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.