ENGLISH Course Descriptions for 2025-2026

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Spring Course Descriptions
CourseTitleInstructorDescription
ENGLISH 10WHAT IS A WORLD?LEE, J.W.
ENGLISH 11SOCIETY, LAW, & LITQUEEN, B.The Idea of America in a Time of Turmoil

The Constitution of the United States has long embodied utopian possibilities. To speak and express oneself freely, to assume an unrestrained press and media, to assemble peaceably to dissent and to advocate (1st Amendment), to have inalienable rights and liberties such as the right to bear arms and due process and equal protection under the law while remaining free from authoritarian government control (2nd, 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendments). These are among the Constitution’s most majestic guarantees. They release imaginative possibilities for what society and each person might choose to become, enabling autonomy, liberty, equality, and a vibrant public discourse that catalyzes public deliberation, the foundation of American democracy itself.

While this class reaches back to the Colonial and Early National Periods, its primary historical reference points are located in the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States and as embodied by mythic conceptions of the idea of America and attendant concepts like American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. With the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S Constitution, the legal foundations and constitutional architecture for the rights and liberties that define American democracy today come into formation. This originalist moment of constitutional transformation recasts the Bill of Rights and its original ten amendments. The framers of these Reconstruction Amendments reimagined liberty and equality and the American constitutional subject, with the Fourteenth Amendment transforming the Constitution and American political culture with progressive ideas reaching toward broad federal protections against race and sex discrimination. Across the ensuing decades and to our present moment, the nature and meaning of the constitutional rights and liberties that conceive of the essence of our democracy are intensely debated in public venues, among the intelligentsia, and within the judiciary in response to salient questions and circumstantial tensions that reframe them. From our current moment of political upheaval in which the foundations of American democracy have been roundly shaken, this class explores several topical areas through the study of law and literature together that are germane to understanding the idea of America and its constitutional democracy today: among them, public discourse and a democratic public sphere in a time of misinformation; religious liberties; violent rhetoric and violent acts; reproductive rights, gendered representations, and justice; and racial formations and the American constitutional subject.

By successfully completing English 11, students can earn one of two general education requirements offered by the course—GEIII (Social and Behavioral Sciences) or GEIV (Arts and Humanities). We will apply legal questions and knowledge to literary questions and ideas, and we will apply critical cultural questions and literary interpretations to legal questions and issues so that we reach a deeply informed law and literature synthesis through the study of American constitutional law and cases, legal and philosophical thought, literary and cultural criticism, and works of fiction, both novels and short stories.
ENGLISH 15IDEAS OF THE WORLDMATTHEWS, R.Forget symbolism.  In the Middle Ages, ideas, concepts, psychological states, sins and virtues were being represented as characters inhabiting the world.  Love, for example, could be behind every tree waiting to hunt you down, Lady Philosophy might show up when you least expect it, while Lady Fortune could maliciously put you on her wheel and spin you into success...or oblivion.  Allegorical figures became ways for writers to argue points without having to resort to the stuffiness of analysis and commentary.  In this class we’ll look at not only medieval classics, like Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and the famous Roman de la Rose, but also modern ones, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and maybe even Disney’s Inside Out.
ENGLISH 15NARRATIVE MIDDLESBARTLETT, J.In this course, we will consider an oft-neglected aspect of narrative structure: the middle. Literary critics are frequently drawn to beginnings and endings, in part because their content and form is so inextricably linked. For example: the Bible begins, “In the beginning was the Word,” a sentence that demonstrates its premise: “In” we go, but once we get to the “the beginning,” we find it is already behind us—it already “was”—and (in case we missed the fact) it was made up of the words we had just read. Likewise, the end of the Bible describes the end of the world: once those words have gone, there is nothing left. The mythic power of beginnings and endings draws Odysseus home, solves mysteries, reunites lovers, and gives villains their comeuppance. Beginnings and endings satisfy our hunger for punishment and reward, but while their drama is inescapable, their ontological status isn’t: we know that stories begin and end wherever we want them to, and our desire to make them true and foundational often deprives us of the pleasures of uncertainty, play, flexibility, open-mindedness, and curiosity that make for the best adventures, and the widest and most inclusive understanding of our life story, with all the characters and influences that shape it. In short, middles never get the attention they deserve: they are aligned with the ordinary, the unheroic, the bewildering, messy, repetitive, and the pointless when they should be seen as the liberating, literally central node of development, transition, rupture, intersection, digression, error, rupture, crossing, wandering, and deviation that makes all narrative go. These qualities and their effects are the subject of this course. Requirements include engagement with course readings, two papers, and a presentation with discussion facilitation.
ENGLISH 16CRAFT OF POETRYTRAN, X.
ENGLISH 17CRAFT OF FICTIONLATIOLAIS, P.
Most English classes ask what works of fiction "mean"; this class asks how works of fiction are made.  The best stories do something borderline miraculous: they help us experience lives different from our own; they make us care what happens to people who don't exist; through the valence of fiction, they tell truths unspeakable in real life; mostly, they take us on a ride.  In the first half of the quarter, we'll read short stories in a range of forms and traditions alongside texts about craft in order to learn, first, to experience this magic, and, second, to parse how writers pull it off.  In the second half of the quarter, we'll embark on stories of our own.  Projects will include both creative and expository writing, as well as a presentation.
ENGLISH 100INTRO TO LIT THEORYSTEINTRAGER, J.
ENGLISH 101WWHAT IS A PERSON?IZENBERG, O.
ENGLISH 101WWRITINGABOUT POETRYHENDERSON, A.Introduction to Poetry

