Department website: http://english.jhu.edu/
The Department of English offers separate undergraduate and graduate programs, each designed to suit the needs of its particular student body. The undergraduate program, in the context of university requirements and elective courses, provides the basis for a liberal education and prepares students for graduate work or professional schools, such as medicine and law, as well as professional teaching and literary scholarship. The graduate program prepares advanced students for professional teaching careers in English literature.
Facilities
In addition to the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins students have easy access to the 12 million volumes and innumerable historical manuscripts of the Library of Congress, as well as the library at Dumbarton Oaks, the Folger Library, the Freer Library, the library of the National Gallery, and many other specialized public collections. Students learn about advances in research and criticism and confer with leading American and European scholars and critics through participation in the activities of the Tudor and Stuart Club, the ELH Colloquium, and the department’s other programming.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
AS.060.106. A Literary History of the Devil to 1800. 3 Credits.
This course reads major works in European literature before 1800 (give or take) depicting the devil. It examines the history of the various social, cultural and political guises under which the devil appears, and the function that representing radical evil performs aesthetically. Among our readings may be selections from the Bible; Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Goethe’s Faust; and many other major hellish works.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.060.209, A Literary History of the Devil to 1800, are not eligible to take AS.060.106.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.107. Introduction to Literary Study. 3 Credits.
This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.108. Writing in Literary Studies. 3 Credits.
Writing in Literary Studies introduces students to the work of literary criticism and literary scholarship. Students learn to evaluate and produce knowledge about literary and other cultural texts while building skills in argumentation, evidence, interpretation, style, and revision. All courses are based on special topics that vary widely according to the interest and expertise of the instructor, but all courses share a common interest in the strategies of written communication within the literary disciplines. Students will practice these skills and methods to support well-argued, carefully researched writing in literary studies, and to translate these insights for diverse audiences beyond literary studies.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.109. Robots, Androids, Slaves. 3 Credits.
Since the rise of Silicon Valley, tech enthusiasts and futurists have been debating the possibility of what has been called “the singularity” — the moment when artificial intelligence (AI) decisively and irreversibly surpasses human abilities. If this does happen, observers worry, it’s not just that robots will take our jobs; will we become subservient to our new robot masters? Will we become extinct, and not because of climate change? This course explores such questions through the lens of literature and popular media. We will watch several films from the last 15 years or so that depict the rise of AI. We will ask about the roles tat gender, race and class have in our imagination of the work robots do. And we will read a range of short essays that approach the question of labor and technology from different angles than mass media usually do.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.117. If The Walls Could Talk: Meaningful Environments in Literary Worlds. 3 Credits.
For most of us, the smaller details marking the four walls of a room that we find ourselves in for long stretches of time eventually blend into the background noise of our day-to-day lives--always present, but screened out of our active notice. But if the walls and objects all around us could talk—or at least be made legible to us—what stories might they have to tell? Faced with such seemingly insubstantial traces of the animate within the inanimate, we might well end up with a newfound appreciation for the word "haunted" in a day-to-day life that has largely been exorcised of all thought of indwelling spirits. In this course, we will read a series of texts that invite us to think more deeply about overlooked meanings, attachments, conflicts, and other social relationships embedded in private and public environments. In so doing, we will learn methods for carefully reading environmental details in literature that will translate to an ability to better grasp the meanings made manifest in our own day-to-day environments.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.119. Serial Storytelling. 3 Credits.
How do we experience stories when we have to wait to see what happens next? This class juxtaposes 21st-century television with 19th-century fiction — Baltimore’s own The Wire alongside Dickens’s Bleak House, amongst others — to think about how artists manipulate our behavior as readers to expand our thinking: to make us perceive the structures of society differently, to make us understand something new about the possibilities of fiction as an art form. Whether we’re forced to wait or eager to rush ahead to the next part, how we read or watch stories has always been the subject of lively debate — and central to narrative’s lasting impact.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.122. Politics, Labor, and Utopia in American Fiction. 3 Credits.
This course will introduce students to a range of literary expressions of labor, political struggle and historical change, focusing on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries. This course moves through late-nineteenth century fictional representations of labor struggles and communal imaginaries, the racialized and classed struggles of the Reconstruction era, and artistic engagement with the Left during the Great Depression, and concludes with two works of speculative fiction from the late twentieth century. We will question how a range of authors deal with political commitment, historical representation, and utopian imagination. The course will highlight scholarship that questions how histories of U.S. racial formation – particularly focusing on the enslavement of Black Americans and the dispossession of Native Americans – are entwined with the literary and political imaginations of authors of social fiction.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.123. Learning to Walk: Experiments in Exteriority. 3 Credits.
