical of modernity. The topic requires an interdisciplinary approach and we will move between visual art, film, literature, and theater. The history of these techniques now spans more than a century, and we will pay close attention to particular moments in this history. Examples may include early Dada collages of Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters; films and essays by Sergei Eisenstein; Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and selections from the Arcades Project; assemblages by Noah Purifoy made in the wake of the L.A. rebellion; the visual work of Hanne Darboven; and recent theater pieces by Heiner Goebbels. We will also think together about theoretical and aesthetic questions that these methods provoke. In collage and assemblage, we will think about the status of objects that have become the media of artworks while not giving up their status as everyday things – often, indeed, as trash. In literary works, we will consider what Walter Benjamin calls “the art of citing without quotation marks,” the theory of which, Benjamin goes on to say, “is intimately related to that of montage.” In film, we will think about the visual disruptions of montage while also considering its essential place in the development of narrative film. In theater, we will consider how to theorize the adjacency of recorded sound, live music, and staged action in performance. A key theoretical concern will be the relationship of critical practice to works built around discontinuity and parataxis. Does argument require allegory, and does allegory require narrative? Why are discontinuous models of critical practice so rare? |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE URBAN SCENE IN RESTORATION AND 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE | STEINTRAGER, J | Course Code: 23800, Tuesdays 11:00am-1:50pm In the years following the end of the English Civil War and the restoration of the monarchy, London rapidly transformed into what we might call capital’s cosmopolitan capitol. Literature in various guises was woven into the fabric of this transformation: cooked up in coffee shops, issuing forth from printers and booksellers, and intoned from the recently reestablished stage. In this course, we will examine some of the diverse ways that literature, broadly construed, reflected on and interacted with the urban scene, with particular emphasis on commerce and commodification: fabrics and fashion; patterns of food and alcohol consumption; the housing market; and the sex trade. Our readings will take in at least some of the generic diversity of the era: selections from diarists such as Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn; poetic descriptions of the city by the likes of Rochester and Samuel Johnson; libertine novels detailing London’s ubiquitous and highly stratified world of prostitution; essays on the stock market and shopping from periodicals; a bit of the narrative visual art of Hogarth; and the urban mock opera of John Gay. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | GROSS, D. | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | DAVIS, R. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LEE, J.W. |