This class will provide a focused introduction to the workings of English poetry; no prior knowledge of poetry is required.  We will begin by reviewing the formal qualities of poems, including rhyme, rhythm, and stanza structure.  We will then examine some standard poetic forms and topoi from the English tradition, such as the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, and the blazon.  Our readings will range chronologically from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.  We will focus on developing skills in analysis and writing without the aid of AI.  Writing requirements will include several short assignments and papers, in addition to a longer final paper.
ENGLISH 101WTHEORY OF CHARACTERBARTLETT, J.This seminar will introduce you to the complexity of the nineteenth-century realist novel through the analysis of an irregular figure, the stock character.  Neither minor nor major, neither flat nor round, too familiar to require much in the way of a personal history and yet unique in their reactions to immediate events, stock characters wander at a rich intersection between character and plot.  If, as Forster has it, the difference between flat and round characters is that the round ones are capable of surprising us, we could say that stock characters often surprise us, but rarely themselves.  Mr. Brownlow, the grand benefactor of Oliver Twist, is both reliably and literally deep—“his kindness and solicitude knew no bounds”—but at key moments, like Oliver’s rescue from Fagin’s gang, the novel makes a point of withholding the very details that we would anticipate (and probably skim over): Brownlow “forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain.” By reverting to an unfathomable type in such moments, stock characters like Brownlow both reveal and aggravate a fundamental contradiction in the form and ethos of the realist novel, pushing the details that are said to conjure its “realism” into uneasy abstractions.  My vision for this course will be similarly, blurrily bifocal: we will get a sense of the form of the realist novel itself by reading a few of them alongside a smattering of novel theory influenced by the fields of anthropology, drama, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and sociology. Requirements include responses to course readings, three short papers, and a presentation with discussion facilitation.
ENGLISH 102AHUNT FOR THE GRAILMATTHEWS, R.Before Indiana Jones and The Lord of the Rings, the Quest for the Holy Grail is still the ultimate treasure hunt.  A supernatural object, it suddenly appears in the middle of the King Arthur project, turning a simple adventure series into a profound spiritual, and epistemological, quest.  Arthurian literature is the original fan fiction.  Beginning as an obscure chieftain fighting against Saxon invaders after the Romans left, Arthur became a literary phenomenon with writers of all sorts adding and creating new episodes and stories.  This course will explore Arthurian literature from its beginnings as a small paragraph in a Latin history of Britain to the development of an entire imaginary world with glittering lovers like Lancelot and Tristan, adulterous queens, and of course, the infamous hunt for a supernatural grail.
ENGLISH 102BTHE AGE OF SENSIBILITYGROSS, D.E102B The Age of Sensibility