This course investigates the literature and phenomena of walking: its history, its great poets, its social and cultural meanings, and some practices that organize mobile attention to the outdoors. How might a simple walk raise awareness of necessity and freedom, public and private space, the environment, and the rhythm of thinking itself? Our readings will range from Henry David Thoreau’s praise of “sauntering” to the French avant-garde practice of urban “drift” in small cadres of two or three, from urbanist Jane Jacobs’s descriptions of the city’s “sidewalk ballet” to Sunaura Taylor’s exploration of walking for the differently abled, and from novelist W.G. Sebald’s distinctive meditations on environmental history through his rambles along English shorelines to Garnette Cadogan’s searing account of walking and the perception of race. Importantly, we’ll adopt these writers’ practices of attention in our own exploration of the landscapes, built environments, and urban geography of the Johns Hopkins campus and Greater Baltimore. Several classes will meet outdoors for collective walks, so comfortable shoes and a good raincoat are required. Aside from reading carefully and participating actively in discussions, assignments will prompt you to move through the world and to craft compelling records of your experiences, observations, and curiosity in writing and other media.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.130. Playing Doctor. 3 Credits.
How many times have you heard it? “I got into medicine because of [Insert Character/Show]!” Medical dramas have been mainstays of our televisual landscape since the early 1960s, and even more so since the premiere of E.R. (1994-2009). In this course, we dive deep into this most pervasive of genres. How do its tropes shape public understanding of physicians and their practices? And can these series empower clinicians and public health campaigns to improve patient outcomes? Across eight weeks, we’ll explore the history of the genre, and then dive deeply into two series, House, M.D. (2004-11), and The Pitt (2025-present), to answer these questions and much more.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.136. Theater at the End of the World. 3 Credits.
The world is ending, the planet is dying, civilization is falling to ruin – now what? For millennia, theatermakers have asked and answered this question through their art. Why does theater keep staging such scenes of devastation and renewal? In this course, you will read a selection of such apocalyptic plays, as well as works in other genres that ask us to imagine that, when all else has withered away, the theater will somehow survive. Course materials will range from medieval morality plays and Shakespearean tragedies to recent novels, avant-garde theater, and Broadway musicals. With the help of texts by and about BIPOC performers, we will also ask: For whom, exactly, is the world supposed to be ending? For whom did it end at least once already – whether years or centuries ago? And what does theater offer to communities who have already survived the apocalypse, or who currently live in apocalyptic times? As an introduction to college-level studies in English, this course teaches the fundamental skills of close reading, attentive viewing, deep discussion, powerful writing, and effective revision.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.140. Diaries, Journals, Some Notes. 3 Credits.
A study of genres of private writings, focusing on the diary form. Readings will likely include diaries by Pepys, Boswell, Frank, Woolf, as well as critical and theoretical texts on the form.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.142. Indigenous Science Fiction: (Re)making Worlds. 3 Credits.
This discussion-based seminar will survey science fiction written by indigenous authors in what are now the United States, Canada, and Australia. We will investigate by what means and to what ends this particular genre has been taken up by indigenous peoples both to reflect on their settler-colonial pasts and presents and to imagine decolonial futures. Texts may include: Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; William Sanders, "The Undiscovered"; Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder; Blake Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears; Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow; Claire Coleman, Terra Nullius; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.143. Nature Writing on Stolen Land. 3 Credits.
What do settler colonists see--and unsee--when they encounter the rich and varied Indigenous homelands in North America and Oceania? What role does their perception and representation of "nature"--including the very construction of "nature" as a distinct category--play in enabling them to displace and imagine that they could replace longstanding Indigenous peoples in what are now the USA, Australia, and Canada? How have Indigenous peoples reiterated and reinvented their own conceptions and experiences of their homelands? This course begins to address these questions in two ways. One, by considering a wide range of representations (narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film, art, music) by both Indigenous and settler cultural producers in the US, Australia, and Canada from the nineteenth century to the present. Readings may include: Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods; Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada; Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies; Duncan Campbell Scott, New World Lyrics and Ballads; Willa Cather, The Professor's House; Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock; Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; Ali Cobby Ackermann, She Is the Earth; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Two, by facilitating a series of creative reflections on the meaning of students' current occupation of the lands of the Conestoga/Susquehannock, Piscataway, and other Indigenous peoples through embodied research in the local region.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.148. Asian and Latinx American Literatures: Rethinking Empire. 3 Credits.
This course explores the transnational convergence of Asians/Asian Americans and Latinxs/ Latinx Americans from a history of multiple imperialisms to the neoliberal, globalized present. We will situate the racialization of Asian and Latinx peoples within a larger, global framework and think critically about areas of solidarity and tension between these two multi-ethnic groups through readings in literature, history, and sociology.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.060.351 are not eligible to take AS.060.148.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.150. Out of Place: Literature of Migrants and Refugees. 3 Credits.
