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Home>Courses>200 Level Courses   Medieval and Early Modern Literature 18th & 19th Century Literature American Literature Modern and Contemporary Literature   201 Chaucer First semester devoted to a close reading of the Canterbury Tales; second semester studies the early lyrics and dream poetry and Troilus and Criseyde. Semesters may be taken separately. See course web site. 203 Medieval Visions: Text and Image The course approaches the Middle Ages from the perspective of cultural studies, examining the relationship between literary texts and material culture. The course will consider many different kinds of texts, signs, and artifacts, seeking to understand the visions they convey. See course web site. 205 The Legends of Arthur A reading of both early and recent versions of the Arthurian Legend, exploring its complex tradition. Consideration of conflicts between personal and private morality, of representations of women, and of constructions of identity and gender. See course web site. 210 Reading Poetry Introduction to the most common types of poetry in English: narrative, dramatic, lyric. The working approach is that of close reading, often word by word, in order to investigate the poetic uses of rhythm and pattern; of sound and music; of appeals to the senses; of allusion to history, art, other literature; of connotation and denotation; and of metaphor. 211 Introduction To Postcolonial Literature The term "postcolonial" is a complex and ambiguous one, but it has proven to be useful as an umbrella under which we can group writings emerging out of varied traditions from far-flung regions of the world that have in common the history of having been British colonies. This course will explore the nature and context of these writings. 212 The Bible and Literature A study of the Bible and its diverse genres, including legendary history, law, chronicle, psalm, love-song and dirge, prophecy, gospel, epistle, and eschatology. This study is accompanied by an extremely various collection of literary material, drawn from traditional and contemporary sources, and from several languages (including Hebrew), in order to illustrate the continued life of Biblical narrative and poetry. 213 Inventing (The) English This exploration of the literature of the British Isles ca. 500-1500 (including Welsh and Anglo-Saxon texts) engages not only the evolution of the English language, but also the idea of what it meant to be English in the Middle Ages. 214 The Author in Literary Theory An exploration of the aesthetic, social, and philosophical problem of the author in a variety of theoretical approaches to literary study, including formalism, psychoanalysis, African-American studies, Marxism, feminism, structuralism and post-structuralism. 217 Humanimality An examination of how animals, as both living facts and symbolic images, function in the construction and practice of human institutions. Conversations among artists, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, scientists, and jurists will guide exploration of animals' place in human culture's ongoing story.   218 The Western Dramatic Tradition Introduction to the tradition of Western drama through close study of major representative plays. (Also called Comparative Literature 218) 220 The English Epic Several of the long narrative poems that represent one tradition in English literature. Readings in Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, and Walcott.   222 Spiritual Autobiography Survey of the genre of life-writing in the Western tradition, beginning with Augustine. English confessional histories, including Fox's Journal, and Bunyan's Grace Abounding, central Romantic and Victorian works, modern/contemporary autobiographies of women/feminism.   223 Self and Style in Sixteenth-Century Poetry, Through a close study of the poetry written in the English Renaissance, this course will introduce students to the varieties of self-presentation as well as religious and political forces at work in the court and city. Emphasis will be placed upon the major poets, including Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and Donne, in addition to less known figures.   224 Early Modern Travel Narratives This course will focus on the literary experiences generated in England by the discovery and colonization of non-European populations in the New World and elsewhere. Texs will include accounts of exploration and empire by Columbus, Raleigh, and Hakluyt, as well as familiar literary authors such as More, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn.   225 Shakespeare: The Tragic and Beyond A study of the major tragedies and related histories, comedies, and romances, with special reference to the evolution of dramatic form, poetic style, characterization, and ideology as they are shaped by Shakespeare's persistent experimentation with dramas of extravagant will, desire, tyranny, scepticism, and death. Particular attention will be paid to key scenes in an effort to assess both Shakespeare's response to contemporary literary and cultural concerns and the internal reformation of his own craft. 226 English Literature in the Age of Discovery This course observes Elizabethan minds at work on themselves, their past, and the wider world they were beginning to encounter. We'll particularly consider their interactions with the indigenous peoples of the New World.   230 Sacred and Profane: 17-c English Poetry God, sex, death, and politics: these enduring concerns form the core topics repeatedly and even obsessively discussed by the poets we will read. This course is designed to introduce students to the poetry written during the seventeenth century, a period of political upheaval and religious transformation that had a formative and lasting influence on Anglophone culture. 241 18th-C: Inventing the Novel The course explores a variety of British eighteenth-century prose narratives that shaped the emerging novel as both a dominant literary genre and popular form of entertainment. Particular emphasis on changing cultural conceptions of subjectivity, authority and narrative voice in discussions of generic categories 243 Trans-Atlantic Exchanges: Conversion & Revolution in Britain & Early America (18-c) This course examines novels and prose narrative--personal, domestic, and national--that engaged in Trans-Atlantic exchanges of eighteenth-century print culture. 252 Romantic Poetry and Criticism A reading of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, with attention to early/late works and to the interfiliation of theory and poetry.   