Defying chronology, we return to the Age of Sensibility as "emotion studies" accelerate across the disciplines. Like David Hume, we see how emotion is a matter of status (not the status of matter); like William Collins, we find fear in our creepy world (not just in our brains), and like Mary Wollstonecraft, we discover how sensibility that appear naturally tied to gender in fact has a sinister history. Finally, with Belinda Royall Sutton on what we now call "the case for reparations," we confront the terrors and the aspirations of slavery that still shape our world today. In this course we survey key works of 18th-century fiction, poetry, psychology, law, and social thought, to address these issues and others, learning along the way how critical work in the present proceeds by way of literary history. The format for the class includes lecture, collaborative work, peer review, and discussion. There are 5 short writing assignments, and one longer project – either argumentative or creative – that goes through a careful drafting and revision process. All materials will be collected via midterm and final Canvas LMS portfolios, which are worth 30% and 60% of your final grade, respectively.
ENGLISH 102CVICTORIAN SPACETUCKER, I.The 19th-century British novel has long been notable for the detail and precision with which it presents the physical world its characters inhabit.   Because this novel has come to be known as “the realist novel,” our impulse might be to assume that the authors of such novels just thought it obvious that their task should be to present readers with as many of the details of the actual world as they could describe.  But, in fact, the notion that people should be defined by the space they inhabit or move about, and that what is most noteworthy about a given space are its particular details, is actually anything but natural and self-evident. In the course, we will read realist novels alongside the texts that helped bring the concepts of Victorian realist space into being.  We will examine theories of landed property, accounts of the mid-19th-century invention of photography; theories of 19th-century poetry and the poetry itself; arguments about citizenship, and finally, theories of evolution and their relation to fossil evidence and theories of evidence more broadly construed.

Some of the authors and texts we will read are the following: Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist; Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White; John Stuart Mill’s, On Liberty, ‘What is Poetry?’ and On the Subjection of Women; William Henry Fox Talbot’s, “The Pencil of Nature;” Charles Darwin’s The Origins of Species; William Whewell, Of Induction

Students will be expected to write two 5-7pp over the course of the quarter, and to engage actively in class discussions.
ENGLISH 102DMODERNIST LITERATUREIZENBERG, O.
ENGLISH 103SHAKESPEAREHELFER, R.103: Happy Endings?: Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies

Shakespeare’s comedies are supposed to end happily—but do they? This course reads Much Ado
About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well as
plays that put the very idea of comic closure under pressure. Focusing on wit, law, marriage, and
authority, the course examines how comedy reshapes conflict into resolution at a significant cost.
We ask why Shakespeare’s “happy endings” so often rely on social coercion and ethical
compromise—and what it means to call those endings comic.
ENGLISH 105NATIVE AM AUTOBIOCARROLL, A.
ENGLISH 105LATINX LITERATUREGERACI, J.This course will explore representations of Latinx identity in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century autobiographical and semi-autobiographical texts with a focus on language, race, embodiment, home and belonging, (queer) sexuality and matrilineal relationships. Authors we will read will likely include Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Carmen Maria Machado, Valeria Luiselli and Myriam Gurba. We will also consider how moments in contemporary popular culture, such as fashion, music and social media, intersect with some of the themes and topics in our course texts. Coursework includes literary analysis and close reading activities, short writing assignments, class participation, and a final creative project and reflection.
ENGLISH 105ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPTSHROFF, B.
ENGLISH 106CAVES TO CATHEDRALSALLEN, E.E106 Caves to Cathedrals
From the mysterious caves where hermits dwell to the soaring cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, this course will explore the significance of space in medieval literature. This course finds people enclosed in spaces of bodily rest or spiritual relief – or making their way through desert expanses or stormy seas. Saints and mystics carve out spaces far from the social world. Arthurian knights go forth into the world, seeking adventure and finding spaces of hospitality. Geoffrey Chaucer, meanwhile, imagines a pilgrimage to Canterbury cathedral, site of the cathedral and shrine of the martyr Thomas Becket. Along the way, the pilgrims tell tales of saintly suffering, magical gifts, hidden gold, a Jewish ghetto. How do spaces shape this restless journey, and how does the journey create space for adventure, for spiritual experience, and for storytelling itself? Seeking answers to questions like these, we will read some of the central texts of the medieval period, tracing paths through saints’ lives, romances, and mixtures of the two. Two papers (5-6 and 8-10 pages), assorted writing exercises.
ENGLISH 106SECULARISMTUCKER, I.
ENGLISH 106THE GROTESQUELEWIS, J.“The grotesque body…is a body in the act of becoming,” wrote the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.  “It is never finished, never completed.” We might say the same thing of the ‘the’ grotesque itself: an ironically boundless aesthetic category that encompasses absurdity, ugliness, monstrosity, infinite regeneration, distortion, incongruity, exaggeration, nonsense, caricature, extravagance, and excess—not to mention the unexpectedly, unaccountably adorable, the inappropriate, the uncanny, the wondrous, the bulbous,  the gnarly, and the incomplete. Meanwhile, the experience of the grotesque arouses contradictory feelings of horror, laughter, wonder, disgust.  In this class, we’ll try to make sense of all of this by taking a historical and topical approach to the grotesque in literature,  looking at how grotesque ideas and images (including the idea of the grotto itself) have changed over time and through various literary genres, while also reading some classic theories of the grotesque (Bakhtin, Kayser, Kristeva, Russo, Ruskin).  Literary readings will range from medieval wonder tales and early modern satire (excerpts from Rabelais) to 18th-century anti-feminist caricature (Swift), to  19th-century nonsense (Carroll), to 19th- and 20th-century American gothic fiction (Poe, Gilman, Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor) to 21st-century examples of the global, medical, ecological  and cyber-grotesque (Kang, King, Machado).   Please note, though:  This is NOT a class in body horror, and monsters are only a small part of an open-ended story that always has its heart the often ethical question of what it means to deviate from the norm.  You will be signing on for a celebration of incompletion.  Nonetheless, especially if you are graduating soon, what better way to (not) round out your English major?  Annotated (essay-format) bibliography, 12-page research project built over the quarter, Week 10 presentation, weekly activities.
ENGLISH 205CHAUCERALLEN, E.E205 Chaucer Canterbury Tales
Late fourteenth-century England saw great social turmoil. Plague wiped out a third of the population; peasants and artisans rose against aristocracy; the King struggled to retain authority and was eventually deposed; the Church was divided against itself. Out of this social unrest comes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—a new kind of poetry for a rapidly changing audience. Thirty pilgrims tell stories to pass the time en route to Canterbury Cathedral, and along the way they encounter the problems raised and satisfactions achieved in forming a socially various community. The work creates a lively microcosm of the turbulent late medieval world, complete with a cook so drunk he falls off his horse and a parson so virtuous he won't tell a story.
        We will read many of the Canterbury Tales, from the Knight’s Tale to the Retraction. We will concentrate on the way in which individuals play out and challenge social stereotypes based on status, gender, and authority: How does the Canterbury pilgrimage highlight medieval status identities? To what extent do the pilgrims reaffirm gender norms? To what extent can narrative poetry call for social or political change? The poem will turn our attention to problems of narration and poetic form as well, placing social questions within complex and problematic frames. Which pilgrim tells what type of tale? How does a pilgrim’s perspective inform or deform their storytelling methods? To what extent does poetic form echo or revise social expectations? When does narrative complexity express the search for social justice—or obstruct it?
        Readings are in Middle English, but no prior experience of the language is expected or required. All students will do brief translation and language exercises and will write several shorter papers and a longer, researched essay (8-15 pp).
ENGLISH 206RESEARCH & WRITINGSZALAY, M.
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 207THESIS PRACTICUMSTAFF
ENGLISH 208THESIS WORKSHOPSZALAY, M.
ENGLISH 210REALISMCORE-PERIPHAFAN, C.S26 E210 -"Some Recent Novels” - Chris Fan
Th 11:00am - 01:50pm, HIB 411

