Contemporary Black Literature English 3002/BLS 3002 Prof. R. Robles Tues/Thu 2:30PM-3:45PM	This course will survey Black literature in global contexts to explore and compare poetry, prose, fiction and creative non-fiction from African diaspora writers in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe since the end of the Second World War. It will situate texts in historical, political, and cultural contexts, such as in independence movements, colonialism, and Civil Rights, to develop interdisciplinary approaches to reading Black diaspora literatures.
Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. A. Deutermann Mon/Wed 12:50PM – 2:05PM	Monsters, heroes, saints, and Satan: these are just some of the characters encountered in early English literature. Examining a range of different kinds of writing, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Shakespearean drama to lyric poetry, we will ask questions about how identity is formed and contested in these works. What does it mean to be a hero? What defines an outcast? How does the formation of identity influence, and sometimes come into explosive contact with, changes in the culture at large—for example, with the birth of the nation-state, the growth of science, or the expansion of empire?
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. S. Hershinow Tues/Thu 10:45AM – 12:00PM	A historical study of the diversity of British and Anglophone literature from the eighteenth century to the present, this course situates a range of writing from various cultural, ethnic, and popular traditions in cultural, political, and historical contexts, including the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Imperialism, World Wars I and II, diaspora, and decolonization. Movements that may be covered include Romanticism, the gothic, aestheticism, modernism, and postmodernism; authors may include Swift, Pope, Haywood, Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Selvon, Heaney, Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Zadie Smith.
Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. R. Rodriguez Mon/Wed 10:45AM – 12:00PM	This course explores the development of American literature from its beginnings through the Civil War. Texts including letters, histories, autobiographies, political documents, poems, plays, and novels, illuminate the rich complexity of this period in American literary history and culture. These works reveal the often interconnected and overlapping stories of discovery and exploration; private piety and public life; the development of national identity; race; gender; slavery and the movement toward its abolition.
Survey of American Literature II: American Literature from the Civil War to Present English 3025 Prof T. Aubry Tues/Thu 2:30 – 3:45PM	This course surveys American Literature from the Civil War to the present. We will examine how the literature of this period reflects and respond to major historical and social developments, including industrialism, urbanism, war, economic depression, racial tension, bureaucratization, challenges to traditional sex and gender norms, and technological innovations. We will examine naturalism, realism, and modernism, as well as more recent literary trends and movements. Among the authors we will study will be Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Ada Limón.
Literatures of the Global South English 3030 Prof. S. Bosu Mon/Wed 4:10PM – 5:25PM	This course examines literary and visual works from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, investigating the term Global South and the debates that surround it. We will explore how writers and artists have responded to histories of colonialism, globalization, and cultural resistance, while questioning the frameworks used to describe these regions. Central to the course would be the relationship between image and text: students will analyze literature alongside photography, painting, film, and political posters to consider how visual culture shapes narrative meaning. Authors and artists may include the likes of Assia Djebar, Bessie Head, Amitav Ghosh, and Bong Joon Ho. Through close reading, visual analysis, and theoretical engagement with postcolonial theory, students will gain tools to think critically about global inequality and literary and artistic expression.
Latino/a Literature in the U.S. English 3059/BLS 3059 Prof. L. De La Cruz Santana Mon/Wed 12:50PM-2:05PM	This course examines significant works of literature written in English by Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. It concentrates on novels, short stories, and essays from the late 19th century to the present. Special attention is given to issues of cultural identity, social class, race, and gender, as well as bilingualism and code-switching. While focusing on the diversity of the Latino, a literary expression, this course also explores the sociopolitical contexts in which the works emerged and the commonalities and differences of the experiences of the Latin American diasporas in the U.S.
Elements of Poetry English 3640/H Harman Poet Wed 2:30PM – 5:25PM	This is a course in using and mastering language and the art of metaphor. Students find their own poetic voices by perceiving worldly objects and then transforming those perceptions into poetic images that reflect their own deepest emotions. While studying and memorizing poems by a wide spectrum of writers, including Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Gwendolyn Brooks, they write and critique their own. Regular conferences.
Introduction to Linguistics English 3700/COMM Prof. N. Lee Tues/Thu 10:45AM – 12:00PM	This course is an introductory survey of linguistics — the scientific study of language.    What is the nature of human language — and how does it compare to what large language models (LLMs) produce? Is speaking an instinctual or learned behavior? Looking at English — and at a diverse range of languages spoken and signed around the world — what do the native speakers of a language know about the language’s word structure, sentence structure, sentence meaning, and pronunciation? How is language mentally represented and processed? How is language affected by social class and race?   In this course, we will discover how human language is a complex but law-governed mental system, capable of open-ended linguistic creativity — and imbued with social power and meaning
Modern Drama English 3770 Prof. S. Vella Tues/Thu 9:05AM – 10:20AM	This course examines dramatic texts that emerged around the world from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.  Plays from a wide range of languages, cultures, and geographical locations will be considered in conversation with changes in production economics, staging technology, and acting technique. This period witnessed an unprecedented mobility for theatre artists and styles, facilitated by touring, film and photography, and wider availability of translations. This mobility, however, took place in a situation of uneven power dynamics facilitated by global colonialism and capitalism. We will therefore encounter these plays and artists in their socio-political contexts and will emphasize consideration of the ethical stakes of cross-cultural influence.
Critical-Race Theory English 3832/BLS 3085 Dr. S. Eversley Tues/Thu 4:10PM-4:25PM	Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic framework that examines how race and racism are embedded in legal and social structures. It argues that racism is not merely an individual prejudice, but that it is a systemic concern. This course will investigate how power, language, history, and representation inform constructions of race and racial hierarchies including thinking about intersectional fields such as in gender and sexuality, postcolonial studies, and Black studies. Our work together will consider ways that the central ideas of CRT illuminate and inform literature, film, music, archival material, and contemporary cultural production.  Everyone is welcome.
Genres of African Literature English 3845/BLS 3845 Prof. M. Eatough Mon/Wed 10:45AM – 12:00PM	The African novel is often recognized as one of the most vibrant sites of cultural production in the modern world. In part, perhaps, due to the relative newness of novel-writing in Africa, fictional narratives from the continent frequently demonstrate a dizzying blend of oral traditions, folk histories, experimental styles, and political engagement. In this course, we will focus on African novels from the post-World War II period, with a particular emphasis on the different genres of fiction to have emerged during these years. Our readings will include canonical realist novels, feminist fiction, war novels, and more recent examples of romance, thrillers, and science fiction. We will use these readings to examine how particular genres of literature engage with the realities of decolonization, genocide, the AIDS epidemic, global capitalism, and the African cultural “renaissance.” Possible texts include works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mariama Bâ, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tade Thompson, Zukiswa Wanner, and Masande Ntshanga.
Topics in Film: The Science Fiction Film English 3940 Prof. F. Cioffi Tues/Thu 10:45AM – 12:00PM	This course will examine the science fiction film, from Metropolis to Mickey 17. We will watch those two films as well as a selection of the following: Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Panic in the Year Zero, The Thing, The Fly, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Altered States, Star Wars, Star Trek,Alien, and several others. The plan is to screen one film a week, shown over the course of two class sessions. This should leave us time for some discussion after each half of the film. We will also have some classes interspersed in which we just talk about the SF film and articles from the reader, entitled Liquid Metal and edited by Sean Redmond. Graded writing will be done in blue books in class. Here are the topics from the text: Section I. The Wonder of Science Fiction Section 2. Science Fiction’s Disaster Imagination Section 3. Spatial Abyss: The Science Fiction City Section 4. The Origin of the Species: Time Travel and the Primal Scene Section 5. Liquid Metal: The Cyborg in Science Fiction
Topics in Literature: True Crime English 3950 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 2:30PM – 3:45PM	This course provides an opportunity to study important literary themes, genres, periods, or authors not found or only touched on in other courses. This format allows for an intensive examination of these topics, which may vary from semester to semester. Representative subjects include the Gothic imagination, the Harlem Renaissance, the writer and the city, mythic patterns, and psychoanalysis and literature. Students may enroll in ENG 3950 more than once if the topic is different.
Topics in Literature: Mythology and Literature English 3950 Prof. L. Kolb Tues/Thu 4:10PM – 5:25PM	The Trojan War has provided inexhaustible subject matter for poets, artists, and filmmakers from the ancient world until today. This course begins with Homer’s epic account of this war, the Iliad, before turning to classical, Medieval, and Renaissance adaptations. How do the Iliad’s major themes–war, honor, gender, death–transform as they are handled in lyric poetry, plays, letters, and visual art across the centuries? How is adaptation both a form of imitation, and an original creative act? In the second half of the semester, we move into modern adaptations, including Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles (2011) and the film Troy (2004). Even as these works revisit an ancient conflict, they offer us new ways of thinking about our own world.
Topics in Language: Linguistics of the Real World English 3960 Prof. K. Belmihoub Mon/Wed 5:50PM – 7:05PM	Introduction to Writing Studies and Rhetorical Theory This course provides an opportunity for in-depth, intensive study of important concepts in writing studies and linguistics introduced in other courses. Subjects, which may vary from semester to semester, include but are not limited to language of the media, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, literacy, language and gender, language and race, pedagogy, multilingualism, discourse analysis, translation studies, rhetoric, composing and editing in digital environments, and computer applications in language study. (Students may enroll more than once in ENG 3960 if the topic is different).
The Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. B. Schreiber Mon/Wed 2:30PM – 3:45PM	This course investigates the state of English in the world today—how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central across speech communities. After studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language, the course explores the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. Students will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally. Students will receive credit for ENG 4015, COM 4015, or SOC 4015. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy. This course investigates the state of English in the world today—how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central across speech communities. After studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language, the course explores the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. Students will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally. Students will receive credit for ENG 4015, COM 4015, or SOC 4015. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy.
Chaucer English 4120 Prof. C. Christoforatou Konstantinis Mon/Wed 10:45AM – 12:00PM	ON THE ROAD WITH THE CHIVALROUS, THE PIOUS AND THE ‘NOT-SO-PIOUS’ Knights, merchants, squires and self-proclaimed saints share fascinating stories of their travels and travails in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s masterpiece contains a series of stories ranging from the serious and pious to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny. The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims whose diversity spans the spectrum of late medieval society: a dashing knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a bookish young scholar, a dainty nun and a conniving pardoner, along with a smart and domineering wife; they all compete with one another, trade insultsand jokes, and share tales. The class will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with medieval literary genres (from chivalric romance and bawdy fabliau to beast fables, saints’ lives, dream visions and myths) frustrating and playing upon the expectations of the reader. Against the diverse background of the tales, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, ask questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim (or the interaction between pilgrims) shapes our perceptions and expectations of their tales, and reflect on medieval individual’s relationship to God, society and the foreign. In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval society, we will discover how Chaucer illuminates and distorts social realities, rendering a colorful portrait of life that is strangely familiar to the modern reader. As a class, we will have an opportunity to examine medieval manuscripts in digitized form through access to the collections of the British Library, the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Index of Medieval Art where additional artifacts such as relics, tapestries, mosaics, and ivories are on display.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. H. Ramdass Tues/Thu 5:50PM-7:05PM	What are the elements that come together to create a Shakespearean tragedy? Let’s explore this question through a hands-on approach to some of the Bard’s bloodiest works. Excerpts of key sources, major influences and literary criticism provided to you, including Plutarch’s Lives, Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses, and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, will contextualize our investigations. We begin with the early Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, then move to later works: Julius Ceasar, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Through close reading practices, discussion, film analysis, class presentations and writing, you will develop your understanding of how these plays posit, interrogate and rework thematic questions and concerns central to Shakespearean tragedy.
Milton ENG 4170 Prof. S. Swarbrick Mon/Wed 12:50PM – 2:05 PM	This course offers students an in-depth study of John Milton’s monumental epic poem Paradise Lost in its religious, political, and cultural contexts. We will consider Milton’s place in literary history, his impact on later writers (including the Romantics), his religious and political radicalism, and his poetic afterlives in contemporary popular culture (from the graphic novel to science fiction). In addition to ParadiseLost, we may examine Milton’s 1645 poems, prose writing, and late masterpiece, Samson Agonistes. We will also engage some critical reading practices, including disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and ecocriticism, as tools for understanding Milton’s lasting political and cultural importance.
Romanticism ENG 4300 Prof. C. Grandy Tues/Thu 2:30PM – 3:45PM	Romanticism and its Afterlives British romanticism is an ethos that arose during a relatively short time period, roughly 1790 to 1830. Yet, it represents what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West.” Beginning with the French revolution and responding to the rising tide of industrial capitalism, writers and thinkers of the romantic period posed radical questions to the status quo, including the institutions of marriage, inherited wealth, monarchy, and slavery. They also pushed back against the Enlightenment period’s emphasis on rationality and logic, finding spiritualism in nature, poetry, and the imagination. This capstone seminar will cover key romantic concepts and writers, while also exploring the legacies and impacts of romanticism in different contexts. We will look to romantic literature as the source for contemporary genres like lyric poetry, gothic horror, dystopia, romance, and science fiction. By analyzing how romanticism lives on in works by 19th, 20th, and 21st century writers and artists, we will gain a better appreciation of its significance to modern thought. We will read two novels, a selection of essays, and quite a lot of poems. Within these broad literary forms, we will closely analyze specific formal and literary devices, from symbolism to narrative style, in order to draw connections to broader cultural, political, economic, and sociological concerns. This class will be led as a seminar, with focus on close reading, textual analysis, and class discussion.
The Nineteenth-Century British Novel ENG 4320 Prof. K. Frank Tues/Thu 5:50PM – 7:05PM	“Selfies” of Romantic Lives in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. How do the British fashion themselves (individually and as a nation) in the nineteenth-century novel, and how does the Caribbean serve as a lens/foil for such self-making, or re-making? How does this anticipate contemporary expectations of selfhood and nationhood? How are depictions of challenging issues of those times—industrialization and urbanization, class and social im/mobility, immigration and the expansion of empire, relations between the sexes and the “races”— instructive in confronting similar issues of our time? In this course we will examine these matters in authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, and Florence Marryat.
Modern Irish Writers ENG 4410 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10PM – 5:25PM	If you want to go on an odyssey with some of the most exciting writers of the modern era (many of whose books were banned when they were first published) register for Modern Irish Writers next semester. We will read a fascinating novel about a man who sells his soul to the devil for eternal youth and beauty (Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) and be drawn in by the raw intensity of Edna O’Brien’s compelling stories of sexual seduction and betrayal (A Fanatic Heart). O’Brien’s books were burned in Ireland by religious authorities when they were first published. We will be dazzled by the poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who explores the complexity of the relationship between men and women in the twenty-first century, but fills the landscape of her poetry with women warriors, powerful queens, and magical shape-changers from the pagan past. A provocative play we will read is George Bernard Shaw’s, St. Joan. The play is based on the true story of St. Joan of Arc who was burned as a witch in medieval France, and hundreds of years later was canonized by the Vatican as a saint! She wore men’s clothes as she led the French troops into battle, and scholars refer to her as one of the first feminists. Other works will include the short stories of James Joyce, praised for their penetration of the dark recesses of the human psyche, and the poems of William Butler Yeats, whose obsession with a beautiful revolutionary haunted his life. Both Yeats and Shaw won the noble prize for literature.