This course is about one of most profound political, social, and cultural issues of our times: mass migration, the movement of masses of people out of their countries and places of origin and increasingly across continents and oceans. It is based in the methods of the literary humanities and will help you develop your skills in reading works of literature. We will look at some key works from across disciplines and media--literature, anthropology, philosophy, and film--to help us understand the experience of migrants in the modern world.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.153. Margaret Atwood: Mythmaker. 3 Credits.
This is the moment for a course on the Canadian climate activist, poet and novelist Margaret Atwood. Best known for her dystopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Atwood's warning visions in poetry, short stories, non-fiction and novels attend to themes of malevolence, metamorphosis, memory, genetic mutation, totalitarianism, corporate control, feminism, free speech, and climate disaster, while rooted in traditions of folktale, myth, and ironic detachment. Among other works, including poetry and non-fiction, we will read novels The Handmaid's Tale, Surfacing, Alias Grace, and Oryx and Crake, exploring Atwood's "writing with intent." Readings: 80-100 pages of Atwood novels per week. Course format: Short lectures with seminar discussion; 9 Discussion posts; Take-home midterm; two short papers, and one final presentation
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.156. What Makes a Poem Queer?. 3 Credits.
What makes a poem queer? How can we tell? How has it changed over time? Understanding “queerness” to mean a non-normative array of lesbian, gay, trans and asexual ways of being, this undergraduate seminar will read across a long historical arc from the classical period to early modern poetry in order to think about how the lyric and the shorter narrative poem have transmitted queer feelings and recorded queer lives. Authors include Sappho, Virgil, Catullus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Beaumont, and Philips.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.159. Jane Austen Beyond England. 3 Credits.
This will be an in-depth study of several Jane Austen novels with an emphasis on how they have traveled outside of the country of her birth – e.g. to the United States, India, and East Asia—through the work of individuals and the flows of global capitalism. Students will gain perhaps a disorienting sense of what Austen means in different cultures at different historical moments, and conduct individual research to learn more. Knowledge of another language is not necessary but could prove useful.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.060.317 - Jane Austen Beyond England - are not eligible to take AS.060.159.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.169. Literature and Visual Art. 3 Credits.
We’ll glance at the history of the relations between painting and literature, before turning to the art of the past 200 years. What has drawn writers to place their powers against those of painters (in particular)? How have they managed the comparisons? How might we understand the distinctive powers and limitations of these two modes of responding to human experience? While we may have an exam, writing assignments will constitute most of your grade.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.176. War and Peace: Text and Context. 3 Credits.
The remit of this course is simple, at least on the surface: we will spend a full term reading Leo Tolstoy's classic (and very long) 1867 novel _War and Peace_. Along the way, we will augment our discussions of the primary text with readings of critical materials drawn from History, Philosophy, and Narrative Theory, covering topics ranging from Napoleon's rise, to philosophies of non-violence, to the stultifying effects of aristocratic marriage. We will pay special attention to the status of _War and Peace_ as world literature, exploring both the non-Russian influences on the text, and its influence, in turn, on global writers in later periods including the postcolonial. Students with native or advanced Russian literacy are welcome to read in Russian; everyone else will read from an English translation.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.193. Fictions of Development. 3 Credits.
What does it mean to develop, to evolve, to grow up? And what's at stake, for authors having different investments, views, and experiences, in the ways human development (and other forms of development) are represented? This course examines literary and other treatments of growth of the past two hundred years. Authors studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Mead, R. K. Narayan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.195. Tyrants & Dictators. 3 Credits.
This undergraduate seminar looks at select works from the vast 19th and 20th century literature of tyrrany and subjugation, including by Melville, Greene, Garcia Marquez, Naipaul and Rushdie.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.203. Bible as Literature. 3 Credits.
This course looks at the ways in which the Bible has and can be read as literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.207. William Shakespeare. 3 Credits.
Who was William Shakespeare, and what can his poems, histories, comedies and tragedies tell us about our overlap with, and divergences from, the early modern world?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.213. Global Victorians: Race, Empire, Re-Imagination. 3 Credits.
The British nineteenth century was marked by rapid industrialization and increasing social inequality. It gave birth to some of the most well-known novelists and thinkers in the English language, while introducing technologies of communication and surveillance that continue to trouble us today. It was also a period of the British Empire’s overseas expansion and racial-economic empowerment, especially in Africa, East Asia, and the Mediterranean. This course surveys a wide range of literary, artistic, intellectual developments that took place across a wide geographical terrain in the British imperial nineteenth-century, as well as later imperial and post-imperial renditions of it.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.216. Zombies. 3 Credits.
This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.219. American Literature to 1865. 3 Credits.
A survey course of American literature from contact to the Civil War.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.222. American Literature, 1865 to today. 3 Credits.
A survey of American literature from 1865 to today.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.223. African American Literature from 1900 to Present. 3 Credits.