Ten recent novels (from the 21st century), arbitrarily chosen. No secondary literature will be assigned.

What does it mean to read the novel today as an object of study — as a symptom of our historical moment, and as a form (an exhausted one? renewed? what?) that continues to test the boundaries of realism, politics, and "world literature"? This seminar approaches fiction published in the 21st century not to explore a coherent movement or genre, but to examine the fractured conditions under which the novel continues to matter.

We will move across formally and geographically diverse works — historical novels, autofictions, translations, novels of “left melancholia” — asking how each negotiates the pressures of globalization, memory, and exhaustion. Along the way, we’ll engage major questions in contemporary literary studies. Is the novel still a privileged form for representing social totality, or has it become one medium among many in the digital age? What does it mean to treat “recent” or “contemporary” as a genre rather than a period? How do theories of affect, world literature, and the Anthropocene reframe the politics of reading? What do translation, circulation, and prize culture do to the categories of the “recent” and “contemporary”? Does the persistence of the historical novel signal nostalgia, critique, or both? Can fiction sustain political hope, or is everything capitalist realism?

We will ask these questions, and we will also spend a lot of time bracketing them as we close read together, aimlessly and playfully hunting down patterns, connections, and rhymes — textual and intertextual.
ENGLISH 210SOUNDSTEINTRAGER, J.E210 - Critical Sound Studies - Jim Steintrager
Tu 02:00pm - 04:50pm, HIB 411