253 English Poetry from Tennyson to Eliot A study of Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Hardy and Eliot, from In Memoriam (1850) to Little Gidding (1942). The course strives to subvert the convenient opposition of Victorian/modern, focusing upon the poet's role in mediating/exposing the social order, the relation between poetry and historical catastrophe, and the structuring modalities of lyric and elegy. 254 Victorian Literature: Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes & Decadents: Gender & Sexuality in the late 19th Century Readings in 19th century literature through diverse critical and theoretical foci which describe an ethos and an aesthetic particular to the Victorian period. Such concerns might reflect an interest in the urban novel as "modern" experience, in Victorian notions of gender and sexuality, in the material shaping of a "political unconscious" in the literature, in the idea of culture as it was practiced, debated and defended during the period, in the development late in the century of the Aesthetic and decadent movements in art and literature, etc. 257 British Topographies 1790-1914 A study of the intersections of place, locality, topography, cartographies, gardening, self-mapping, self-cancelling, ruin, remembrance, trauma, amid the historical and cultural construction of landscape. One focus of the course will be the English and Scottish borderlands&emdash;Northumbria, Cumbria, the Scottish Borders, and Galloway and Dumfries&emdash;areas marked by centuries of war, uneasily folded, since the 17th-century, within the "union" of Britain. Literary texts will be supplemented by a concern for landscape painting and water-color (Palmer, Turner, Constable, Ruskin), and by a study of the rapid development during the period of the technologies of the illustrated book. 258 The Novel The development of the novel from the late eighteenth century as a genre critically implicated in questions of gender, identity, and the construction of a social and political entity known as "the world", as well as in fundamental questions of representation itself and the "narratable". See course web site. 260a In the American Grain: Traditions in North American Literature Survey of the variety of texts written in the English language which came to be called American Analysis of the discovery and conquest of the continent through a consideration of the Puritan world conceived as a model city upon a hill, moving to a review of the drifting, searching world aboard Melville's Pequod in Moby Dick. Readings to the Civil War. 261 American Literature 1865-1914 An introduction to American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with emphasis on the literary response to historical developments such as the transformation of private life, the rise of technological society, and the intensification of racial and class conflict.   262 The American Moderns 1915 On This course considers the techniques that characterize seminal writers of the hardboiled genre, with an aim to understanding emerging attitudes towards knowledge, power, identity and desire in urban America. Includes works by Dashiell Hammett, W. R. Burnett, Raymond Carver, Chester Himes, as well as such "noir" films as Detour, The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, Brick and The Big Lebowski. 263 19th-Century American Women's Narrative This course examines narrative writing by women in the United States from its inception to the early 20th century. Its primary focus is writing by women which has conceptualized alternative visions of the nation and its history. TAmericans. See course web site. 265 Documentary Poet and Late Modernism A study of the strategies fashioned by late modernist poets in the U.S. who were influenced by contemporary documentary technologies; primary focus will be on the poetry of Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Reznikoff. 266 A Sense of Place This course examines non-fiction writing about place in the USA from Thoreau to such recent writers as Annie Dillard and William Least Heat Moon, with especial attention to the discursive construction of highly particularized environments. 267 The American 1950's Conformity Culture and Its Discontents Popular views of the American 1950s run the gamut from seeing the decade as an idyllic time before the turbulent 1960s to a more jaded view of an era of conformity and paranoia cultivated in the name of a “non-ideological” anti-Communist consensus. In this course, we will examine novels, poems, plays, films, and other modes of cultural production from the 1950s, in order to come to a deeper understanding of the American 1950s as a decade that encompassed both the mainstream culture of suburbs and Cold Warriors and also the countercultural tendencies of groups like the Beats. 268 New American Fiction What does it mean to study “New American Fiction”? In this class, we will read seven novels published within the past twenty years, each of which pushes the boundaries of the three terms contained in this course’s title. Selected readings in poetry, fiction, and drama. 270 Portraits in Black: The Emergence and Influence of African-American Culture A consideration of the emergence and influence of African-American culture in the United States through parallel readings of works from the American "canon" and from the African-American tradition. Satisfies the Social Justice requirement. 271 'Race,' Writing, and Difference in American Literature The complex intersections of race and gender in American literature, with particular attention to the problematic conceptualization of the North American Indian and African-American cultures held hostage at those intersections. 272 Malingering: Illness & Idleness in Literature and Film The knowledge of illness admits no uncertainty; when we are ill we feel it in our bodies. But what about the illness of another? How do we know-or feel-it? How do we know they’re not faking, or malingering? This question implicates our ability both to manage the body and to cure it. 273 Modern British Literature An exploration of literary modernism in Britain through analysis of fiction, criticism, and aesthetic manifestos in their historical contexts. 274 Modern Irish Literature Irish literature from Swift to O'Brien and Heaney. The course considers this literature as the politically articulate inscription of complex and multiple intersections of history, class and culture. Throughout the course, Irish history, particularly the Famine, (re)appears as an episode of trauma, historical memory and literary investment. See course web site. Satisfies Social Justice requirement. 275 Thinking Globally & Writing Locally: Contemporary South-Asian Fiction The course will examine the ways the global circulation of people, ideas, languages, and literary and cultural forms brought about by colonialism, decolonization, and immigration shape specific Anglophone literary traditions.  276 Litrature and Politics of South African Apartheid This course explores the history and historiography of South African apartheid from its inception in 1948 to the election of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994. We will consider the interplay between complex definitions of race, gender, nation and difference in novels, drama, poetry, and memoirs written during the apartheid years. We will also discuss the tension between an ethics and aesthetics of literary production in a time of political oppression.  277 Postcolonial Women Writers The narrative strategies enabling and sometimes subverting historically and culturally specific negotiations between the claims of postcolonial, class, and feminist politics. Focus on writings by women. See course web site. Satisfies Social Justice requirement. 278 Contemporary Women Writers Readings in novels, short fiction, poetry, and some non-fictional prose by contemporary women writers. A study of the interrelations between literature written by female authors and the questions, concerns, and debates that characterize contemporary feminist theory. Readings in Hurston, Woolf, Winterson, Lorde, leGuin, Atwood, Erdich, Bambara, Yamanaka, and Cisneros. 279 Asian-American Literature This course serves as an introduction to the critical study of Asian American literature and culture. Using a selection of key literary texts in the field as well as texts by emergent authors, critics, and filmmakers, we will examine the multiple and often contesting subjectivities that take shape under the rubric of “Asian American.” 280 Freud and Film This course juxtaposes two great developments of the twentieth century—Freud and film. Both changed the way we understand the relation of self to body. Our emphasis will be on the Freudian corpus; we will use film as a way of illustrating—but also challenging—elements of the Freudian system.   280 Borders, Migrations, National Identities What constitutes a border? How are borders drawn? How do borders and migrations affect national identity formation? What are the markers that determine individual and collective national identity? This course will address these questions, and will investigate the ways in which they are explored in texts by Indian, Palestinian, Israeli, Irish, South African, and Chicano writers.   281 Fictions of Empire A study of representative texts from the 18th century to the present which deal with the British colonial encounter. 282 The Modernist Movement in Literature and the Arts, 1900-1920 This course considers modernism as a collective enterprise--self-conscious and deliberate--in the earlier part of the 20th century that took various forms in art, literature and architecture. Readings grouped around Joyce's Ulysses, Cubist painting, and modernist architecture. See course web site.  284b Sex, Gender, Representation: Queer Theory This class will investigate how cultural theory, philosophy, literary theory, and literature itself have evaluated and questioned the categories by which we understand sexualities. We will pay special attention to the concept of "queerness" and the work of queer theory in defamiliarizing everyday assumptions about sexuality and sexual identity, gay and straight. Satisfies Social Justice requirement. 285 Disabilities: Autobiography, Education and Theory 286 Arts of the Possible: Literature and Social Justice Movements In this course, we will be reading memoirs, essays, and poetry by American writer/activists whose works articulate, critique and re-envision social justice movements that have recast the cultural and political terrain of the United States over the last 40 years. We will be focusing on works that illuminate the formation of -- and interrelations/tensions between -- civil rights struggles, peace movements, feminist organizing, and LGBT movements. Satisfies Social Justice requirement. 287 Technology Modernity and the Birth of Cinema This course follows the rise of photography and cinema as popular media in the late 19th and early 20th century, with an aim to understand how this development coincides with the emergence of new attitudes towards technology and the modern city. The course will also explore the relationship between cinema and other media, including literature, visual arts, architecture and psychology.   289 Contemporary Poetry 290 History of Literary Criticism: Plato to Shelley For course description see Classics 290a. (Also called Classics 290a and Comparative Literature 290a) 291 Poetry Workshop: A Practical Course 292 Writing Poetry II 293 Fiction Writing 294 Fiction Writing: States of Mind Prerequisite: a writing sample and a previous creative writing course or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15 students. This course invites creative writers to explore how subjectivity can be evoked in fiction--that is, how mental activity finds distinctive utterance in a story. 293 Fiction Writing: From Traditional to Experimental 295 Interpretation and the Other: Meaning, Understanding, and Alterity (Humanities Seminar) This interdisciplinary course aims to enhance critical awareness of a variety of practices of interpretation in the liberal arts. The seminar begins with consideration of a number of influential perspectives on language and meaning, which are then explored in relation to several case studies of interpretation that embody, amplify or challenge them. The seminar concludes with an examination of some of the ethical contours of interpretation's encounter with otherness. Cross Listed with Religion, Comparative Literature, Philosophy 296 Theory and Practice of Versification This course will consider verse as a means of generating intensities of insight and expression. We will examine the difference between poetry as "rhythmic arrangement of words" and poetry as "elliptical reference," and will discuss how these two experiences of poetry are interrelated.   299 Sections I,II Junior Seminar Two-semester, year-long seminar, required of all English majors. Through class readings and discussion, and writing tutorials, students are expected to engage 1) a series of texts representing the range and diversity of the historical tradition in British and American literature, and 2) critical theory and practice as it has been influenced by hermeneutics, feminism, psychology, semiology, sociology, and the study of cultural representation, and as it reflects the methods of literary criticism. See course links.     100-level courses 300-level courses