A survey of the major and minor texts written by African Americans during the twentieth century, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and concluding with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.229. Nineteenth-Century American Literature: History, Philosophy, Insight. 3 Credits.
This lecture course will introduce students to the literature and literary culture of nineteenth-century America and its wider world. Focusing on history, genre and print practices, and culturally hybrid narrative logics, the course will move from the deeply curious and disturbing qualities of this body of literature to the origins and real asks of liberalism, progressivism, national and transnational ideology, secularism, and global modernity. Our core literary selection will comprise of nineteenth century American literature, including but not limited to the works Alexis de Tocqueville, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Spofford, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allen Poe, David Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Francis Parkman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Yung Wing, and Sui Sin Far.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.232. Detective Fiction. 3 Credits.
This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.246. Medicine in Literature, Then & Now. 3 Credits.
From quacks to plague, from humors to hypochondria, from AIDS to cancer, this lecture course examines literary representations of suffering, disease and treatment across genres and across time. In particular it explores how early modern literature represents and occasionally satirizes medicine, and how contemporary writers inherit and revise early modern modes. Over the semester, students will become familiar with the diverse array of forms of medical practice, the classed and gendered hierarchies in which medical practitioners were organized during different historical periods, and the various stances and attitudes towards medicine as discourse, profession, and field of knowledge that result. After an initial grounding in some historical and methodological basics, we will proceed to wrestle with a range of literary texts (prose works, poetry, drama, and memoir). Authors will include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Moliere, Gunn, Sontag, Lorde, and Boyer.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.265. Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Figuring Out Your Life. 3 Credits.
Reading major novelists from the nineteenth century including Austen, C. Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. We will pay attention to formal conventions, and relation to social and historical context.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.303. Utopia and Difference. 3 Credits.
From antiquity through our own day, writers have used their craft to try to imagine perfect, or at least vastly improved, human societies. Utopian literature spans broad forms: cloud cuckoo land visions of prosperity and abundance, detailed plans for the governments of the future, and ambiguous auguries combining utopia with its opposite: dystopia. Imagining better worlds is a heterogenous and ancient tradition, but beginning in the late 19th century, writers like H. G. Wells and Charlotte Perkins Gilman began to suspect that a perfect future was inseparable from a united one: ending hardship depended on bringing all people into a shared way of life and belief. But do utopian demands for consensus threaten the freedom to live as one chooses? Can utopia coexist with diversity? In this course, we will read from a broad range of prose utopias from the 19th century to the present, including Kang Youwei’s Datong Shu (1884), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1886), George Schuyler’s Black Empire (1938), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). Students in this course will develop a familiarity with a range of themes and conflicts that characterize utopian writing, and craft their own written reflections that consider the tensions between utopian visions of the future and the people those visions may exclude, marginalize, or assimilate.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.306. The Historical Novel and Contemporary Experience. 3 Credits.
Events of recent years have made history palpable; the pandemic, increasing visibility of climate change, and political unrest have all given us the felt sense that history is happening now, here, to us. Our focus in this course will be that sense of history, as rendered by novels. While we will read one foundational 19th century novel most of our texts will be more recent. I hope that this course allows us to recognize historical experience more sharply, and to think about our relation to it more powerfully, with more adequate concepts. Students will write a series of brief papers and a final research paper.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.311. Privacy, Surveillance, and Paranoia. 3 Credits.
What secrets can we, or should we, keep to ourselves? And what information is available to the state? This course examines the history, philosophy, politics, and literature of privacy and surveillance.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.313. Literature of the Settler Revolution. 3 Credits.
The nineteenth century saw the creation of an “Angloworld” as a result of what one historian has called “the settler revolution.” In perhaps the largest mass migration in human history, millions of English-speakers (and others) invaded Indigenous worlds in what have consequently come to be known as the United States, Canada, and Australia. This seminar offers an introduction to nineteenth-century Indigenous and settler Anglophone writing in the US, Canada, and Australia with a view to understanding the role of literature in inciting, interrogating, and resisting this settler revolution.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.318. Science Fiction and the Futures of Climate Change. 3 Credits.
This course will examine representations of, and confrontations with, climate change in science fiction. We will focus on narratives that explicitly foreground the current planetary catastrophe of anthropogenic global warming and its various cause and consequences, especially those texts that produce and/or critique new forms of climate change denialism. We will also engage with various community partners working to confront climate change. We will examine these projects and narratives alongside climate change discourse, literary theory, and literary criticism to develop an understanding of the difficulties and stakes of imaginatively rendering climate change through speculative frameworks, and to explore the relationships between climate change, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.320. Coming to America: The West Indian Immigrant Novel. 3 Credits.
At various points in the twentieth century, the United States saw large numbers of immigrants from the British West Indies. As these immigrants settled, they began to form communities and develop literature that reflected their experiences in their new home. With special attention to the novel, this course examines how this literature tackled the complicated relationship between race, immigration, and citizenship. To investigate this relationship, this course may examine novels like Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Elizabeth Nuñez's Beyond the Limbo Silence, and Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.321. American Literary Naturalism in Black and White. 3 Credits.
In this course we will explore one of the most vexed topics in the study of American literature: naturalism, a genre concerned with the biological and social forces that limit individual freedom. For years, critics and readers have debated whether naturalism presents a world in which humans are hopelessly trapped by forces beyond their control or one in which those forces can eventually be controlled and society improved. Is naturalism skeptical, even derisive toward, the idea of progress, or is it a toolkit that enables writers to act as progressive scientist-reformers? In the US context, many naturalist novels have been immediate best-sellers—Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Richard Wright’s Native Son—but their reputations have tended to diminish over time, as naturalism became increasingly associated with despair, poor prose style, and scientific racism. Yet one of the central suppositions of this course is that this reputation has a lot to do with who has been considered naturalist, i.e., a fairly exclusive cohort of white American male writers. From the late 1890s to the 1940s, African American writers drew on naturalism to contest the very social order that the worst aspects of the genre propped up. This course offers a rare opportunity to read these black naturalists alongside white American male and female naturalist authors in an effort to develop a more nuanced account of the genre than the reduction of it to pessimism or Social Darwinism. The class might appeal to those interested in the relationship between scientific understandings of the body and literature; minority authors and mainstream tradition; literature and urbanization. Or those who simply prefer their art, coffee, romance, etc. a little bitter.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.323. Everything Must Go: The Shock of Modernism. 3 Credits.
Modernist art was a field for radical innovation. Never before or since have so many major breakthroughs in the arts occurred in so short a period. This course will focus on some of the great modernist disrupters of literary forms--prose fiction, poetry, dramatic spectacle. Writers and others to be considered may include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, Franz Kafka, and Oskar Schlemmer.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.324. Literature on the Cusp: 1890-1910. 3 Credits.
This course takes up literature from the decades just before and just after the turn of the 20th century, including novels, poetry, and essays by Emily Dickinson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E. W. Harper, Henry James, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. Students will also engage with critical writing from the new academic journal, Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.325. George Eliot: Passion and Adulthood. 3 Credits.
In this course we will read the major novels (and some essays) by George Eliot, one of the most intellectually engaging of British novelists. Her fiction explores ethical, social, and aesthetic issues concerning sexual politics, the limits of morality, the demands of family, the desperation of skepticism, and the capacities of the novel form. Students should leave the course with a heightened sense of the powers of the novel and the seriousness of its ambitions. Texts are likely to include Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, but our focus will be on her two last and most ambitious novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.326. Shakespeare: The Novel. 3 Credits.
What if King Lear had been a mother? What if the we thought about Othello through the lens of the holocaust? What if the indigene Caliban was the hero, not the villain? What if Miranda chose Caliban over her European suitor? (The Tempest) Could a modern-day Kate be tricked into marriage and “tamed” (The Taming of the Shrew)? When contemporary novelists rewrite Shakespeare, they pose questions left hanging in the play and bring the plays into our own world. In this course, we will read Shakespeare plays (King Lear, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice) along with contemporary novelists that rewrite – and confront -- those plays (Jane Smiley, Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, Anne Tyler). Students will take up important literary questions about kinds of literature (plays vs novels), the canon, imitation, adaptation, and also address the themes of power, gender and sexuality, family dynamics, authority, colonization and the environment.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.328. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. 3 Credits.
This course surveys American literature and social history during what was then known as the New Negro movement (roughly 1912-1934), today popularly called the Harlem Renaissance. Since the1980s, scholars have revised claims that the “Renaissance” was a literary failure characterized mainly by exotic and primitive caricatures. Today the era is noted for renewing ideas of American pluralist nationality, a project, in the words of one critic, “of reconceiving the United States as something other than a white nation.” To think through some of these claims, the course juxtaposes the classic modernist work of white American writers alongside the classics of African American Harlem Renaissance literature. We will pay close attention to the evolution and instantiation of racial stereotypes during the 1920s and the operation of modernist literary techniques.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.330. Witches, Weather, and Wonder: Early Climate Thinking. 3 Credits.
This class reads how literature represented the causes of early climate disasters during the European period of transition from magic to science as ways of knowing. How did people understand the new experiences of climate in the age of coal mining, colonization, and extreme weather conditions in the 'little ice age' in Europe. Readings include plays, poems, fiction.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.333. Listening to Podcasts. 3 Credits.
The word “podcast” was coined in 2004 as a portmanteau of “broadcast” and “iPod.” As thename implies, podcasts were born when an old mode of audio transmission (radio broadcast) met a new technology (portable mp3 players like Apple’s iPod, or rather RSS feeds adapted to handle audio files). But even back then, “podcasts” were more than just time-delayed radio programs you could carry around in your pocket. They also included a wide range of born-podcast formats: free-flowing talk shows, scripted audio-essays, anthologies of audio-journalism, etc. In this course, we will study the historical origins and contemporary range of podcasts as a medium for writing and performance. We will consider how this medium has absorbed genres from other media (memoir, essay, drama, documentary, fiction, autofiction, etc.) and combined them in innovative ways. We will also explore genres made possible for the first time by podcasts—whether by their ability for on-demand playback, by their low cost of distribution, or by their openness to audio-experimentation. The primary skills taught by this course are careful listening and analytic writing. This is not a course in podcast production. It will, however, require students to analyze podcasts by “quoting” them in both text-based papers and audio-essays. As such, this course will teach some basic skills in editing audio, writing scripts, and mixing sound.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.336. Ulysses and The Waste Land at 101. 3 Credits.
This course celebrates the centenary of two of the most famous works of literature to appear in the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Attention to historical contexts, connections with other works of literature, and influence on writing worldwide. We will also read, in counterpoint, another groundbreaking text of 1922: the brilliant, challenging, and inexhaustible novel Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.337. James Joyce's Ulysses. 3 Credits.
A careful semester-long reading of James Joyce’s masterpeice Ulysses, one of the greatest and most intimidating novels in world literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.344. Reimagining the Past: History and Memory in Asian American Fiction. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will be focusing on Asian American historical fiction to investigate the constitutive tension between fact and fiction in narratives about the past. What kinds of historical claims, if any, can novels make? How is historical memory transformed in the process of narration? How does the past continue to condition our present/future, and, conversely, in what ways is the past haunted by the present?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.345. Literature from the Chinese Diaspora. 3 Credits.
Study of the literature and criticism of the Chinese Diaspora in North America from the 1980s to the present, with emphasis on narrative choices, plotting, cross-cultural decision-making, realism, immigration, competing political/interpretive/economic systems, and historical memory and trauma. Authors include Yiyun Li, Ken Liu, Madeleine Thien, Chia-Chia Lin, Weike Wang, Max Yeh, Iris Chang, Amy Tan, with an option for Chinese language students and native speakers to read works in Chinese by Glenn Cao and Chang Lin.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.347. American Bibles. 3 Credits.
This course will juxtapose pertinent key passages of the Bible with modern American texts that are fundamentally biblical in their inspirations, aspirations, proportions, and allusions. We will consider these texts’ attempts, in the face of globalizing and secularizing forces, such as Atlantic slavery and German higher criticism, to affirm, undermine, appropriate, and redirect the authority of the ur-canonical text. Texts may include: Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred; Pauline Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter; Mark Twain, Diaries of Adam and Eve and Letters from the Earth; Terrence Malick, dir., Tree of Life; Michal Lemberger, After Abel and Other Stories.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.350. Reason and Romance: Literature of the British Eighteenth Century. 3 Credits.
Any era can be characterized by its oppositions. Perhaps none were more defined by their polarities, however, than the eighteenth century in Britain. Reason and passion, honor and ribaldry, skepticism and fantasy, tradition and revolution: in capturing the tensions between these dyads, the literature of the period furnishes a wildly energetic field through which to examine questions of consciousness, freedom, gender, celebrity, race, and political theater that continue to shape our lives today. Authors examined may include Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, John Gay, Charlotte Lennox, and Alexander Pope.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.351. The Latin Asian Imagination. 3 Credits.
This course explores the transnational convergence of Asians/Asian Americans and Latinxs/ Latinx Americans from a history of multiple imperialisms to the neoliberal, globalized present. We will situate the racialization of Asian and Latinx peoples within a larger, global framework and think critically about areas of solidarity and tension between these two multi-ethnic groups through readings in literature, history, and sociology.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.060.148 are not able to take AS.060.351.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.354. Literature of the Sea. 3 Credits.
This course focuses on great literary documents of seafaring in its historical and environmental aspects. Writers and filmmakers may include Columbus, Douglass, Melville, Conrad, Carson, Cousteau, Walrond, McKay and Sekula. How have seas, sailors, ships and their cargoes helped to shape our imagination and understanding of major events and processes of modernity, such as the encounter with the New World, slavery, industrial capitalism, marine science, the birth of environmental consciousness, and contemporary globalization? What part did seafaring play in the formation of international legal systems, or in epochal events such as the American and Russian Revolutions? How does contemporary piracy compare to its “golden age?” How can we discern a history of the “trackless” oceans, and how do we imagine their future now that “90% of everything” crosses an ocean, and the seas are described as both rising and dying? Our focus in the course will be on writers and filmmakers listed above, but our approach to what is sometimes called “Blue Humanities” or “ocean studies” will be interdisciplinary, and so we will also read excerpts from historians and theorists such as Laleh Khalili, Marcus Rediker, and Jeffrey Bolster.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.355. Poetry and Politics Today. 3 Credits.
The history of poetry is full of political poems of every kind — odes, epics, dramatic persona poems. And the history of literary criticism is full of denunciations of poetry that gets “too political,” and loses sight of its job to give pleasure. In this course, we will look at a range of contemporary poetry that tackles political issues — things like the causes of climate change; immigration crises; white supremacy; patriarchal gender systems; the legacies of colonialism — and study the ways it accomplishes its goals while still giving us the kinds of surprise in language that poetry has always promised. Reading will include (but not be limited to) work by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Cathy Park Hong, Sandra Simonds, Stephanie Young, and Wendy Trevino.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.356. Poetry and Perfect Worlds. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will closely read poetic representations of perfect, vastly better, or singularly beautiful worlds in poetry from antiquity through the present. Matters to be considered will include the challenge of putting utopia into verse, relations between beauty and luxury, and the depiction of nature in a time of ecological crisis. Poets studied may include Theocritus, Tao Yuanming, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Lisa Robertson, Nikki Giovanni, and Juliana Spahr
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.358. Virginia Woolf. 3 Credits.
Beautiful, acute, and consequential, Woolf’s writing opens onto an extraordinary range of aesthetic, psychological, and political issues. In this seminar, we will read from her novels, essays, and diaries as well as the varied works of art and philosophy that influenced her.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.359. Slavery in Early Modern Literature. 3 Credits.
Against the backdrop of the rise of the European slave trade, how were enslaved people represented in early modern English literature? How was the condition of enslavement inflected by emergent nationalism, colonialism and theological constructions of difference? This course puts Renaissance literature into conversation with comparative histories of slavery and critical race theory. Authors include Aristotle, Plautus, Thomas More, Bartolomé de las Casas, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Osman of Timisoara, Stephanie Smallwood, Michael Guasco, Saidiya Hartman, Herman Bennett, Orlando Patterson, Jared Sexton, and Mary Nyquist.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.363. Henry James. 3 Credits.
Henry James was one of the most influential and challenging novelists in American history. The bulk of this class will immerse us his major works, including both his literary experimentation and the complex social and political situations his fictions analyze. We’ll also look at afterlives today — at more recent writers and artists who show what these novels still can do.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.364. Utopias. 3 Credits.
This course examines how writers have imagined perfect, or at least vastly improved, human societies from antiquity through our own day. Topics of particular interest will be the relation between individual liberty and social cohesion in utopian schemes, views on the nature of happiness and justice, and speculations about the ease or arduousness with which utopia might be created or maintained. Authors to be studied may include Plato, Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Octavia Butler.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.369. Speculative Slavery and Liberatory Fiction. 3 Credits.
This course will introduce students to the study and genre of Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, through the lens of narratives focused on liberation/freedom. Liberatory fiction pushes the genre of Afrofuturism further to create space for the imagination to envision alternate futures and pasts, that rewrite history to aid in the process of liberation for black lives. The intended outcome of these texts is the liberation of its subjects and, in some cases, its readers to reflect on the contemporary. The liberation of subjects comes in the form of attaining collective or personal freedoms. This course will cover themes such as, gender and the speculative, the haunting of the post-slavery subject, and black apocalypses. All of these themes will be analyzed through reading both theory and narratives including: The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”, and N.K. Jemisin’s “The City Born Great”.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.371. Southern Literature 1900-1963: Politics, Race, and History. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will examine literary, historical, and theoretical texts on the American South from the first half of the twentieth century. Thematically, the course focuses on literary representations of labor history, histories of racialization, and political struggle. We will interrogate the construction of a region across a range of texts, tracing the emergence of Southern literature as an object of study in the early twentieth century. How did literature in the first half of the twentieth century negotiate the historical legacies of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Depression? How has literature shaped the popular understanding of Southern identity? We will focus in particular on the ways that literature mediates, critiques, and reimagines important historical and political conjunctures in the history of the American South.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.372. English Literature from Beowulf to Milton. 3 Credits.
This course will survey what have long been thought to be the monuments of English literature from the earliest recorded texts to the end of the early Modern period, in a great variety of genres (from epic to lyric, fable to drama). Classes will provide the background necessary to read these texts both closely and historically, in the light of cultural continuities and differences.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.374. Irish Literature. 3 Credits.