Over the past decade or so, sound studies has emerged as a lively trans-disciplinary field. While the field can at times be descriptive, this course will focus on critical sound studies: theorists that have aimed to analyze what might be called sonic ideologies and practices and to offer different ways to approach the sonic domain. To do so, we will consider a number of seminal thinkers on music and noise in a broadly Marxist vein: Benjamin, Adorno, and Jacques Attali. We will also consider those who have taken a more eco-critical approach, from R. Murray Schafer on “soundscapes” in the 1970s to more recent writings by, e.g., Frances Dyson. Finally, we will consider the recent turn of sound studies to the global South in writings by Ana María Ochoa, Gavin Steingo, et al. Topics that will be covered en route and that will help tie the various strands together will include: the liberatory discourse around noise and dissonance; social control, bio-power and the  bio-politics of sound; and the legacies of colonialism, anthropology, and ethnocentrism in sound studies.
ENGLISH 210TRAVEL AS NARRATIVEVAN DEN ABBEEL, G.E210 Travel as Narrative: Grand Tourisms -Georges Van Den Abeele
Th 02:00pm - 04:50pm, HIB 411

Study of travel narrative with attention to questions of form and genre as well as to how differences of place, race, gender, and culture are negotiated, expressed, or suppressed.  We will analyze works from the time of the early modern and egregiously aristocratic grand tour through the modernist expression of quotidian tourism. Readings to include such writer/travelers as Montaigne, Montagu, Sterne, Rousseau, Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal, Twain, James, Forster, and Mann, among others.
ENGLISH 210GLOBAL MODERNISMSSZALAY, M.E210 - Apple, China, and the Limits of Cognitive Mapping - Michael Szalay
W 02:00pm - 04:50pm, HG 2310
Most U.S. consumers learned of the Foxconn suicides on a 2012 episode of This American Life. NPR’s earnest cosmopolitans were scandalized that the real OS of their beloved iPhones, seemingly designed to connect them to a larger world, were Chinese factories so brutal that dozens of workers had taken their lives in protest. The revelations breathed new life into a flagging anti-sweatshop movement that “named and shamed” companies reliant on superexploited overseas labor. But for the most part, consumers kept buying iPhones, which remain a marker of affluence the world over.
We might account for the ultimate brevity of the Apple consumer’s outrage in terms of liberal bad faith, resignation, or even apathy. Our seminar will instead focus on the challenges of thinking in a materialist key across spatial, temporal, and technological discontinuities. We will ask what we can and cannot know about a commodity’s concrete origins in globally distended supply chains and the labor regimes that sustain them. We will also ask how narratives—Apple’s, above all—both evoke and repress those origins. Fredric Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” will focalize our inquiries. The enterprise “enables a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” Less an effort to chart literal space than to grasp the individual’s complexly mediated relation to encompassing dynamics and structures, cognitive mapping was one of Jameson’s many efforts to think capitalist totality. But the concept is among his “least articulated,” Colin MacCabe argues, more gestural than fully elaborated. And it risks presuming Western subjects who belatedly realize “the causes of ‘our’ social life are elsewhere, in the processes of extraction, dispossession and subjugation that constitute imperialism and colonialism.”
As Toscano and Kindle remind us, cognitive mapping “gain[s] in salience precisely with the actualization of that ‘world market’ which is both capitalism’s goal and its presupposition.” Our own mapping will wrestle with Apple’s famously efficient global supply chains. We will also study Apple’s role in the rise of China’s tech industry and today’s “cybernetic circulation complex”; and we will ask how its great innovation—the iPhone—facilitates personal logistics under conditions of constant work. At the same time, we will assess the occlusive, reifying features of Apple’s famously walled gardens: its minimalist designs; user-friendly “human interface guidelines”; easy product interoperability; sealed systems and gauzy, self-allegorizing streaming content. The latter especially will allow us to explore older models of ideology critique and, at the same time, the company-specific imperatives and interdictions that often determine Apple streaming content (fun fact: Jon Stewart quit Apple’s The Problem with Jon Stewart because Apple refused to air his discussion of China with Lina Khan).
Throughout, we will study the labor practices that create value for Apple in China, and claims made about Chinese capitalism (by David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, and many others). We will also study films, fiction, and poetry by Chinese creators like Jia Zhangke, Yu Hua, Ma Boyong, Hao Jingfang, and Zheng Xiaoqiong. We will place their works alongside Apple shows (Severance and Pluribus) and U.S. fiction featuring Apple devices (Lin Ma’s Severance and Ben Lerner’s Transcription). Throughout, we will assess the forms of critical leverage that different materialist reading practices might ideally provide. “Apple|China” will be above all a case study, that is finally to say, one that will allow us to experiment with more broadly applicable materialist reading practices.
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
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ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
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ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGMARTIN, T.
ENGLISH 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHALEXANDER, J.
ENGLISH 398RHET/TCHNG OF COMPQUEEN, B.
ENGLISH 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGSTAFF