| 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. |