Contemporary American Literature ENG 4500 Prof. S. W. Mao Mon/Wed 4:10PM- 5:25PM	This course will examine American literature from the past fifty years. It will explore what is distinctive or contemporary about the texts produced during this period, with an emphasis on how they both borrow and depart from earlier literary traditions. Issues the course considers may include the end of the Cold War and the new ideological divisions that emerged in its wake, the influence of rapidly evolving digital technologies, the development of experimental and radical techniques in various literary forms, the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of the United States, the role of popular culture, including mass market genres such mystery, romance, and science fiction, as well as shifts in our understanding of gender roles and ethnic identities.
Mixed-Race Literature English 4560/BLS 3064 Prof. R. Walker Tues/Thu 2:30PM – 3:45PM	Fiction written by and centering on people of mixed black and white descent have perennially been assimilated into the African American canon, much in the same way that biracial individuals have historically been classified as black in the U.S. Against this tendency, this course will examine some of the many fictions published by and about biracial people, taking seriously the particular racial perspective that they explore. Among the writers we’ll consider are the trailblazing novelist Charles Chesnutt; James Weldon Johnson, “the Dean of African American literature”; Nella Larsen, arguably the most accomplished novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; and Danzy Senna, today’s preeminent novelist of biracial experience. We’ll pay close attention to this literature’s historical context, considering it in relation to such developments as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, shifts in gender ideology, legal history, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Modern Satire English 4700 Prof. L. Silverman Mon/Wed 4:10PM – 5:25PM	This course surveys satiric expression from classical origins in Aesop, and Lucian, through the great Enlightenment English authors such as Swift and Johnson, to contemporary sites such as South Park, as writers for stage, page and video critique the shortcomings of their society. A major focus of the reading will be the transformation of popular traditions of satire by successive writers, particularly the Aesopian tradition of beast fable, as it informs such works as Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale, Jonson’s Volpone, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and the Lucianic tradition of otherworldly fantasy, on which Swift draws so imaginatively in Gulliver’s Travels
Advanced Topics in Language: American Extinctions English 4950 Prof. A. Yoon Mon/Wed 5:50PM – 7:05PM	The Making of the New World Every year, reports of lost biodiversity fill the news; animals are classified according to risk status; and popular entertainment increasingly offers dire visions of extinction events. Contemporary portrayals of extinction often dwell on the novelty of confronting it and the urgency of halting its progress. Yet extinction has been a consistent and defining phenomenon in the American hemisphere since its colonization, unfolding in various modalities: as an historical narrative, an affective haunt, an ecological danger, and a colonial practice. This course investigates the importance of extinction as both a foundational narrative and a lived reality of the “New World.” We will examine how extinction in multiple forms accompanied the establishment of early colonial societies, and we will chart an alternative history of the American democracy through literary records that bear witness to how settlers’ claims of possession meant large-scale dispossession for other humans, animals, and plants. When extinction is imposed by forces of colonization, racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, and war, what are the possibilities of evasion or survival? What forms of remembrance can be had for extinguished lives? Readings will include texts by Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. Primary texts will be complemented by secondary literature drawn from Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, legal scholarship, and feminist theory.

Topics in Literature: The Craft of Fiction English 3950 Prof. T. Aubry Mon/Wed/Thur 11:00-1:30PM In-person Tues/Fri Online Hybrid Synchronous

How do literary works grab our attention and how do they keep us reading? Why do some stories excite us and others bore us? What strategies are involved in getting us to care about fictional characters? How do authors create suspense? How do they give us a vivid sense of the worlds they are depicting? How do they make us laugh or cry? In this class, we will examine genres ranging from serious literature to fantasy in order to get a better sense of the techniques authors use to inspire engagement from readers. Considering examples from writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Alice Munro, Ted Chiang, Flannery O’Connor, Tomi Adeyemi, Lee Child, and Colleen Hoover, we will explore key strategies such as exposition, point of view, pacing, characterization, and world-building. Students will produce both analyses of literary texts and short pieces of fiction. The goal of the course will be to help students understand how fiction works and develop techniques they can use in their own creative writing, thus giving them the tools they need to craft entertaining and emotionally compelling stories.

Topics in Literature: Fairy Tails English 3950 Prof. D. Odnopovoza Mon/Wed/Fri 11:00-1:30PM Online Synchronous Tues/Thu In-person Hybrid Synchronous

This course will study fairy and folk tales across cultures, centuries and media. The texts we explore range from familiar stories, such as “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Snow White,” to lesser-known texts from Thousand and One Nights and Panchatantra. We will explore the shape-shifting of fairy tales as they travel from one culture to another, from oral tradition to written form and from text to screen. In addition, we will engage with methodologies developed by Freud, Jung, Campbell, Frazer, Propp and Maria Tartar to understand the universal appeal and power of the fairy tale. You will be writing a 7-10 paper for this course.

Crafting Stronger Sentences English 3001 Prof. F. Cioffi Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	This course will focus on English grammar–the form, variety, and extraordinary possibilities of the English sentence, from the simple to the advanced.  This course will examine how sentences are put together, how they work, and how they carry power to persuade an audience and effect change. The course will discuss issues of correctness, grammaticality, common usage, and formal writing, and will help students generate correct, sophisticated, audience-appropriate prose.
Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. L. Silberman Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	Find out what inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. See how Satan first became a glamorous anti-hero. In this course, we will be reading representative works of English literature from Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Other readings will include selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—the romantic, the bawdy, and the moral–one of the plays of Shakespeare, a Renaissance epyllion—a short, erotic narrative–and selected Renaissance love lyrics. There will be two short, critical essays, a midterm and a final exam.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. C. Grandy Tues/Thu 4:10-5:25PM	In this class we will read British literature from the last three centuries, spanning intellectual and aesthetic movements that include the enlightenment, romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism. We will place these readings in their historical contexts, from the toppling of monarchies to reckonings with colonialism. Our overarching focus will be how literary forms evolve in response to historical circumstances, while also creating new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. How does poetry that uses everyday language expand the notion of what is picturesque or beautiful? How does the rise of the novel form and free indirect discourse create a new sense of the public sphere? How do experiments in first person perspective expand the self-consciousness of subjectivity? This course will challenge you to read literature not just for its content (what it’s about) but for its form (how it’s written), expanding your abilities in both close reading and textual analysis. This is a discussion-based class and is reading-intensive, asking students to annotate texts in preparation for class sessions. Students will also be asked to write short essays and a midterm exam. Writers we will read include Jonathan Swift, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Seamus Heaney, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith.
Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. A. Yoon Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	This course explores the development of American literature from its beginnings through the Civil War. Texts including letters, histories, autobiographies, political documents, poems, plays, and novels, illuminate the rich complexity of this period in American literary history and culture. These works reveal the often interconnected and overlapping stories of discovery and exploration; private piety and public life; the development of national identity; race; gender; slavery and the movement toward its abolition.
Survey of American Literature II: American Literature from the Civil War to Present English 3025 Prof R. Walker Tues/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	This course surveys the wealth of literature published in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the present day, with an emphasis on the period between 1880 and 1945. Students will leave the course with a solid grasp on the major literary movements that flourished in modern America, including realism and regionalism, modernism, and postwar literature, along with the major players of those movements (from Henry James and Charles Chesnutt to Toni Morrison and Junot Díaz).
Post-Colonial Literature English 3036 Prof. S. Bosu Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	This course examines postcolonial literary texts written in English,specific to nations and regions that were once European colonies,especially in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. The focus is onliterature of empire, especially, but not limited to, works of variousgenres produced in the years leading up to, during, and after thestruggles for ?independence,? including works by such writers asChinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Michelle Cliff, J. M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jamaica Kincaid, Imbolo Mbue, V.S. Naipaul, Ng ugiwa Thiong’o,Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie.
Survey of Caribbean Literature English 3038 Prof. K. Frank Tues/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	This course charts the development of Caribbean literature in English from the 19th century to the present and emphasizes its formal and thematic aspects. Special attention is given to the influence of Caribbean Geography and Caribbean history on its literature. Themes include anti-imperialism and nationalism, globalization, migration and exile, the treatment of race, the treatment of women and carnivalesque subversions.
Latino/a Literature in the U.S. English 3059 Prof. J. Caroccio Maldonado Mon/Wed 9:05-10:20AM	This course examines significant works of literature written in English by Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. It concentrates on novels, short stories, and essays from the late 19th century to the present. Special attention is given to issues of cultural identity, social class, race, and gender, as well as bilingualism and code-switching. While focusing on the diversity of the Latino, a literary expression, this course also explores the sociopolitical contexts in which the works emerged and the commonalities and differences of the experiences of the Latin American diasporas in the U.S.
Craft of Poetry: English 3645 Prof. S. W. Mao Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	In this course, students will read and examine contemporary voices in poetry in order to build their own poetry writing practice. Students will actively engage in lively questions about poetic process and the craft of writing as they work to define and contextualize poetry in class discussions, then move to a workshop model of inquiry, feedback, and revision. Students will draw out craft lessons from contemporary poetry by reading book-length collections by established poets as well as read and discuss craft essays and guides that help students navigate writing poetry as a practice of observing, imagining, and bending language. In the workshop model, students will produce material and submit drafts to the workshop for discussion where collectively we will offer rigorous feedback. By the end of the course, students will have developed a deeper understanding of poetry and the craft of writing, and cultivated a growing sense of their own aesthetic interests and voice, culminating in a small body of their own original poems.
Contemporary Drama English 3780 Prof S. Vella Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	In a world full of mass media options, why does live theatre continue to thrive? In this class we will study a selection of plays and theatrical productions produced around the world in the last 25 years. This will include selections from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East that range in scale from mega-musicals produced in international urban centers to works produced for culturally-specific, local communities. We will focus on the unique ways in which contemporary theatre allows artists and audiences to engage both locally and globally with the urgent social, political, ecological, and cultural issues in our lives. In addition to reading plays and watching video documentation of performances, this course will also take advantage of the vibrant New York City contemporary theatre scene, and will include field trips. Assignments will include short written assignments and one longer paper.
Topics in Film: Cyborgs, Androids, AI English 3940 Prof. P. Hitchcock Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	This course provides an opportunity to study important filmmakers, genres, national cinemas, and themes not found or only touched on in other film courses. Representative subjects include the films of Ingmar Bergman, Asian cinema, Eastern European film before and after the fall of Communism, the animated film, the image of the city, and the samurai film and the western. This format allows for an intensive examination of such topics, which may vary from semester. Students may enroll in this course more than once if the topic is different.
Topics in Film: Mexican Melodrama English 3940 Prof. C. Castro Tues/Thu 4:10-5:25PM	Explores the genealogy of melodramatic audiovisual products —from early silent film to contemporary sitcoms— across the 20th and 21st century. While the regional focus is Mexico, the class is designed to form parallels with other Latin American countries and to think about Mexican film within a global context. This course aims towards a critical study of melodrama as genre and affective modality that defines Mexican film production to this day. This course provides an opportunity to study important filmmakers, genres, national cinemas, and themes not found or only touched on in other film courses. Representative subjects include the films of Ingmar Bergman, Asian cinema, Eastern European film before and after the fall of Communism, the animated film, the image of the city, and the samurai film and the western. This format allows for an intensive examination of such topics, which may vary from semester. Students may enroll in this course more than once if the topic is different.
Topics in Literature: Essentials of Publishing English 3950 Prof. T. Aubry Wed 12:50-2:05PM Hybrid Asynchronous	In order to become what we think of as literature, every text needs to work its way through the publishing industry. This means an editor must decide that it deserves to be circulated and read. It will likely require further development and revision, a process that typically involves ongoing dialogue between the author and editor. The text will need to be copy-edited and proofread. Designers will work to make it visually appealing, creating a cover that grabs people’s attention and helps convey what the book is about. Publicists will seek to garner attention for the work through blurbs from established authors, readings, book parties, panels, social media posts, and reviews in prominent venues. If the editorial team has guessed right, the work may become a bestseller or a viral sensation, the author a literary celebrity. Or, if they guessed wrong, as is often the case, it will be forgotten within a matter of weeks. In every case, a host of individuals is responsible for shepherding a successful work of writing through myriad processes so that it can reach the reading public. The publishing industry shapes every reader’s encounter with literature; without it, there would be no books, no stories, no articles, no literary culture in the United States. ENG 3950: The Essentials of Publishing is designed to offer knowledge of how this industry operates. Specifically aimed at students interested in working in publishing during and after graduation, it will have a hybrid structure. Students will spend half the time participating in a weekly seminar engaged in critical conversations about different features of the publishing industry; and they will spend the other half interning at a publishing house in New York City. Students in the course will have the opportunity to get hands-on work experience, learn how books get produced, and start building a network of contacts they can turn to when they go on the job market after graduation. All of internships in the publishing industry will be arranged by the professor. Students do need to apply for internships on their own. All students who participate will receive a $2000 fellowship to support their work as interns. The course will be capped at twelve students and admission is by application only. Students who are interested should send a 1-2-page cover letter, resume, and 3-5 page writing sample to [email protected] by Friday October 25. The writing sample may be an essay from a previous class or a work that the student produced independently. The cover letter should explain why the student is interested in publishing and what contributions they think they can make to the course and to the industry. Applicants are encouraged to indicate how they can help promote diversity, equity, and inclusivity in our literary and intellectual culture. Finalists may be asked to interview with editors before the semester begins, and acceptance in the class will be contingent upon being given a position at a particular publishing house.
Topics in Literature: Jane Austen English 3950 Prof. S. Hershinow Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	This special topics course will examine Jane Austen’s role in the history of the novel and consider her enduring popularity. In novels like Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), Austen opened up new possibilities for the novel as a literary form. We will highlight Austen’s literary innovations (her satire and style, her experimentation with the marriage plot and psychological characterization) and social commentary (on the legal status of women, the transatlantic slave trade, and the French revolution). We will explore each of Austen’s six published novels along with excerpts from contemporary literary and political texts, critical commentary, and popular adaptations. By diving deep into the work of a single author, we’ll gain a rare perspective on the development of a writer’s craft. Our course will also coincide with the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, and we’ll consider the reception of her work over time and in our moment. Austen fans and those entirely new to Austen are very welcome.
Topics in Literature: The Real X-FIles English 3950 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	In this course, we will examine the phenomenon of UFOs—now more commonly called UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena–from the post-World War II period to the present day. Starting with the supposed Roswell crash in 1947, we will continue on to the Pentagon’s recent shocking admission that UFOs are, in fact, real. We will examine the ways in which theories of UFOs tend to reflect the particular anxieties and fears of their historical moments, and we will ask what our current conversations about the subject say about how we feel about our government. Key texts and media in the class will include such nonfiction books as Leslie Kean’s UFOs and Garrett Graff’s UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life; fiction including Ted Chiang’s STORY OF YOUR LIFE and Nnedi Okorafor’s BINTI Trilogy; films including ARRIVAL and CONTACT; and selected documentaries
Special Topics in Language English 3960 Prof. L. Blankenship & Prof. D. Libertz Wed 2:30-3:45PM Hybrid Asychronous	This course introduces students to the field of rhetoric and writing studies. Students will become acquainted with the variety of ways intellectuals have engaged with the nature and uses of rhetoric and writing, to include philosophical, theoretical, critical, and social scientific study of rhetoric and writing. Examples of subjects of study include: meaning, persuasion, identity, argument, style, mediation and modality, genre, and circulation. Students explore practical applications to their areas of study across different disciplines, career paths, and personal interests.
The Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. K Belmihoub Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	In this course, we will investigate the state of English in the world today – how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central in diverse speech communities. English today is part of new modes of literacy and discourse practices, and has dynamic relationships with other languages and cultures. These changes call for us to re-examine our understandings of language standards, speech communities, linguistic identities, and best practices for English language teaching. We will begin by studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language. We then explore the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. We will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally. Specifically, this course has the following objectives: To develop a critical understanding of the interconnections between globalization and the English language; To analyze the ways a language changes from new communication technologies, plural speech communities, and transnational economic relationships; To explore the ways in which the changes in English impact business practices and language teaching in the 21st century.
Radical Bestiaries: Animals and Humans in the Atlantic World IDC 4050H-MTH (4420) Tuesdays, 11:20-2:05PM Rick Rodriguez (English) Elizabeth Heath (History)	In the middle panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” humans and animals wildly coexist. This riotous image stands in stark contrast to that of The Great Chain of Being, where all creatures are neatly and vertically organized in subordination to humans. It is fair to say that the ideas that animate the visuals in The Great Chain of Being have come to dominate how we think and write about human history and culture and perhaps more importantly how that history and culture have been made, though not without opposition. We’ll examine the ideas, beliefs, and practices underpinning these images in literary and historical texts, tracking their development from the 15th through the 19th centuries and to our own time. Doing so will not only yield a more complex appreciation of the entangled relations between humans and animals but also how these relations contributed to the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World.
Chaucer English 4120 Prof. H. Ramdass Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	This course is devoted to an intensive study of the Canterbury Tales, a work that founds the English literary tradition. Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s composition is a fascinating medley of stories that range from the serious and pious, to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny. The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims that include a dashing knight, a drunken miller, a bookish young scholar, a monk, a conniving pardoner, a self-indulgent nun, and a bold and enterprising Wife. Students are introduced to a range of genres—from epic, satire, allegory and romance to fable, elegy, dream-vision, autobiography, and travel narrative. In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval society, readers will discover how the Poet reflects and distorts social and political realities, rendering a colorful portrait of late medieval life that appears strangely familiar six hundred years later.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. A. Deutermann Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	This course offers an in-depth survey of the work of William Shakespeare, plausibly regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. Students will examine a range of Shakespeare’s works, from early plays heavily influenced by classical models through his great comedies and tragedies to his late romances. The course will consider these works in the context of political, religious, and cultural issues of Shakespeare’s time and in light of particular thematic concerns recurring in Shakespeare’s work. We will analyze the plays both as dramatic works intended to be performed and as literary productions that reward careful close reading.
Topics in Shakespeare: Trickery, Gender, Power English 4145 Prof. L. Kolb Tues/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	Tricks abound in Shakespeare’s plays. In comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, strategic deceptions make some characters fall in love and others doubt their sanity. In tragedies like Richard III, Hamlet, and Othello, crafted ruses enable revenge and facilitate power grabs. In this class, we explore what tricks tell us about power, performance, and gender relations. What does acting have to do with ruling? What kinds of deceptions do people who lack power–women, servants, racial and cultural ‘outsiders’–use to seize it, from below? And what are the parallels between onstage tricksters’ manipulations of language to create social illusions and Shakespeare’s uses of it to spin theatrical fictions? Alongside a range of comedies, tragedies, and romances, we will read excerpts from Renaissance texts including Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) and Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentlewoman (1631) to better understand the entanglement of trickery, power, and gendered performance, onstage and off.
The Modern Short Story English 4450 Prof. E. Dreifus Thu 4:10-5:25PM HA	Significant short stories of the twentieth century. Faulkner, Joyce, Cather, Mansfield, Kafka, and others will be studied, explicated, and discussed with emphasis on symbol, myth, and relationships to nineteenth-century forerunners in the short story art. This course may serve as the capstone for the liberal arts English minor.
The Modern Short Novel English 4460 Prof. E. Chou Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	What can a short a novel do that a long one cannot? This course pursues this and other equally compelling questions through close attention to an array of writers who make a resource of brevity. This course may have an international scope, perhaps including works in translation.
Literature of the Harlem Renaissance: English 4545 Prof. E. Richardson Tues 6:05-9:00PM	“From the 1920s through the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance marked a flourishing of African American literature, culture, and intellectual thought. During this period, Black authors, artists, and thinkers worked to redefine Black identity, challenging persistent stereotypes and showcasing Black life as integral to the modern world. This movement was shaped by emerging technologies like film and photography, as well as the growth of modern print culture through periodicals and pamphlets. In this course, we will explore a wide range of literary and cultural works from this vibrant era, examining how they reflect and respond to the social and political landscapes of the time. Readings will include plays by Georgia Douglas Johnson and Willis Richardson, essays by Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, poetry by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and novels by Claude McKay and Nella Larsen. Our discussions will engage with historical and cultural contexts, informed by concepts from gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, data studies, and Black studies.   A sample* of the readings includes Blue-Eyed Black Boy by Georgia Douglas Johnson; The Chip Woman’s Fortune by Willis Richardson; “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston; “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes; “Yet I Do Marvel” by Countee Cullen; Home to Harlem by Claude McKay; and Passing by Nella Larsen.   *Select readings of poems, essays and periodicals TBD by the instructor and the class in first 1-2 weeks of the course based on class discussion.”
The Global Business of Literature English 4615 Prof. M. Eatough Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	It has become commonplace among many literary critics to say that we are living in the era of a “new” world literature.  Indeed, even the most cursory examination of a display table at Barnes and Noble will show just how “global” contemporary reading tastes can be—translations of Japanese and Chinese novels sit side-by-side with Anglophone texts from Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, while Spanish-language texts jostle for attention with Greek and Latin classics. In this class, we will study the social, cultural, and economic factors that have led to the creation of this “new” world literature.  Our approach to this topic will be broadly interdisciplinary: we will not only read works of world literature, but also examine world literature through the lenses of economics, history, and sociology.  Our readings will thus range from historical scholarship on the rise of the modern publishing industry to sociological studies of literary prizes, and from analyses of subcultural readerships and niche marketing to detailed accounts of book series and literary magazines.  We will also discuss the role that translation plays in shaping the works that we read—and, equally important, the role that private foundations and government programs play in funding such translations. Possible readings include novels by Chetan Bhagat, Roberto Bolano, NoViolet Bulawayo, Fernanda Melchor, Yu Miri, and Sally Rooney.
Medieval Romance English 4710 Prof. C. Christoforatou Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	Fantasy, Faith, and Fiction in the Middle Ages Romance was medieval culture’s most popular non-religious literary genre. It is also the genre that has had the largest influence on subsequent history. From modern science fiction to soap opera, there is no form of contemporary popular narrative that does not draw in some way on the conventions of medieval romance. Together in this course we will chart the genre’s development from its emergence in fourth-century Africa to its subsequent revivals in the courts of tenth-century Persia, eleventh-century Constantinople, and twelfth and fourteenth-century France and England. Central to the study of romance as a genre is its creative reinterpretation of passion and faith in relation to fellowship and love. This was a necessary process that allowed medieval authors to preserve and question the contradictions at the heart of courtly love and the institutions of knighthood and marriage. To fully understand these contradictions, we will consider the genre’s ties to masculinity, femininity, community, faith, shame and honor, and question the extent to which the genre can be said to enjoy a certain autonomy from history. We will conclude with contemporary approaches to medieval romance. Readings for the course will include Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance, Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian cycle, Cliges, The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot),and The Story of the Grail (Perceval), Beroul’s Romance of Tristan, two anonymous Middle English romances, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as shorter romances in translation by Christine de Pizan and Marie de France. In addition, the class will explore romance’s affinities to other genres and systems of power by looking at the work of influential women patrons who served as scribes, narrators, and commentators
Gothic Mysteries English 4740 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	Against a background of haunted castles, demonic predators, and victims who unconsciously collaborate in their own ruin, Gothic literature takes us on a journey into the dark recesses of the human psyche that fascinated Freud and examines its insatiable appetite for danger and forbidden pleasure. Through psychoanalytical and feminist lens, we will explore Gothic stories by both men and women. We will see how Victorian medical attitudes towards the female body forced the female writer of the Gothic novel to create erotically coded texts that scholars are still unraveling today. If you like spectacular settings, you will revel in Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Gothic novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, about fatal passion, voodoo priestesses, sexual addiction, and mad Creole heiresses set in the lush islands of Jamaica and Dominica. You will love Sheridan Le Fanu’s thriller of voluptuous terror, Carmilla, which describes the seduction and possession of an innocent young woman by a tantalizingly beautiful female vampire who provides her victims with a taste of ecstasy before luring them into the world of the damned. Readings will include Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, that portrays one of the loneliest creatures in all of literature—the deformed offspring of an egotistical scientist, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, condemned as shocking and immoral when it was first published, but now recognized as one of the most daring and complex novels of its time.
Topics in Literature: Investigating Language Data English 4950 Prof. N. Lee Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	Linguistic patterns — whether unconsciously embedded in spoken or signed language, or cast in literary or other texts, or carefully prompted in experimental settings — can illuminate both the substance of general human cognition and the social attributes of individual (groups of) speakers. Is the word the going away? Are our brains pre-set to learn “singular” and “plural” (but not other numbers)? Do gay men really lisp? Are literary novels wordier than genre fiction? This course provides a gentle introduction to quantitative methods for language data, with hands-on tutorials for counting or measuring various aspects of linguistic behavior and textual features. This course will guide students through ways to find, organize, and visualize language data. Students will learn how to carry out this exploratory data analysis with both discrete and continuous data, from text corpora, speech and audio recordings, and experimental measurements, using R, an open-source statistical software environment. These broadly transferable computational skills and competence in data science will serve students in the pursuit of linguistic, social, and humanistic questions. No prior data analysis or computer science / programming experience is required.
Topics in Literature: Language. Identity, and Social Media English 4950 Prof. B. Schreiber Tues/Thu 4:10-5:25PM	How do the language and images that we use online shape the way others see us – and the way we see ourselves?  This class will explore how digital technology has changed language use and conventions, and how identities are formed online. In the first half of the course, we will examine case studies on personal and corporate social media use across various platforms around the world, considering how users select social media platforms and employ language resources, including multimodality, as they write. We will learn about options and tools for online research, and discuss the ethical concerns that arise in collecting data via social media. In the second half of the course, students will work on their own case studies examining how language is used to create community and identity within a particular forum or genre (such as Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, or online advertising).  Evaluation will be based on discussion board posts, leading and participating in class discussions, the written case study, and a final research presentation.

Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. R. Hinds Mon/Thu 5:30-8:00PM (Online) Tues 5:30-8:00PM (In-person) Hybrid Synchronous 7/15-8/15	This course surveys British literature from the earliest examples of the Middle Ages through the 16th and 17th centuries. It will consider selected works from this broad period in the context of the political, scientific, and religious changes that Britain experienced over the course of those centuries. It will also study some of the major contributions made by English dramatists— Shakespeare as well as other figures—to this tradition. Students will have the opportunity to explore shifting definitions of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. We will also examine literary developments And transformations in genre, from Beowulf through chivalric romance to Milton’s grand epic Paradise Lost, which shapes and influences much of subsequent literature in English.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. M. McGlynn Tues 11:00-1:41PM Hybrid Asynchronous 6/10-7/11	In making a survey of the last 300 years of British literature, this class will pay particular attention to the representations of work and leisure and how wealth and deprivation are depicted.  Throughout the term, we will explore constructions of urban and rural, of rich and poor, of artist and worker, with special focus on enslaved and precarious labor, domestic workers, and snobbery. 2/3rds of the work for ENG 3015 will take place asynchronously; attendance for all five in-person class sessions is mandatory.
Survey of Caribbean Literature English 3038 Prof. K. Frank Mon/Tues/Thu 2:00-4:41PM Online Synchronous 6/10-7/11	The Politics of Caribbean Romance. Skinny Fabulous’ soca song “Shameless” and Qyor’s reggae song “I’ll Be Waiting” are just two among many songs that send entirely different messages about relationships between Caribbean women and men. In this course, we will focus particularly on those relationships in Caribbean literature. What myths or fantasies about the Caribbean and Caribbeanness, constructed externally or internally, inform the dynamics of “romantic” or purely exploitative, sexual Caribbean relationships? Additionally, how do issues such as authenticity and creolization, among others, pertain to such liaisons? Involving African-Caribbean, Asian-Caribbean, and European-Caribbean experiences, we will explore these matters by reading pertinent texts, listening to and/or watching videos of some pertinent music, and we will likely watch one film.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof C. Campbell Mon/Tues/Thu 11:00-12:53PM Hybrid Asynchronous 7/15-8/15	This course offers an in-depth survey of the work of William Shakespeare, plausibly regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. Students will examine a range of Shakespeare’s works, from early plays heavily influenced by classical models through his great comedies and tragedies to his late romances. The course will consider these works in the context of political, religious, and cultural issues of Shakespeare’s time and in light of particular thematic concerns recurring in Shakespeare’s work. We will analyze the plays both as dramatic works intended to be performed and as literary productions that reward careful close reading.
Oscar Wilde English 4380 Prof. O’Toole Tues 2:00-4:30PM Hybrid Asynchronous 7/15-8/15	Oscar Wilde in Five Acts  “The truth,” Oscar Wilde once quipped, “is rarely pure and never simple.” This witticism aptly describes both Wilde’s own life—he was a husband and father who was eventually imprisoned for “gross indecency with other male persons”—and his life’s work: essays, poems, plays, and fiction that have made him one of the most widely read and translated authors in the English language. In this course, we consider the life and literature of Oscar Wilde within the context of late-Victorian England, renowned as much for its scandalous challenges to the status quo as for its excessive concern for propriety. Wilde’s own challenges came in the form of such works as the comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, his essay on literature “The Decay of Lying,” and his only novel, published to outrage and protest in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In addition to reading these works, we investigate the Aesthetic and Decadent movements in late-century arts and culture, the public scandal surrounding Wilde’s infamous court trials, and Wilde’s enduring legacy, including popular contemporary works such as Moisés Kaufman’s off-Broadway hit Gross Indecency and Virgil Marti’s immersive installation For Oscar Wilde.
Twentieth-Century British Lit. English 4420 Prof. M. Eatough Tues 2:00-4:30PM Online Synchronous 7/15-8/15	A multi-genre examination of works of literary, cultural, and historical significance, this course will discuss such movements as high modernism, post-war realism, and postmodernism, as well as recent literary developments on the British Isles. Poetry, drama, short fiction, and novels will be included, as may films and nonfiction works. Their intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic contexts will be emphasized. Colonial and independence fiction from throughout the British Empire may be covered, as may Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and English texts. Authors to be studied might include Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Eliot, Rushdie, Heaney, and Ishiguro. For students with two other upper-level (3000-level or above) English courses, this course may serve as the capstone for the Tier III requirement.
The Modern Short Story English 4450 Prof. R. Walker Tues 2:00-4:41PM Hybrid Asynchronous 6/10-7/11	This course is about one of the newest genres in all of literary history, the short story. The short story, though influenced by much older literary genres, did not truly congeal into a discrete genre of its own until the nineteenth century. Its youth provides us the rare opportunity to develop a working sense of its global history within a course’s time—a feat that would be all but impossible with some of the short story’s older cousins, such as drama and poetry. While our focus will be on the history and the development of the short story, we will pay close attention to individual exemplars of the genre. The works of the short story’s virtuosos—Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Anton Chekhov among them—will be our guides, and these author’s exquisite fictions will furnish the occasions for close literary analysis.

Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. R. Hinds Tues/Thu 5:50-7:05PM	This course surveys British literature from the earliest examples of the Middle Ages through the 16th and 17th centuries. It will consider selected works from this broadperiod in the context of the political, scientific, and religious changes that Britain experiences over the course of those centuries. It will also study some of themajor contributions made by English dramatists— Shakespeare as well as other figures—to this tradition. Students will have the opportunity to explore shifting definitions of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. We will also examine literary developments And transformations in genre, from Beowulf through chivalric romance to Milton’s grand epic Paradise Lost, which shapes and influences much of subsequent literature in English.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. G. Hentzi Tue/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	This course offers an overview of more than three centuries of English, Irish, and Commonwealth literature in the major genres of fiction and non-fiction prose, poetry, and drama. Beginning with the Restoration, we will read characteristic works from all the major historical periods down to the present day, including the eighteenth century, the Romantic and Victorian eras, the Modern period, the second half of the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first. Authors to be studied include John Dryden, William Congreve, Alexander Pope, Edward Gibbon, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, John Keats, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Zadie Smith.
Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. R. Rodriguez Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	What if we consider the idea of America’s greatness (often symbolized by the image of the “city upon a hill”) from the perspective of the citizens of the city underground: the colonized, scapegoats, outlaws, slaves, women, immigrants, the poor, etc.? How might such a shift in viewpoint impact our understanding of the nation’s founding concepts and ideals: utopia, community, citizenship, equality, fellowship, democracy, liberty, and other life pursuits?   In addition to the survey’s focus on representative texts and genres, our course will tap American literature’s utopian vein and engage in a critical and imaginative assessment of writers invested in thinking about workable alternatives to the status quo. Among the writers considered will be Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Michel de Montaigne, William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Anne Hutchinson, Salem’s witch hunters and their victims, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Edgar Allan Poe, David Walker, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Rollin Ridge (“Yellow Bird”), Walt Whitman, and Hannah Crafts.
American Literature II 1865 to Present English 3025 Prof. E. Richardson Wed 6:05-9:00PM Online-Synchronous	In this class, we will explore a swath of classic and unconventional American literature and culture from 1865 to the present, focusing on protest, civil rights, and social change. We will interpret texts by close reading formal literary strategies related to the narrative plot, character formation, imagery, rhetoric, and tone. We will also analyze material attending to the expression meaning of freedom and citizenship, labor and class, government regulations, afterlives of slavery, settler colonialism, and LGBTQ rights. These topics pose a series of intriguing questions in this course:  How does the individual protagonist tell a larger story of America and society? How might collaborative writing substantiate and detail our conception of democracy? To what extent are the aesthetics (or artistry) of literature shaped or determined by a protest? What’s the difference between art and protest? And above all else, when there is tension, conflict, cultural shifts, reactionary responses, revolution, and resolutions achieved and unrealized America, what can literature do? Throughout the course, we will engage with these questions and more as we explore the power of literature to shape our understanding of the world around us. Authors include Upton Sinclair, W.E.B Du Bois, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Georgia Douglas, Claude McKay, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, John Okada, Rachel Carson, Joy Harjo, and Raquel Salas Rivera
Literatures of Global South English 3030 TBA Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	This course surveys developments in the history and aesthetics of literature from the region known as the Global South. Students will examine how the termGlobal South came to identify a diverse collection of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature from across Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. Thecourse’s comparative orientation will focus on the social, cultural, and economic issues addressed by these literatures, including (but not limited to) the effects of the international division of labor and of capitalist extraction, the uneven consequences of climate change, and the creation of transnational political solidarities (e.g., Bandung and BRICS).
Survey of Caribbean Literature In English English 3038 Prof. R. Salois Tues/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	This course charts the development of Caribbean literature in English from the 19th century to the present and emphasizes its formal and thematic aspects. Special attention is given to the influence of Caribbean Geography and Caribbean history on its literature. Themes include anti-imperialism and nationalism, globalization, migration and exile, the treatment of race, the treatment of women and carnivalesque subversions.
Latino/a Literature in the U.S. English 3059 Prof. L. Santana Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	This course examines significant works of literature written in English by Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. It concentrates on novels, short stories, and essays from the late 19th century to the present. Special attention is given to issues of cultural identity, social class, race, and gender, as well as bilingualism and code-switching. While focusing on the diversity of the Latino, a literary expression, this course also explores the sociopolitical contexts in which the works emerged and the commonalities and differences of the experiences of the Latin American diasporas in the U.S. (Students will receive credit for CMP 3059, ENG 3059, or LTS 3059. These courses may substitute for each other with the F-replacement option.
Creative Journalism English 3600 TBA Wed 2:30-5:25PM	What must a journalist do to move beyond the bare bones of the news? How does the journalist, trained to gather facts and evidence, achieve a personal style that is both honest and imaginative? The class explores how creative journalists combine the techniques of the novelist with those of the journalist. In addition to writing exercises and stories, students will examine the works of such creative journalists as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Joseph Mitchell, V. S. Naipaul, Gay Talese, John A. Williams, and Tom Wolfe.
Elements of Poetry English 3640 TBA Mon/Wed 2:30 – 3:45PM	This is a course in using and mastering language and the art of metaphor. Students find their own poetic voices by perceiving worldly objects and then transforming those perceptions into poetic images that reflect their own deepest emotions. While studying and memorizing poems by a wide spectrum of writers, including Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Gwendolyn Brooks, they write and critique their own. Regular conferences.
Advanced Essay Writing English 3680 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 2:30 – 3:45PM	The goal of this course is to expand the writer’s sense of style by increasing sensitivity to tools such as metaphor, humor, irony, and voice. Through assigned readings and class discussions, individual and small group conferenceswith the professor, and revision, students will experiment with distinctive stylistic options. Using a variety of sentence types and patterns to improve how their writing flows, students will explore creative paragraphing and sectioning to achieve different effects; learn to use grammatical and mechanical devices to control rhythm and meaning; study how the sounds of words and their associations can enhance vividness; and gain appreciation for the processes of revision and its opportunities. Students will develop a sense of their unique style and a repertoire of tools to drawfrom in a variety of writing occasions.
Introduction to Linguistics English 3700 Prof. N. Lee Tue/Thu 5:50 – 7:05PM	ENG/COM 3700: Introduction to Linguistics: The Study of Language This course is an introductory survey of the field of linguistics — the scientific study of language. What is the nature of human language? Is speaking an instinctual or learned behavior?  In this course, we will discover how human language is a complex but law-governed mental system, capable of open-ended linguistic creativity — and imbued with social power and meaning.  We will not only examine varieties of English, but will also investigate the diverse range of languages spoken and signed around the world, as we look at the following questions: What do a language’s speakers know about the language’s word structure (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), sentence meaning (semantics and pragmatics), and pronunciation (phonetics and phonology)? How do children acquire this knowledge, and why do they acquire it so much more quickly and easily than adults do (language acquisition)? How is language processed in the brain (neurolinguistics)? How does linguistic variation interact with class, race, gender, and other socially meaningful categories (sociolinguistics)? And how do dialects and languages change over time (historical linguistics)?  This course also explores applications to the (bilingual or foreign-language) classroom, speech pathology, communication sciences and disorders, technology and computer science, literary analysis, translation studies, psychology, sociology, and other disciplinary interests.
Modern Drama English 3770 Prof. S. Vella Mon/Wed 12:50 – 2:05PM	This course examines dramatic texts that emerged around the world from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.  Plays from a wide range of languages, cultures, and geographical locations—including selections from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—will be considered in conversation with changes in production economics, staging technology, and acting technique. This period witnessed an unprecedented mobility for theatre artists and styles, facilitated by touring, film and photography, and wider availability of translations. This mobility, however, took place in a situation of uneven power dynamics facilitated by global colonialism and capitalism. We will therefore encounter these plays and artists in their socio-political contexts and will emphasize consideration of the ethical stakes of cross-cultural influence.
Holocaust Literature English 3810 Prof. S. Valente Tues 4:10 – 5:25PM Hybrid Asynchronous	The Holocaust, the destruction of European Jewry, is often termed an unspeakable,unimaginable, and unrepresentable event. Through a selection of eyewitnesstestimony, novels, stories, poetry, and art, this course examines how such workscontribute to our understanding of history and literature and bear on some of themajor arguments and themes around Holocaust fiction and literature including theethics of representation; historical investigation vs personal accounts; differentnarrative forms; different generational accounts; responses to Holocaust narratives;and Holocaust denial. Authors may include, but are not limited to: Tadeusz Borowski;Paul Celan; Eva Hoffman; Imre Kertesz; Primo Levi; Art Spiegelman; and DanielMendelsohn. (Students may receive credit for ENG 3810, HIS 3810, or JWS 3810.These courses may substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy.)
Topics in Film: Latinx Film English 3940 Prof. J. Caroccio Maldonado Mon/Wed 9:05 – 10:20AM Online Synchronous	This course provides an opportunity to study important filmmakers, genres, national cinemas, and themes not found or only touched on in other film courses. Representative subjects include the films of Ingmar Bergman, Asian cinema, Eastern European film before and after the fall of Communism, the animated film, the image of the city, and the samurai film and the western. This format allows for an intensive examination of such topics, which may vary from semester. Students may enroll in this course more than once if the topic is different.
Topics in Literature: Literature and Photography English 3950 Prof. C. Grandy Tue/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	Photography is a versatile medium: an artform, a tool for government and police surveillance, a memory aid, and, more recently, a means of digital communication. This course explores how literature and photography have impacted each other, from the time leading up to the arrival of photographic technology in 1839 to the present. We will read literary works of poetry, non-fiction, memoir, documentary, and fiction alongside analog and digital photographs. How was photography originally greeted by artists and social theorists? How have writers employed photography metaphorically or literally? What collaborative projects have emerged using the formal capacities of both mediums? Writers we will read include Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Muriel Rukeyser, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Deborah Willis, Anne Carson, and Robin Coste Lewis; photographers will include Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Zoe Leonard, Andreas Gursky, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jeff Wall. Some topics and themes we will explore include identification and racial profiling, memory and loss, voyeurism, documentary ethics, and photography as fiction.
Sociolinguistics: Language Variation & Social Identity English 3960 Prof. N. Lee Tue/Thu 2:30PM-3:45PM	Language varies — across situations, across individuals, and over time — both reflecting and constructing our social order. This course introduces variationist sociolinguistics, which seeks to describe and explain the linguistic and social factors that underlie that variation. We’ll survey the patterning of speech variation by region, social class, age, ethnicity and racialized identity, gender, sexuality, and other identities we construct (as nerds or frat stars, jocks or burnouts, urbanites or rural types). We’ll also explore how linguistic variation relates to language change and history. You will get hands-on with quantitative methods that will help us characterize the relationship between language and society, as you collect and analyze real life language data on particular cases of variation.
The Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. B. Schreiber Mon/Wed 2:30 – 3:45PM	This course investigates the state of English in the world today—how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central across speech communities. After studying the historical andgeopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language, the course explores the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology fordiversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. Students will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally.Students will receive credit for ENG 4015, COM 4015, or SOC 4015. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy.
Medieval Literature English 4110 Prof. C. Christoforatou Mon/Wed 10:45AM-12:00PM	IMAGES OF THE SELF AND OF THE WORLD IN MEDIEVAL LIT. Medieval readers had a keen interest in the nature of the world, places both near and far, and were avid consumers of tales of distant places and people. Their literature was at the heart of the creation of western visions of natural and human diversity, taking on the themes of travel, exploration, alienation, exile, faith, and spirituality. In its depth and breath, the literature they produced continues to inspire discussion on philosophical, anthropological, and cosmological matters.   This course seeks to foster an understanding of the enduring human values that unite the different cultures and literary traditions we will study. We will read literature in English and in translation that spans three continents and a period of well over 600 years. The readings will allow us to examine the nature of the medieval cosmos and the role of the individual in it. They include selections from medieval fictional travelogues such as Mandeville’s Book of Travels, Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance, a Medieval Greek travel-narrative, a selection of romances produced by female authors, and the only surviving spiritual autobiography by a medieval laywoman, Margery Kempe. Several satires will also be included, which collectively will offer insight into medieval individual’s relationship to faith, society, nature, and the foreign.   To the extent that the class is interested in the material culture of the Middle Ages, we will access digitized archives and museum collections of illuminated manuscripts, relics, tapestries, mosaics, and ivories that will allow us to study the cultural influences that allowed medieval civilizations to evolve.
Chaucer English 4120 Prof. H. Ramdass Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	This course is devoted to an intensive study of the Canterbury Tales, a work that founds the English literary tradition. Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s composition is a fascinating medley of stories that range from the serious and pious, to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny.The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims that include a dashing knight, a drunken miller, a bookish young scholar, a monk, a conniving pardoner, a self-indulgent nun, and a bold and enterprising Wife. Students are introduced to a range of genres—from epic, satire, allegory and romance to fable, elegy, dream-vision, autobiography, and travel narrative. In piecing together Chaucer’s portraitof late medieval society, readers will discover how the Poet reflects and distorts social and political realities, rendering a colorful portrait of late medieval life that appears strangely familiar six hundred years later.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. L. Silberman Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	This course offers an in-depth survey of the work of William Shakespeare, plausiblyregarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. Students will examine a range of Shakespeare’s works, from early plays heavily influenced by classical models through his great comedies and tragedies to his late romances. The course will consider these works in the context of political, religious, and cultural issues of Shakespeare’s time and in light of particular thematic concerns recurring in Shakespeare’s work. We will analyze the plays both as dramatic works intended to be performed and as literary productions that reward careful close reading.
Romanticism English 4300 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	This course will examine the nuances of Romanticism. In addition to exploring the Romantic obsession with ecstasy and the voluptuous surrender to beauty and imagination so evident in the Romantic writers, we will examine the darker, more sinister side of Romantic literature. The Satanic Hero and Fatal Woman motifs will be looked at from different perspectives and works dealing with sexual and psychological vampirism will be examined. The semester’s reading will cover a variety of literary forms by Romantic writers, as well as by Victorian writers influenced by Romantic ideology and themes. Readings will include Emily Bronte’s novel of ferocious obsessive desire—Wuthering Heights, and Thomas Hardy’s anti-Romantic novel about a woman whose beauty and innocence proved to be the cause of her lethal seduction—Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The novel’s spectacular ending takes place amidst the pagan monuments of Stonehenge. We will luxuriate in the exquisite poetry of John Keats where bewitching enchantresses, magical bedchambers, and landscapes of desire, lure the reader into a world of tantalizing beauty, and be drawn into the forbidden, opium influenced dreamscapes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We will read two exciting women poets, Mary Robinson and Anna Letitia Barbauld. These women, as well as being accomplished poets at a time when women did not have the vote and could not enter the university, led more adventurous and daring lives than their male counterparts. These are just a few of the interesting writers we will be discussing next semester.
Victorian Literature English 4310 Prof. K. Frank Tues/Thu 5:50-7:05PM	“The Pursuit of Happiness?” In business, utilitarianism implies an obligation to operate so as to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, which seems to coincide with romanticism in business, wherein business practices are not only about profit, but are also about facilitating human experiences and relations. What does Victorian poetry and prose suggest about how these ideals inform challenging issues of those times, such as industrialization and urbanization, social im/mobility, immigration and the expansion of empire, and how might these texts help us better understand and address similar issues in our own time? We will examine these matters in works by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Alfred Tennyson, among others.
Readings in Queer Literature, Media, and Theory English 4525 Prof. R. Walker Tues/Thu 2:30PM-3:45PM	What unites the many groups comprising the sprawling acronym LGBTQ? It is the fact that they all desire in ways out of keeping with prevailing norms governing gender, whether it be that they are attracted to people of the same sex or that their perception of their gender does not correspond with their sex (to name only a couple of the many possibilities). Ranging from the nineteenth century to the present, this course focuses on the rich literature that has put the experiences of this multifarious group front and center. In studying literature written about LGBTQ people—some of it written before any subgroup in this acronym even had a name—students will have the opportunity to weigh the costs and benefits of visibility and categorization for this diverse demographic (such as it is). To what extent do categories help or harm gender-nonconforming people? What are the costs and benefits of being “out” or “in,” and does the answer to this question hinge on other factors of a person’s identity?
Horror Film English 4745 Prof. M. Eatough Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	Why do readers like scary stories? What do such stories do for us on an emotional and psychological level—and how do they help us to understand the world in which we live? In this class, we will examine some of the most highly regarded and controversial horror stories from the last hundred years, from early classics by H. P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson to more recent work in cosmic horror, body horror, psychological horror, and weird fiction. In doing so, we will ask what these texts tell us about the social anxieties of their day. How does horror fiction give tangible form to concerns about the shape and structure of modern society? Does horror fiction by definition reinforce fears about outsiders and the unknown, or can it also be used to call attention to the hidden violence lurking within familiar everyday life? Possible authors may include Stephen Graham Jones, Mariana Enríquez, Thomas Ligotti, Jeff Vandermeer, Octavia Butler, Kathe Koja, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Mónica Ojeda, Agustina Bazterrica, Stephen King, Brian Evenson, Michael Cisco, H. P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson, as well as comics by Charles Burns and Junji Ito and films by Wes Craven, Jordan Peele, and George Romero.
Science Fiction English 4760 Prof. F. Cioffi Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	Science fiction explores other worlds, usually ones that are nonexistent at present but are possible—maybe even probable—extensions of our own or of an author’s landscape into very different, often dangerous realms. In this course, we will explore what insights this genre can offer about our own world and society, about those of the author, or about the human psyche itself—insights that more realistic genres might avoid or overlook.   We will read some relatively recent (post-WWII) science fiction novels, including works by American, Polish, Japanese, and Russian writers. One text will be a graphic novel (Burns) and one a film (Marker)   There is quite a lot of reading in this capstone course, but it should be fun and (I hope) compelling and timely! All writing (3 papers/exams) will be done in class.   Reading List [themes appear in brackets]: John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) [Superhuman kids implanted in human mothers] Chris Marker, La Jetée (film) (1963) [Post-holocaust struggles of survivors] Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1969) [World War II, time travel, and aliens] Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1972) [Alien invasion] Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress (1974) [Chemical modification of consciousness] Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979) [Slavery, Civil War, time travel] Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) [Near future world totally subjugating women] Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (1994) [Alternate world/history] Charles Burns, Black Hole (2005) [Weird physical alterations caused by immorality] Ling Ma, Severance (2018) [Post-holocaust desolation] Gish Jen, The Resisters (2020) [Women’s baseball team in a near future]
Advanced Topics in Language: The Making of the New World English 4950 Prof. Yoon Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	Every year, reports of lost biodiversity fill the news; animals are classified according to risk status; and popular entertainment increasingly offers dire visions of extinction events. Contemporary portrayals of extinction often dwell on the novelty of confronting it and the urgency of halting its progress. Yet extinction has been a consistent and defining phenomenon in the American hemisphere since its colonization, unfolding in various modalities: as an historical narrative, an affective haunt, an ecological danger, and a colonial practice. This course seeks to make sense of the importance of extinction as both a foundational narrative and a lived reality of the “New World.” We will examine how extinction in multiple forms accompanied the establishment of early colonial societies, and simultaneously chart an alternative history of the American democracy through literary records that bear witness to how settlers’ claims of possession meant dispossession for other humans, animals, and plants on large scales. When extinction is imposed by forces of colonization, racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, and war, what possibilities of evasion or survival are there? What forms of remembrance can be had for extinguished lives? How does the idea of extinction push us to rethink how we understand life itself? Readings will include texts by Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. Primary texts will be complemented by secondary literature drawn from Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, legal scholarship, and feminist theory.

  

Crafting Stronger Sentences: Conventions of English Grammar English 3001 Prof. B. Schreiber Tue/Thu 4:10 – 5:25PM	This course examines how sentences are put together, how they function, how writers engage the rules–and how they resist them. In the first part of the course, students will learn about the structure of English sentences, including formal names for parts of speech and grammatical constructions. Students will reflect on their experiences with grammar instruction and usage and will be assessed on knowledge and application of grammatical concepts. The second half of the course explores complex issues related to English grammar, such as prescriptivism as a social justice issue, inclusive language and political correctness, and the past, present, and future of grammar education. Students will complete an empirical research project drawing on original data examining a grammatical question discussed in the class.
Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. L. Silberman Mon/ Wed 10:45-12:00 PM	Find out what inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  See how Satan first became a glamorous anti-hero.  In this course, we will be reading representative works of English literature from Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Other readings will include selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—the romantic, the bawdy, and the moral–one of the plays of Shakespeare, a Renaissance epyllion—a short, erotic narrative–and selected Renaissance love lyrics.  There will be two short, critical essays, a midterm and a final exam.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. R. Hinds Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM
Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. R. Rodriguez Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM	What if we consider the idea of America’s greatness (often symbolized by the image of the “city upon a hill”) from the perspective of the citizens of the city underground: the colonized, scapegoats, outlaws, slaves, women, immigrants, the poor? How might such a shift in viewpoint impact our understanding of the nation’s founding concepts and ideals: utopia, community, citizenship, equality, fellowship, democracy, liberty, and other life pursuits?   In addition to the survey’s focus on representative texts and genres, our course will tap American literature’s utopian vein and engage in a critical and imaginative assessment of writers invested in thinking about workable alternatives to the status quo. Among the writers considered will be Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Michel de Montaigne, William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Anne Hutchinson, Salem’s witch hunters and their victims, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Edgar Allan Poe, David Walker, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Rollin Ridge (“Yellow Bird”), Walt Whitman, and Hannah Crafts.
Survey of American Literature II English 3025 Prof. E. Richardson Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM	In this class, we will explore a swath of classic and unconventional American literature and culture from 1865 to the present, focusing on protest, civil rights, and social change. We will interpret texts by close reading formal literary strategies related to the narrative plot, character formation, imagery, rhetoric, and tone. We will also analyze material attending to the expression meaning of freedom and citizenship, labor and class, government regulations, afterlives of slavery, settler colonialism, and LGBTQ rights. These topics pose a series of intriguing questions in this course:  How does the individual protagonist tell a larger story of America and society? How might collaborative writing substantiate and detail our conception of democracy? To what extent are the aesthetics (or artistry) of literature shaped or determined by a protest? What’s the difference between art and protest? And above all else, when there is tension, conflict, cultural shifts, reactionary responses, revolution, and resolutions achieved and unrealized America, what can literature do? Throughout the course, we will engage with these questions and more as we explore the power of literature to shape our understanding of the world around us. Authors include Upton Sinclair, W.E.B Du Bois, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Georgia Douglas, Claude McKay, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, John Okada, Rachel Carson, Joy Harjo, and Raquel Salas Rivera.
Asian American Literature English 3032 Prof. E. Chou Tue/Thu 10:45-12:00 PM	The key events for Asian American literature were the key events of modern America: World War II, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act. These events will guide the content of this course, including right up to the literature and films of today. We will begin with World War II and the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans in internment camps as “enemy aliens” and study both the internment and its significance up to today. Creative works will include short stories, a novel No-No Boy, drawings, and artwork. Primary documents will include the Executive Order for internment, Supreme Court decisions about it, and the redress and apology by President Reagan in 1982. Student contributions will include biographical profiles and newspaper accounts.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Act together make up the key legislation that give us the large immigration population of America today, including in New York and at Baruch. We will use this diverse group as the context for our focus on its Asian-Americans. Through short stories, a novel, a graphic novel, film segments, and perhaps an invited speaker, we will raise and discuss thoughtful questions about Asian American-ness today.
Women in Literature English 3720 Prof. L. Kolb Tues/Thu 4:10 -5:25 PM	This course surveys writing about and (mostly) by women, from the ancient world to 2021. Beginning with ancient Greek lyric verse, we will explore Medieval lais and spiritual autobiography; Renaissance poetry and plays; 18th-century prose fiction; and 20th- and 21st-century novels. Throughout the class, we will consider the links between masculinist ideas of femininity, on the one hand, and female and gender non-conforming authors’ and characters’ resistance to those ideas, on the other. Surveying a wide range of texts, we will ask: how do the tools required in order to perform normative gender roles become, for some people, instruments of resistance—of re-making self and world? Texts on the syllabus may include selections from the Book of Margery Kempe; Margaret Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure; Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.
The Structure and History of English English 3750 Prof. N. Lee Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05 PM
Contemporary Drama English 3780 Prof. S. Vella Thursday 10:45 – 12:00PM	In a world full of mass media options, why does live theatre continue to thrive? In this class we will study a selection of plays and theatrical productions produced around the world in the last 25 years. This will include selections from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and will range in scale from mega-musicals produced in international urban centers to works produced for culturally-specific, local communities. We will focus on the unique ways in which contemporary theatre allows artists and audiences to engage both locally and globally with the urgent social, political, ecological, and cultural issues in our lives. In addition to reading plays and watching video documentation of performances, this course will also take advantage of the vibrant New York City contemporary theatre scene, and will include field trips and guest speakers. Assignments will include short written assignments and a research project.
Law and Literature English 3850 Prof. S. Hershinow Tues/Thurs 10:45 – 12:00 PM	This course explores both law in literature (how literary texts view enduring legal issues) and law as literature (how the methods of literary criticism provide new understandings of legal texts). We will investigate themes of justice, bias, and the limits of the law in literary texts by writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Godwin, Toni Morrison, and Valeria Luiselli. In addition, we will read writings by Supreme Court Justices, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, prison letters, and documentaries using the methods of literary interpretation and analysis. Selected topics for deeper engagement will include criminal responsibility, legal personhood, the form of the court case, human rights, and mass incarceration.
A History of Translation English 3880 Prof. A. Izquierdo Tue/Thu 2:30 – 3:45 PM	In the modern world, issues of translation and intercultural communication arise everywhere: in literary texts, on the Internet, on television, opera and film, in business, in law, in science, and in many other domains. Can a sonnet or a poem be translated? Why do we keep translating the Bible to this day? Were Cervantes and Shakespeare plagiarizers? What’s the relationship between translation, politics & ideology? Is Broadway’s West Side Story a translation of Romeo and Juliet? How are new technologies affecting translation today? How has Hamlet been adapted into film and theater in China? What’s the impact of literary translation practices in the world?   This course examines the development of translation ideas and practices and searches to develop a dialogue of diverse but related art forms such as literature, theater, music, film, opera, etc. through the concepts of translation, adaptation and imitation. The course is structured around the reading and analysis of key texts in translation theory (Cicero St. Jerome, Du Bellay, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Jakobson, Borges, Spivak, Octavio Paz, etc.) as well as case studies of the practices and roles played by translation and translators (Horace, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt, Tyndale, Tobias Smollet, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Nabokov, Gregory Rabassa, Edith Grossman, etc.) in different historical contexts. No language other than English is required for this course.
Modern Fantasy Literature ENG 3950 Prof. F. Cioffi Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	This is a course on fantasy fiction, namely narratives that invoke a fantastical other world, one not guided by or dependent on any known or even unknown scientific principles, nor necessarily an extrapolation of our own world. Fantasy literature often involves imaginary beings or extraordinary versions of humans. It is a literary genre peopled by elves, dwarfs, dragons, sea monsters, superhumans, and hobbits.   Much literature of this type has been written, and writers from as far back as the ancients have explored the genre’s boundaries and possibilities. There will be quite a lot of reading (about 170 pages/week), but it should be fun! We will try to construct together a theory of how fantasy operates and how it in some way creates as it caters to an audience. We also need to address the question, “Why fantasy?” What is it that fantasy can do for authors that realistic, “mimetic” fiction cannot?   Some of the texts will likely be familiar to you; some fall into the “YA” or young adult literature category. But I think all will be provocative and timely. We have on our reading list authors from Great Britain, the U.S., Japan, and Nigeria. Some are still writing today. And many of the books are the first in a series of books in which an author further explores the same fantasy “world.” Thus if you are really taken with a novel, you might go on to read the sequel or sequels! Two papers and a final exam will be required.   Required Texts: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) Natalie Bobbitt, Tuck Everlasting (1975) Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (1995) Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (1997) Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (2011) Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015)
The Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. K. Belmihoub Mon/Wed 7:45-9:00 PM	In this course, we will investigate the state of English in the world today – how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central in diverse speech communities. English today is part of new modes of literacy and discourse practices, and has dynamic relationships with other languages and cultures. These changes call for us to re-examine our understandings of language standards, speech communities, linguistic identities, and best practices for English language teaching.   We will begin by studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language. We then explore the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. We will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally.   Specifically, this course has the following objectives:   –          To develop a critical understanding of the interconnections between globalization and the English language; –          To analyze the ways a language changes from new communication technologies, plural speech communities, and transnational economic relationships; To explore the ways in which the changes in English impact business practices and language teaching in the 21st century.
Performing the Caribbean English 4050H Prof. H Ramdass & Prof. R. Robles Thu 2:30-5:25 PM	Performing the Caribbean explores various modes and genres of cultural performance across different societies in the Caribbean basin. A central animating question involves how collective public performances such as Carnival, Crop Over, Dancehall, Reggaeton, Dembow, and their constituent artistic expressions (music, song, film, art, fashion, theatre, dance) engage in the creation and negotiation of national narratives and trans-Caribbean identities. We will explore how such processes and representations are influenced and contested because of state involvement, tourism, evolving gender roles, and sexual identities, (im)migration and diasporic influences, social media, and climate change, and how the resulting Caribbean cultural products, in turn, influence global culture.
Chaucer English 4120 Prof. C. Christoforatou Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	Knights, merchants, rogues, and self-proclaimed saints share fascinating stories of their travels and travails in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s masterpiece contains a series of stories ranging from the serious and pious to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny.  The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims whose diversity spans the spectrum of late medieval society: a dashing knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a bookish young scholar, a dainty nun and a conniving pardoner, and a smart and domineering wife who compete with one another, trade insults and jokes, and share tales. This class will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres—from chivalric romance and bawdy fabliau to beast fables, saints’ lives, and etiological myths—frustrating and playing upon the expectations of the reader.  Against the diverse background of the tales, students will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, ask questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales, and reflect on medieval individual’s relationship to God, society and the foreign.  In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval society, students will discover how Chaucer illuminates and distorts social realities, rendering a colorful portrait of life that is strangely familiar to the modern reader today. As a class, we will additionally have an opportunity to examine medieval manuscripts in digitized form through access to the collections of the British Library, the Cloisters, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art where additional other artifacts such as relics, tapestries, mosaics, and ivories are held. In this way, the class will delve more meaningfully into the material culture of the late Middle Ages.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. S. Swarbrick Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM	This upper-level literature course surveys some of William Shakespeare’s most enduring plays. We will investigate subjects such as tyranny and surveillance in Measure for Measure and Richard III; gender and performance in As You Like It; race and the construction of identity in Titus Andronicus; ecology and human-animal relations in King Lear; and jealousy and love in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. Students will have the opportunity to read Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their source materials, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and recent film adaptations. We will also reflect on the lasting importance of Shakespeare’s plays for addressing contemporary issues such as freedom, equality, environmental sustainability, and social justice.
British Poetry from 1900 English 4400 Prof. M. McGlynn Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM	“World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural” (from Louis MacNeice, “Snow”)   An exploration of poetry of the British Isles from 1900 to the present, this course will balance a broader survey of the last century with close attention to individual poets such as Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Duffy, Heaney, and Boland. Students will learn vocabulary and analytical skills specific to the discussion of the poetic form. We will look at the way that poetry responded to modernity, World War I, and the Irish Revolution, before turning to the Thirties poets, and “The Movement,” as well as poets often excluded from such groups, including women, immigrants, people of color, and members of the working class, particularly those using nonstandard English. We will consider throughout the connections and disconnections among poets of Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland, noting how nation shapes their poems. We will return regularly to questions of how discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and race interact with the discourses of nationalism; of the ways in which poets construct ideas about place; and of the relationship between politics and language, particularly politics and literary form.
African Diasporas: U.S., Latin America, and the Carribbean English 4535 Prof. K. Frank Tues/Thu 2:30 – 3:45PM	There’s an intriguing moment in African Americans Pt. 4 when Oprah celebrates not having any European ancestry, though still being mixed. The DNA test may be inaccurate, but that’s beside the point. The point is that despite her immense wealth even Oprah has to deal with what all people in the African diaspora confront, albeit in various ways: “race” and identity, with an underlying ontological conflict between creolization and authenticity. In this course we will examine that conflict and the politics of identifying fractionally, such as, “I’m half Puerto Rican and half ‘black.’” Works include Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, Is Just a Movie, and The Sellout.
Studies in American Poetry: The Long Poem English 4540 Prof. A Yoon Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	With touchstones as famous as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, American long poems ambitiously have sought to offer sometimes loving, sometimes terrifying engagements with subjects as diverse as visions of world history and radical politics. What are the affordances of the long poem, and how does it mediate questions of history, identity, or desire? Who gets to write a long poem and publish it? With historical and cultural contexts in mind, we will investigate how poetry and politics intersect, and how factors such as race and gender inflect both poetic practice and cultural production in the American tradition of long poems. Readings will include poems that successfully dominated the US literary scene during its burgeoning developments in the nineteenth century, which made icons out of their authors, such as Leaves of Grass and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, as well as culturally forgotten epics such as the Black abolitionist George Boyer Vashon’s “Vincent Ogé” and parts of Herman Melville’s vast and bitter Clarel. Our materials will take us from the antebellum years and the Reconstruction era—as we examine how Reconstruction’s dislocations and disappointments influenced a poetics of dissent among Black radical writers—to the long poem’s trajectory into modernism with Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.
Mixed-Race Literature English 4560 Prof. R. Walker Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	Fiction written by and centering on people of mixed black and white descent has perennially been assimilated into the African American canon, much in the same way that biracial individuals have historically been classified as black in the U.S. Against this tendency, this course will examine some of the many fictions published by and about biracial people, taking seriously the particular racial perspective that they explore. We’ll pay close attention to this literature’s historical context, considering it in relation to such developments as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, shifts in gender ideology, and court cases. Writers include Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Danzy Senna, among others.
Gothic Mysteries English 4740 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM	Against a background of haunted castles, demonic predators, and victims who unconsciously collaborate in their own ruin, Gothic literature takes us on a journey into the dark recesses of the human psyche that fascinated Freud and examines its insatiable appetite for danger and forbidden pleasure. Through psychoanalytical and feminist lens, we will explore Gothic stories by both men and women. We will see how Victorian medical attitudes towards the female body forced the female writer of the Gothic novel to create erotically coded texts that scholars are still unraveling today. If you like spectacular settings, you will revel in Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Gothic novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, about fatal passion, voodoo priestesses, sexual addiction, and mad Creole heiresses set in the lush islands of Jamaica and Dominica. You will love Sheridan Le Fanu’s thriller of voluptuous terror, Carmilla, which describes the seduction and possession of an innocent young woman by a tantalizingly beautiful female vampire who provides her victims with a taste of ecstasy before luring them into the world of the damned. Readings will include Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, that portrays one of the loneliest creatures in all of literature—the deformed offspring of an egotistical scientist, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, condemned as shocking and immoral when it was first published, but now recognized as one of the most daring and complex novels of its time.
Advanced Topics in Language, Literature, or Film English 4950 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM

        BARUCH COLLEGE – ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. Steven Swarbrick Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	This course surveys British literature from the earliest examples of the Middle Ages through the 16th and 17th centuries. It will consider selected works from this broad period in the context of the political, scientific, and religious changes that Britain experiences over the course of those centuries. It will also study some of the major contributions made by English dramatists (Shakespeare as well as other figures) to this tradition. Students will have the opportunity to explore shifting definitions of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. We will also examine literary developments And transformations in genre, from Beowulf through chivalric romance to Milton’s grand epic Paradise Lost, which shapes and influences much of subsequent literature in English.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. Stephanie Hershinow Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	In this course, we’ll cover roughly 300 years of British literary history—from the witty, rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope to the playful, first-person essays of Zadie Smith. Along the way, we’ll cover a great deal of historical ground: responses to the French Revolution, the rise of industrialization, the horrors of war, and the development of new technologies. We’ll see genres invented (like the novel) and genres upended (like the lyric poem). Our primary focus throughout will be on experiments in literary form: How is the careful balance of the couplet challenged by Romantic poetry’s attempt to represent common speech? How does the emergence of realism find (and create) value in everyday life? How do Modernist writers strive to create something new while reviving traditional models? How does absurdist theater find meaning in, well, the absence of meaning? Our readings will map the contours of a changing Britain up to the aftermath of Empire in the present day, and we’ll look ahead to what might come next. In addition to completing the reading and preparing for class discussion, you’ll write short essays and exams that will encourage you to work on your skills of reading closely and thinking synthetically.
Survey of American Literature I Prof. Ami Yoon English 3020 Prof. Wed 5:50-7:05PM	This course explores the development of American literature from its beginnings through the Civil War. Texts including letters, histories, autobiographies, political documents, poems, plays, and novels, illuminate the rich complexity of this period in American literary history and culture. These works reveal the often interconnected and overlapping stories of discovery and exploration; private piety and public life; the development of national identity; race; gender; slavery and the movement towards its abolition.
Survey of American Literature II English 3025 Prof. Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	This course surveys the wide variety of literature produced in the United States from the Civil War to the present, an era of dizzying change. This period witnessed such momentous historical events as the Industrial Revolution, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, gay liberation, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the development of a globalized economy—to name only a few. This course will consider how American authors of this era responded to their rapidly shifting landscape. Students will encounter a rich array of writers, such as Howells, Mark Twain, James, Washington, Du Bois, Crane, Wharton, Cather, Frost, O’Neill, Hurston, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Wright, Williams, Ellison, Brooks, Baldwin, O’Connor, Plath, Walker, Morrison, Roth, Kingston, Silko, Lee, Adichie, Erdrich, and Dí­az.
Post-Colonial Literature English 3036 STAFF Tues/Thur 4:10-5:25PM	This course examines postcolonial literary texts written in English, specific to nations and regions that were once European colonies, especially in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. The focus is on literature of empire, especially, but not limited to, works of various genres produced in the years leading up to, during, and after the struggles for “independence,” including works by such writers as Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Michelle Cliff, J. M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jamaica Kincaid, Imbolo Mbue, V.S. Naipaul, Ng ugiwa Thiong’o, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie.
Introduction to Linguistics and Language Learning English 3700 Prof. Naomi Lee Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05PM	The course introduces fundamental concepts of linguistics, exploring the diversity, creativity, and open-endedness of language and how language enthusiasts have long attempted to understand its organization and use in society. Examples from world languages will illustrate concepts from the traditional areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. Language acquisition, multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and technology and language are examined for their relevance to language teaching and learning. Students explore practical applications to their areas of study, including the bilingual or foreign-language classroom, literary analysis, psychology, sociology, translation studies, and other disciplinary interests. Students will receive credit for either ENG 3700 or COM 3700. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-replacement policy.
Women In Literature English 3720 Prof. Lauren Silberman Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	This course examines the presence of women in literature as both authors and subjects. How do literary works represent and challenge the traditional social roles assigned to women? How have novels, poetry, and plays shaped powerful cultural myths of femininity? The historical period(s) and genres to be covered in this course will vary: medieval and renaissance authors might include Marie de France and Shakespeare; eighteenth-century writers might include Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft; Romantic, Victorian and modern authors might include Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf.
Modern World Drama English 3770 Prof. Stephanie Vella Tue/Thu 4:10-5:25PM	This course examines dramatic texts that emerged around the world from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.  Plays from a wide range of languages, cultures, and geographical locations—including selections from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—will be considered in conversation with changes in production economics, staging technology, and acting technique. This period witnessed an unprecedented mobility for theatre artists and styles, facilitated by touring, film and photography, and wider availability of translations. This mobility, however, took place in a situation of uneven power dynamics facilitated by global colonialism and capitalism. We will therefore encounter these plays and artists in their socio-political contexts and will emphasize consideration of the ethical stakes of cross-cultural influence and cultural appropriation.
Topics in Film: English 3940 Prof. Peter Hitchcock Tue/Thu 10:45-1200PM	This course provides an opportunity to study important filmmakers, genres, national cinemas, and themes not found or only touched on in other film courses. Representative subjects include the films of Ingmar Bergman, Asian cinema, Eastern European film before and after the fall of Communism, the animated film, the image of the city, and the samurai film and the western. This format allows for an intensive examination of such topics, which may vary from semester.
Topics in Literature: African American Drama English 3950 Prof. Erica Richardson Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05PM	African American Drama is a survey course on plays written by African Americans from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. This course includes works by playwrights such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, George Woolfe, Suzan Lori Parks, and Tarell Alvin McCraney. We will cover the historical and cultural context surrounding each play and theories about the purpose of Black theater associated with different aesthetic and cultural periods such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the “culture wars” of the 1990s, as well as emerging patterns and approaches to contemporary Black theater. Questions in this course include: How does African American Drama contend with anti-black cultural production and racism? What kind of community or shared experience can African American Drama create? How does Black theater perform concepts of Blackness that reflect and exceed social expectations? Students can engage the assigned plays and respond to these questions through their choice of assessment options, including performance, performance review (based on recordings, film adaption, or attending a performance), and traditional literary analysis.
Topics in Literature: South American Dream: Latin Jewish Literature English 3950 Prof. Sarah Valente Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	The South American Dream: Latin-American Jewish Literature This course explores twentieth-century Jewish literature that stems from the establishment of modern urban life after mass immigration from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, to the cultural impact of the newly arriving German-speaking Jews in the 1930s, to Jewish life under military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s. Students will examine writings about the historical and social-political aspects of the Jewish experience, life and culture in Latin America from authors Amanda Berenguer, Alicia Partnoy, Mauricio Rosencof, Jacobo Timerman, and others. Students will learn about issues of Jewish representation, memory of atrocity, and quest for justice in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay through texts and films.
Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. Brooke Schreiber Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	This course investigates the state of English in the world today—how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central across speech communities. After studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language, the course explores the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. Students will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally. Students will receive credit for ENG 4015, COM 4015, or SOC 4015. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy.
Chaucer English 4120 Prof Harold Ramdass Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	This semester, join our journey through The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s seminal masterwork. As we wend our way, we will examine selections of Chaucer’s shorter works and some of his key literary influences. Our journey will investigate how this expansive and diverse collection of tales engage major social, cultural, political, religious, and health concerns of the day through the deft interplay of subtle characterization, psychological complexity, narrative control, and adherence to or violation of a variety of generic expectations. In examining this frame narrative, we pay special attention to the ways various and multiple frames and framing devices—prologue/tale structures, genre, class, gender, age, occupation, genre—can create, shape, or transform meaning. We will read these tales in the original Middle English. As no previous experience with Middle English is required of you for the class, we will consult modern translations to support and not replace the original text. Close reading will serve as the foundation for all of our analytical argument-driven and creative individual and group assignments.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. Allison Deutermann Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM	Shakespeare is both a playwright passionately engaged with the concerns of his own time and place and an artist whose work has done much to shape contemporary culture.  We shall be studying six of Shakespeare’s plays, Comedy of Errors, the early comedy of mistaken identity, Titus Andronicus, a raw and violent revenge tragedy Shakespeare wrote early in his career, the history play Richard III, the mature comedy Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure,  a problem comedy of sexual betrayal and political corruption, Othello, the tragedy of marital jealousy and murder, and the late romance Cymbeline, which revisits the problem of jealousy and brings everything to a happy conclusion of reunion and forgiveness.  We shall consider how similar themes and situations are transformed from one play to the next.  Some class time will be devoted to showing film adaptations of one or more of these plays.   Written work for the course will consist of two short critical essays, a midterm, and a final.  Papers may be rewritten once for an additional grade, and extra credit will be given for class participation.
VICTORIAN LITERATURE “The Pursuit of Happiness?” English 4310 Prof. Kevin Frank Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05PM	In business, utilitarianism implies an obligation to operate so as to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, which seems to coincide with romanticism in business, wherein business practices are not only about profit, but are also about facilitating human experiences and relations. What does Victorian poetry and prose suggest about how these ideals inform challenging issues of those times, such as industrialization and urbanization, social im/mobility, immigration and the expansion of empire, and how might these texts help us better understand and address similar issues in our own time? We will examine these matters in works by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Alfred Tennyson.
Modern Irish Writers English 4410 Prof. Carmel Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25PM	If you want to go on an odyssey with some of the most exciting writers of the modern era (many of whose books were banned when they were first published) register for Modern Irish Writers.  We will read a fascinating novel about a man who sells his soul to the devil in return for eternal youth and beauty (Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray). You will be drawn in by the raw intensity of Edna O’Brien’s compelling stories of sexual seduction and betrayal, (A Fanatic Heart), —stories that earned her a reputation of being one of the most daring women writers of the twenty-first century.  Another provocative work we will read is Nobel-Prize winner George Bernard Shaw’s play, St. Joan, which is based on the true story of St. Joan of Arc who was burned as a witch in medieval France, and hundreds of years later was canonized by the Vatican as a saint! She wore men’s clothes as she led the French troops into battle, and scholars refer to her as one of the first feminists.  We will luxuriate in the poetry of William Butler Yeats (another Nobel Prize winner) whose obsession with a beautiful Irish revolutionary, haunted his life, and read short stories by James Joyce, psychological masterpieces that penetrate the dark recesses of the human psyche that fascinated Freud.
The Main Currents of Literary Expression in Contemporary America English 4500 Prof. Rick Rodriguez Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	This section of the course will focus on literature about migration in a hemispheric American context.  We’ll pay close attention to the language writers use to describe the conditions that make people less attached to the convergence of self and place. Among the writers considered: Hector Tobar, Javier Zamora, Sara Uribe, Yuri Herrera, Edwidge Danticat, Reinaldo Arenas, Achy Obejas, and Raquel Salas Rivera.
African Diasporas: U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean English 4535 Prof. Shelly Eversley Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	How does literature engage and represent Black African diasporas?  Thinking through the multiple instances of the movements and migrations of African-descended peoples throughout the world (the Caribbean, the Americas, and Africa), and across multiple moments in history, we will explore a diversity of literatures and cultural productions such as music and film, to analyze the issues and debates around key issues engaging concepts of diaspora.  Using critical theory to inspire deeper analysis, our readings will also consider important questions surrounding gender, identity, colonialism, empire, slavery, transnationalism, and Afrofuturism.  This capstone course will culminate in a research project.  Everyone is welcome.
Mixed-Race Literature English 4560 Prof. Rafael Walker Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	Fiction written by and centering on people of mixed black and white descent have perennially been assimilated into the African American canon, much in the same way that biracial individuals have historically been classified as black in the U.S. Against this tendency, this course will examine some of the many fictions published by and about biracial people, taking seriously the particular racial perspective that they explore. Among the writers we’ll consider are the pioneering novelist Charles Chesnutt; James Weldon Johnson, “the Dean of African American literature”; Nella Larsen, arguably the most accomplished novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; Danzy Senna, today’s preeminent novelist of biracial experience; and President Barack Obama. We’ll pay close attention to this literature’s historical context, considering it in relation to such developments as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, shifts in gender ideology, legal history, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study English 4710 Prof. Christina Christoforatou Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	Romance was medieval culture’s most popular nonreligious literary genre. It is also the genre that has had the largest influence on subsequent history. From modern science fiction to the soap opera, there is no form of contemporary popular narrative that does not draw in some way on the conventions of medieval romance. This course will chart the genre’s development from its emergence in fourth-century Africa to its subsequent revivals in the courts of tenth century Persia, eleventh-century Constantinople, and twelfth and fourteenth-century France and England. Readings for the course include Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance, Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian cycle, Cliges, The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot), and The Story of the Grail (Perceval), Beroul’s Romance of Tristan, two anonymous Middle English romances, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as shorter romances in translation by Christine de Pizan and Marie de France. The class will explore romance’s affinities to other genres and systems of power through the work of influential women patrons who additionally served as scribes and commentators. Allegorical poems of Persian and Byzantine origin will help us delineate romance’s cultural transmission and literary permanence and will lead to creative research projects. Students are invited to access digital archives and museum collections to discover the influences that allowed medieval civilizations to evolve through a process of exploration and adaptation. They may, for example, examine illuminated manuscripts, relics, mosaics, tapestries, and ivories alongside topics as they emerge in the romances, such as faith and power, violence and desire, spirituality conquest, alterity, and spatiotemporal otherness.
Horror English 4745 Prof. Frank Cioffi Tue/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	Horror is a type of literature that is meant to scare you. How does it succeed in this? What, in today’s incredibly horrifying world, can scare us anymore?  Actually, quite a lot. This course will examine horror stories such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, as well as recent works by writers such as Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell.   Today, horror has a large audience, and the bestseller list usually has several examples of the genre. Looking at it from a literary perspective would be valuable insofar as understanding the psychological interaction between reader and text. Why does one want to be frightened? What value does such an experience have? Why do some works frighten and horrify some people but leave others quite indifferent? And to what extent has our culture become immune to shock, inured to horror?   Course goals:   To identify works of horror and distinguish them from works in other popular genres, such as science fiction, gothic, supernatural fiction, the macabre, and fantasy.To recognize the conventions of the genre of horror fiction.To define, specifically, what is known as “art horror”;To demonstrate convincingly how horror and other nonmimetic works of literature reflect the concerns of the author, audience, and the world from which they emerged.To explain the paradox of horror, i.e., why something clearly not true causes readers or viewers to feel real fear.To organize their ideas about a work or work and formulate—in writing—argumentative essays on that subject that expound, explain, document, and defend their ideas.
Literary Translation Seminar English 4800 Prof. Adrian Izquierdo Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	The capstone Literary Translation Seminar will offer students basic knowledge and hands-on experience both in the field of Translation Studies and in the practice of literary translation. Translation today is an all-encompassing concept that describes the movement of texts, images, artifacts and ideas across linguistic, semiotic and cultural divides. As such, it is an indispensable theoretical framework for the analysis of our multilingual world. Drawing on expertise from several disciplines, the course will consider the multifaceted concept of translation from a diachronic and synchronic perspective, and will focus extensively on how translation and a host of other associated concepts—paraphrase, imitation, mimesis, transmesis, transliteration, transcreation, recreation, transformation, parody, appropriation, rewriting, adaptation, transference, transcoding, transduction, interpretation—have impacted, and still impact, all human activity.

  

        BARUCH COLLEGE – ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. L. Silberman Mon/ Wed 2:30-3:45 PM	Find out what inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  See how Satan first became a glamorous anti-hero.  In this course, we will be reading representative works of English literature from Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Other readings will include selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—the romantic, the bawdy, and the moral–one of the plays of Shakespeare, a Renaissance epyllion—a short, erotic narrative–and selected Renaissance love lyrics.  There will be two short, critical essays, a midterm and a final exam.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. S. O’Toole Tue/Thu 4:10-5:25 PM	This course provides a survey of British and global Anglophone literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. We will explore how imaginative writers from some of the most celebrated periods of literature responded to the major historical and cultural developments of their time: the revolution in thought and expression sparked by the visionary and rebellious Romantics; the proliferation of realism in the nineteenth century as the Victorians grappled with the horrors of industrialization, the expansion of empire, and the challenge of science to traditional beliefs; modernism’s rejection of conventional values in experimental literary forms; and contemporary literature’s reflections on our own position in history. Authors to be studied will include some of the following: Swift, Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Prince, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, Seacole, Dickens, Gaskell, C. Rossetti, Dutt, Hardy, Wilde, T. S. Eliot, McKay, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Selvon, Thiong’o, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Roy, Z. Smith, among others. The class will proceed by close reading, discussion, and brief student presentations.
Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. R. Rodriguez Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM	What if we consider the idea of America’s greatness (often symbolized by the image of the “city upon a hill”) from the perspective of the citizens of the city underground: the colonized, scapegoats, outlaws, slaves, women, immigrants, the poor, etc.? How might such a shift in viewpoint impact our understanding of the nation’s founding concepts and ideals: utopia, community, citizenship, equality, fellowship, democracy, liberty, and other life pursuits?   In addition to the survey’s focus on texts and genres, our course will tap American literature’s utopian vein and engage in a critical and imaginative assessment of writers invested in thinking about workable alternatives to the status quo. Among the writers considered will be Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Michel de Montaigne, William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Anne Hutchinson, Salem’s witch hunters and their victims, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Edgar Allan Poe, David Walker, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Rollin Ridge (“Yellow Bird”), Walt Whitman, and Hannah Crafts.
Survey of American Literature II English 3025 Prof. E. Richardson Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM	This course surveys the wide variety of literature produced in the United States from the Civil War to the present, an era of dizzying change. This period witnessed such momentous historical events as the Industrial Revolution, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, gay liberation, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the development of a globalized economy–to name only a few. This course will consider how American authors of this era responded to their rapidly shifting landscape. Students will encounter a rich array of writers, such as Howells, Mark Twain, James, Washington, Du Bois, Crane, Wharton, Cather, Frost, O’Neill, Hurston, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Wright, Williams, Ellison, Brooks, Baldwin, O’Connor, Plath, Walker, Morrison, Roth, Kingston, Silko, Lee, Adichie, Erdrich, and Di­az
A Survey of African American Literature English 3034 Prof. S. Eversley Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00 PM	African American literature has always engaged in conversations about what it means to be human, that in fact, black lives matter as much as any other.  Poetry, fiction, novels, plays, and essays by African Americans reveal these longstanding engagements even though the assumption of black personhood, of an equal value among humans, should seem obvious.  They also explore important questions about gender, sexual, and class identities to complicate the easy binaries that limit creative and critical thinking—thinking that can restrict human possibility.  In this class, we will study some of the best writers in American literary history.   Together, we will think about how African American literature—and the issues they raise—are central to the American Project.  Everyone is welcome.
Globalization and Literature English 3215 Prof. M. Eatough Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	It’s common to say that we now live in a “globalized” world, one that is increasingly bound together by advanced telecommunications technologies, rapid travel, and ever-tighter connections between nations, economies, and cultures. But globalization has not simply reshaped the world that we live in and the way that we experience it: it has also revolutionized the way we think about the world, the stories we tell about it, and the ways we tell those stories. This course will examine several different forms of media and the way in which they engage with social, cultural, and economic modes of globalization. Possible texts include Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah; CA Davids, How to Be a Revolutionary; shorter fiction by Jamil Jan Kochai and Mike McCormack; the video games Braid and Super Mario; and the graphic novels Persepolis, The Incal, Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, and a manga TBD.
The Craft of Poetry: From the Mixtape to the Remix–Learning to Compose Across Genres English 3645 Prof. C. Campanioni Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM	The prescriptions of writing (both “critical” and “creative”) often demand stringent parameters of structure, method, and voice according to its traditions, its disciplines, and its genres. Yet, increasingly, the labor and means by which authors express their ideas take on alternative forms through the integration of multiple genres, and the usage of multimodal techniques and multimedia technology. I want creative writing in this course to become an adventure in discovering what voices lie within us, and how we navigate the complex negotiations of self-expression, identity, and collective exchange. In this course, we will evaluate what we’ve been told about writing (and poetry), what audiences we want to reach with our poetry, and how to compose poetry as a DJ, an architect, a chef (a poetics of preparation!), a videographer, a curator and archivist, as anything other than *just* a writer. In the process, we will gain an understanding of contemporary and long-established techniques relevant across genres—poetry, fiction, CNF, personal accountings such as correspondences and notebook annotations—and especially, the genre-less/“hybrid” or uncategorizable text. You will be writing new material through generative prompts in class, as well as out-of-class assignments like “The Text as Caption,” in which writers are encouraged to look at the gaps in representations as an entry point for narrative, and the “Text as Object,” which invites writers to re-imagine the pre-histories (and distant futures), as well as the secret interiors of their most cherished objects. Best of all, you will be collaborating with your peers on feedback and revision through periodic workshops, while learning how to integrate characteristics of other genres and artistic modes of production into your poetry.
Stephen Sondheim ENG 3685 Prof. J. Entes Winter Session Online M-Th 9:30-12:30	Some say Stephen Sondheim’s shows sound spectacular; the lyrics scintillate.  His splendid songs soar because of his music and lyrics.  He has reached a supreme status by his eight Tonys, including a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2008, eight Grammys, an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.  We will study his success and style.  Specifically, we will read the book he wrote, Finishing the Hat:  Collected Lyrics (1954-1981).  We will stream some of his shows that were made into movies like West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. Unfortunately, at the age of 91, Stephen Sondheim died, the day after Thanksgiving, November 26, 2021.  His long life and legacy will be examined. The course is being taught online, during Intersession.
Film and Literature: Queering India ENG 3270 Prof. S. Bhattacharya Winter Session Online	What is a queer perspective on culture and society? This course aims to provide an introductory survey of literature and film from India and the Indian diaspora to think through this question. Materials we will look at in this class cover a large swath of time, from the early 20th century to the present, and will range across genres such as speculative feminist fiction, political and cultural manifestos, postcolonial novels, and contemporary films. In 2018, the Supreme Court of India finally struck down Section 377, a colonial-era law used to criminalize homosexuality and other “unnatural” sex acts, from the Indian Penal Code after more than a decade of legal battles. The fight for legal rights was accompanied by growing queer representation in popular culture and literature. The supposed “coming out” of queerness into Indian social and cultural life in the last 10 years, the demand to be seen and heard, has been critiqued by some as a by-product of “Westernization” or the influence of “foreign-returned” elites inspired by the Euro-American LGBTQ movement. This has brought with it the need to understand the diversity of queer India as well as the diaspora. In the case of the diaspora, we will work to de-center the Euro-American diaspora, paying attention to long histories of migration to the African continent and indentured labor in the Caribbean and the Pacific as sites for possible South-South solidarities. Taking seriously questions of race, caste, class, nationality, and gender, we will consider what a queer orientation to these hegemonic structures might be and what it might reveal. Thinking through the ways experiences of gender and sexuality were iterated and experienced across times and spaces will help us think through the specifics of each text (and its contexts) while also following threads and connections beyond. Students will engage with a diverse set of cultural, political, and legal artefacts, such as the writings of “founding fathers” like Gandhi and BR Ambedkar, as well as legal briefs opposing the punitive Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, which further stigmatizes non-normative gender identities by requiring transgender people to register with the government. We will read fiction, old and new, such as Untouchable (1935), The God of Small Things (1997), and Gun Island (2019) and also watch movies ranging from big budget Hollywood films like Gandhi (1982), hard hitting documentaries like Ram ke Naam (1992) to Bollywood rom-coms like Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan (2020).
Women in Literature English 3720 Prof. C. Lewis Tu/Th 2:30-3:45 PM	This section of Women in Literature will specifically look at Disabled Women in Victorian Literature.Focusing on nineteenth-century British novels and novellas, we will examine how disability and gender intersect, and how sexism and ableism combine. Some questions we will consider: what specific issues did disabled women face? How were disabled female characters written? What roles did they play in novels? Why were novelists so interested in writing disabled female characters? How do these characters relate to real-life disabled women in the 1800s? In addition, the class will explore disabled female characters’ relationship to sexuality, queerness, marriage, class, race, medicine and doctors, caregiving and cure, religion and spirituality. We will read texts by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Dinah Craik, Charlotte Yonge, and Wilkie Collins and will discuss female characters that have various disabilities, including blindness, deafness, mobility impairments, missing limbs, scoliosis and “deformity,” neurodivergence and “madness.”
The Structure and the History of English English 3750 Prof. B. Schreiber Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00 PM	The course investigates how the rules and patterns of spoken and written American English evolved, and how the language is used today as a system for making meaning. This course covers how English sounds are produced; how new words are formed, slang terms are coined, and words are borrowed and lent across languages; how English sentences are structured; and how meaning is influenced by situation, culture, and context. Students will learn how English changed over time, from the Great Vowel Shift to the development of modern regional and social dialects, including the emergence of World Englishes. Grading will be based on two exams and on an independent research project.
Topics in Film: Latinx Film English 3940 Prof. J. Caroccio Maldonado Mon/Wed 9:05-10:20AM	This course will introduce students to films by and about Latinx people in the United States. We’ll engage film from a literary perspective. Thinking through how dialogue, sequence, pacing and scene tell a narrative. Broadly applicable questions of ethnicity, race, sexuality, class and gender will underly our discussions. As well as issues of representation on the screen and how that compares to “real life.” Films show us worlds and places we’ve never seen and influence how we see the world, and what we believe. We’ll explore how Latinidad is created, shaped, and challenged in film. Some films we will watch are Selina, Gun Hill Road, Stand and Deliver, Real Women Have Curves, and Encanto.
Topics in Literature: Fairytales and Folklore ENG 3950 Prof. H. Ramdass Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM	This course introduces students to the some of the world’s great fairy and folk tale traditions. These tales, which many have argued are folk-derived vehicles for instructing the young, circulated across countless across histories, cultures and geographies. We will consider the work they perform in their original contexts, in transmissions and retellings, and in such diverse modern appropriations as Disney cartoons, marketing, government policy, and the men’s movement. Excerpts from the major collections of Europe, West Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia will furnish our primary readings. We pay particular attention to works by Straparola and Basile, the Renaissance Italian inventors of the literary fairy tale tradition; Perrault, who elevated the form; the brothers Grimm, who systematized the collection and study of these tales. Selections from the Indian Buddhist Panchatantra, The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, The Tales of Anansi and Brer Rabbit, and Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang will furnish needed points of comparison. In our close engagements with these texts, our investigation will be interdisciplinary, with our critical approach drawing on theorists such as Freud, Jung, and Frazer, and modern scholars such as Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes. Students will explore their thinking in one critical analysis and a sourced argumentative essay. Because the fairy tale is a living tradition, we will create our own digital anthology of your original fairytales and artwork.
Topics in Literature: Essentials of Publishing English 3950 Prof. T. Aubry Tuesday 12:50-2:05 PM	In order to become what we think of as literature, almost every text needs to work its way through the publishing industry. This means an editor must decide that it deserves to be circulated and read. It will likely require further development and revision, a process that typically involves ongoing dialogue between the author and editor. The text will need to be fact-checked, copy-edited, and proofread. Designers will work to make it visually appealing, finding images for the cover, if it’s a book, or for the first page, if it’s a short story or article. Publicists will seek to garner attention for the work through blurbs from famous authors, readings, book parties, panels, and reviews in prominent venues. If the editorial team has guessed right, the work may become a bestseller or a viral sensation, the author a literary celebrity. Or, if they guessed wrong, as is often the case, it will be forgotten within a matter of weeks. In every case, a host of individuals is responsible for shepherding a successful work of writing through myriad processes so that it can reach the reading public. The publishing industry shapes every reader’s encounter with literature; without it, there would be no books, no articles, no literary culture in the United States.   ENG 3950: The Essentials of Publishing is designed to offer greater knowledge of how this industry operates. Specifically aimed at students interested in working in publishing during and/or after graduation, it will have a hybrid structure. Students will spend half the time participating in a weekly seminar engaged in critical conversations about different features of the publishing industry; and they will spend the other half doing rotations onsite, working in short-term internships at book publishers and magazines in New York City. Students in the course will have the opportunity to get hands-on work experience, learn how books and magazines get produced, and start building a network of contacts they can turn to when they go on the job market after graduation.   All of the short-term positions in the publishing industry will be arranged ahead of time by the professor. Students will not need to secure internships on their own. Because the course is being supported by a Mellon Foundation Grant, all students who participate will receive a $2000 fellowship.   The course will be capped at ten students and admission is by application only. Students who are interested should send a 1-2-page cover letter, resume, and 3–5-page writing sample to [email protected] by October 21. The writing sample may be an essay from a previous class or a work that the student produced independently. The cover letter should explain why the student is interested in publishing and what contributions they think they can make to the course and to the industry. Applicants are encouraged to indicate how they can help promote diversity, equity, and inclusivity in our literary and intellectual culture. Preference will be given to students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the publishing industry.
Advanced Editing English 3960 Prof. Amy Baily and Prof. Lisa Blankenship Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45 PM	This course will provide both theory behind the practice of editing and hands-on practice with revising and editing pieces. Through multiple stages of drafting, we will workshop non-fiction prose, fiction, and poetry, as well as multimedia pieces.  A useful practicum for majors interested in writing and editing positions in non-profit or industry, the course also will benefit non-majors who want a supportive environment to hone writing and editing skills essential for contemporary work settings.​
Chaucer English 4120 Prof. C. Christoforatou Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	Knights, merchants, rogues, and self-proclaimed saints share fascinating stories of their travels and travails in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s masterpiece contains a series of stories ranging from the serious and pious to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny.  The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims whose diversity spans the spectrum of late medieval society: a dashing knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a bookish young scholar, a dainty nun and a conniving pardoner, and a smart and domineering wife who compete with one another, trade insults and jokes, and share tales. We will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres in this class—from chivalric romance and bawdy fabliau to beast fables, saints’ lives, and etiological myths—frustrating and playing upon the expectations of the audience.  Against this diverse literary background, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, further shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales.  The study of the pilgrims’ quests (i.e., amorous, heroic or religious) will allow us to consider medieval individual’s relationship to God, society and the foreign, and engage in comparative, intertextual and paratextual analysis.  In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval society, we will finally discover how Chaucer illuminates and distorts social realities, rendering a colorful portrait of life that is strangely familiar to the modern reader. To fully appreciate the influences that allowed medieval literary culture to evolve through exploration and adaptation, we will have the opportunity to examine medieval manuscripts in digitized form and delve more meaningfully into the material culture of the late Middle Ages through a possible visit to The Cloisters or the Metropolitan Museum of Art where various other artifacts such as relics, tapestries, mosaics, and ivories are on display.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. S. Swarbrick Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	This upper-level literature course surveys some of William Shakespeare’s most enduring plays. We will investigate subjects such as tyranny and surveillance in Measure for Measure and Richard III; gender and performance in As You Like It; race and the construction of identity in Titus Andronicus; ecology and human-animal relations in King Lear; and jealousy and love in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. Students will have the opportunity to read Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their source materials, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and recent film adaptations. We will also reflect on the lasting importance of Shakespeare’s plays for addressing contemporary issues such as freedom, equality, environmental sustainability, and social justice.
Topics in Shakespeare: English 4145 Prof. A. Deutermann Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM
The Eighteenth-Century Novel English 4210 Prof. S. Hershinow Tues/Thu 10:45-12:00PM	Criminals, lawyers, and judges populate the early British novel. Some scholars see the novel form originating out of what we would now call “true crime”—novels were scandalous, even dangerous. Moral authorities cautioned that reading novels would lead impressionable young people to lives of crime. This course will examine the rise of the novel alongside the emergence of the modern legal system in the eighteenth century. We will examine how the novel as a genre coalesces around characters that are placed in risky situations and the legal narratives that develop around them (forms such as testimony, confession, and the arguing of a case). We will focus on landmark laws (such as the 1662 Poor Relief Act and the 1753 Hardwicke Marriage Act), on the psychologies of guilt and innocence, and on the formal literary challenges of representing transgression and justice. How might a consideration of legal questions complicate our understanding of what novels do? While our discussions will range widely, we’ll focus on one key line of inquiry: in an era when most people didn’t have full legal personhood, how did literature give dispossessed people a voice? We’ll learn to read eighteenth-century novels together, but we’ll also look at some modern reimaginings that extend their insights to our present moment.
Romanticism & Revolution     English 4300 Prof. C. Grandy Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM	The historical period of romanticism may have been relatively short (roughly 1785-1830), but it represents an age of great change across politics, philosophy, art, and science. This class will examine literary responses to and engagements with the revolutions of the romantic period, from the bloody revolts of the French and Haitian revolutions to the rise of industrialism and humankind’s new distance from the natural world. We will read a variety of poetry that engages with the changes of the period: William Wordsworth’s account of new media and population growth in London, where he finds panoramas, wax figures, and “magic lantern” projections; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s call-to-arms response to “Peterloo,” the violent police attack on a peaceful protest for government reform; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s philosophical reflections on changes in how we see the world, from micro-observations of the everyday to macro-displays of the sublime. We will also read select political tracts from the period, including the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. In addition to poetry and political non-fiction, we will analyze the rise of the novel, along with the threat of automation, A.I., and scientific advancement, in Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In closely reading these different literary forms, we will examine how the various revolutions of the romantic period impacted the modern world and linger in our current institutions of citizenship and democracy as well as our perspectives on identity and nature.
The Nineteenth-Century Novel English 4320 Prof. K. Frank Tue/Thu5:50-7:05 PM	“Selfies” of Romantic Lives in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. How do the British fashion themselves (individually and as a nation) in the nineteenth-century novel, and how does the Caribbean serve as a lens for such self-fashioning? How does this anticipate contemporary expectations of selfhood and nationhood? How are depictions of challenging issues of those times—industrialization and urbanization, class and social im/mobility, immigration and the expansion of empire, relations between the sexes and the “races”— instructive in confronting similar issues of our time? In this course we will examine these matters in authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, and Florence Marryat. * ENG 4320 PTRA may serve as the capstone for the Tier III requirement.
Twentieth-Century British Literature English 4420 Prof. M. McGlynn Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM	“…the ladder is a perfect symbol of the bourgeois idea of society, because, while undoubtedly it offers the opportunity to climb, it is a device which can only be used individually: you go up the ladder alone…. My own view is that the ladder version of society is objectionable in … that it sweetens the poison of hierarchy, in particular by offering the hierarchy of merit as a thing different in kind from the hierarchy of money or birth” (Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 330).  This semester we will study the literature of Great Britain and Ireland from 1900 to 2020.  As a way of gaining perspective on such a long and eventful period, we will focus on the notion of meritocracy in the texts we read, taking the Williams quote above as a starting point.  Such investigation will require examination of ideas about spaces (particularly homes, countryside, and urban landscapes); about industrialization and modernization; about class, gender, and immigration; and about education, taste, and discrimination. Readings will include fiction by Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Wodehouse, Beckett, Ishiguro, Rowling, and Peace, and poetry by Hardy, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Heaney, and Boland.
The Modern Short Novel: Modern Short Novel From Asia English 4460 Prof. Eva Chou Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00 PM	Students in this course will read modern short novels in translation from a number of Asian countries such as Japan and China, plus works from Pakistan and Singapore written in English. In fewer than 200 pages each, our authors create convincing worlds of characters, events, and atmosphere. Collectively, the authors ask large questions about the role that a person plays in society, the role that nations play in the world, and even larger questions like the meaning of being human. The class will analyze each novel both as a work of literary art and for what it conveys about the culture that produced it and will emerge with some knowledge of Asia and a renewed respect for works of the imagination.
The Main Currents of Literary Expression in Contemporary America English 4500 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM	Including the Jewish-American school, the Beat Generation, poetry of “confession,” and experimental fiction. Bellow, Malamud, Mailer, Ginsberg, Jones, Lowell, Roethke, Updike, and Nabokov are involved.
Gothic Mysteries English 4740 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM	Against a background of haunted castles, demonic predators, and victims who unconsciously collaborate in their own ruin, Gothic literature takes us on a journey into the dark recesses of the human psyche that fascinated Freud, and examines its insatiable appetite for danger and forbidden pleasure.  Through psychoanalytical and feminist lens, we will explore Gothic stories by both men and women.  We will see how Victorian medical attitudes towards the female body forced the female writer of the Gothic novel to create erotically coded texts that scholars are still unraveling today.  If you like spectacular settings, you will revel in Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Gothic novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, about fatal passion, voodoo priestesses, sexual addiction, and mad Creole heiresses set in the lush islands of Jamaica and Dominica.  You will love Sheridan Le Fanu’s thriller of voluptuous terror, Carmilla, which describes the seduction and possession of an innocent young woman by a tantalizingly beautiful female vampire who provides her victims with a taste of ecstasy before luring them into the world of the damned.  Readings will include Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, that portrays one of the loneliest creatures in all of literature—the deformed offspring of an egotistical scientist, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, condemned as shocking and immoral when it was first published, but now recognized as one of the most daring and complex novels of its time.
Dystopias and Queer Hope: Postcolonial Environmental Humanities ENG 4950 Prof. S. Bhattacharya Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM	In this seminar we will study queer texts and films from the global South and diasporic perspectives, considering their particular articulations of queer life and its possibilities. Texts will cover a large swathe of time, from the early twentieth century till the present, and will range across genres such as speculative feminist fiction, first nations narratives, postcolonial novels and contemporary Bollywood films. We will end the course by looking at science fiction that explores life in spaces that some consider dystopian futures but are already becoming the present for many. As this arc indicates, an underlying theme of the course will be the maintaining of the creativity and vitality of everyday life while drowning in literal and discursive trash. Across the globe, queer lives have already been lived in materially and discursively toxic contexts. Engaging with text and films produced across the world, set in places such as Zimbabwe, India, Britain, and even galaxies yet undiscovered, we will think through the lessons that the creation of a queer life illuminate for us. Queer life within the context of this seminar refers to the multifarious ways marginalized and non-normative bodies and peoples create social and political lives. Carefully considering the contexts and possibilities the characters encounter, we will explore how queer is a term that translates and mutates in interesting ways across time and place. In paying attention to the specificities of the texts, queer itself is thus a term we will reckon with. Taking seriously questions of race, class, nationality and gender, we will consider what a queer orientation to these hegemonic structures produces or reveals, not only in past literary texts but as a way of imagining a hopeful future. As we encounter air and water that is more polluted, toxic even, than at any time homo sapiens have walked the earth, the only response may seem to be pessimism. Rejecting pessimism, we will ask what queer futures and hope we can imagine at a moment of planetary crisis.