This course will introduce students to the long history of Irish literature, often relegated to a footnote or subsumed under the study of British literature broadly, from the medieval period until the contemporary era. Starting with the medieval Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley] and ending with Anna Burns’ 2018 masterpiece Milkman, this course will introduce students to the ways in which a colonial literature changes over time as Ireland, England’s first colony, is conquered and reconquered, rebels and revolts, and continues to confront the legacy of colonization as the nation remains divided between the North and the Republic today. Throughout the course, students will read texts written Jonathan Swift, Brian Ferriman, Peig Sayers, J.M. Synge, James Connolly, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien and others. This course will serve as a case study for students interested in literature of conflict, colonial and neo-colonial politics, and the fight for justice globally.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.375. Literary Studies as Data Science. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to variety of approaches to literary studies, underscoring their common interest in the nature of data, its collection, and its analysis. Materials are drawn from the fields of British empiricism, Law and Literature, Marxist and Foucauldian critique, the Birmingham School, New Criticism, Genre Studies, New Historicism, Structuralism, Systems theory, Russian formalism, computational analytics, and the Sociology of Literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.379. The Rhetoric of Black Radicalism. 3 Credits.
This course will focus on the history of black resistance to oppression and injustice from the early republic to the present through different forms of radical speech acts. The main question(s) that we will explore are as follows: how do radical speech acts shape and inform our understanding of social and political issues, including our very conception of the United States as a nation (and ourselves as a people)? In this course, we will investigate such questions through reading radical speeches and essays from a range of black activists and examining the principles of persuasion that help shape the relationship between polemical language and activism. This course will engage with writers and speakers such as Lemuel Haynes, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Alicia Garza.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.380. Poetics of Science: Romantic Literature. 3 Credits.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a famous parable about the limits of scientific endeavor, but it grew out of a culture where the line between science and literature was not at all secure, and writers often considered themselves in collaboration with the newest scientific disciplines. This course will follow that collaboration and debates that emerged in British Romanticism as the disciplines of geology, meteorology, anatomy, demography, evolutionary biology and Literature itself began to take their modern shape.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.381. The Asian American Novel. 3 Credits.
This course provides a foundation for reading Asian American novels. We will be discussing the origins of “Asian American” as a political coalition in the 1960s amidst a longer historical narrative of U.S. imperial and military projects and immigration policies that have influenced the racialization of those who identify with this multi-ethnic group. At the same time, we will be examining the limitations of this U.S.-centric perspective by rethinking the geopolitical spaces of both “Asia” and “the Americas” through transpacific and hemispheric lenses. Discussions will center around how the novel form could provide insight into linked social struggles and the new narratives of political community they imagine.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.384. The Contemporary Novel. 3 Credits.
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, writers of narrative fiction have been working furiously to keep up with the turbulence that global capitalism has visited on the world — war, political chaos, environmental catastrophe, massive forced migration and displacement — while trying to maintain ties to the techniques of narrative that gave the 19th century reality novel its successes and its prestige. In this course we will read a range of texts, mostly in translation, that stretch and deform those conventions in order to represent the lives and struggles of characters who are caught up in immense historical change. More and more often, novelists are choosing to depict characters drawn from what Marx would have called “surplus populations” — people for whom economic stability and personal safety are out of reach, partly because they are seen as not worth employing (or exploiting). Under these conditions, we will ask, is it only possible to tell tragic stories? What do happy endings look like? What do changes do character development and point of view have to undergo, for instance, to keep up with 21st-century history? Is realism still the best vehicle for telling these stories? Readings will include novels by Sally Rooney, Eduard Louis, Fernanda Melchor, Elena Ferrante, Marlon James, and Manoranjan Byapari, as well as secondary material by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, Jill Richards, and the Endnotes collective.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.385. U.S. Colonialism and Science Fiction. 3 Credits.
Recent scholarship has noted the persistence of a colonial gaze in science fiction’s imaginations of the future. In the US, the earliest proto-science fiction emerged out of pulp stories about the violent settlement of the post-bellum Midwest. Similarly, figures such as the “alien other” and tropes of space exploration were inseparable from turn-of-the-century US imperial ventures. At the same time, diverse forms of speculative fiction have flourished that challenge and reinterpret the colonial assumptions of the genre. This course will focus on the links between US imperialism, settler colonialism and the “other worlds” imagined by science fiction, and the ways that writers have deconstructed technologies of scientific racism and colonial domination. As we read texts from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, N. K. Jemisin, and watch Hollywood films like James Cameron’s Avatar or Marvel’s Black Panther, we will consider how science fiction raises provocative questions about the role of science and technology, race and gender in post-humanist imaginations, and the politics of futurity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.388. Old World/New World Women. 3 Credits.
The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.389. Emily Dickinson, Film, and Television. 3 Credits.
Emily Dickinson’s life and poetry has recently been the subject of movies, novels, art installations and TV series; fiction writers, poets, artists, screen-runners, and filmmakers have found their own voices in response to hers. To understand why she has been so popular, we will focus on the formal, historical and gendered aspects of her poetry. We will also watch some of the following: Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, Wild Nights. Exams are unlikely. Instead, expect close attention to your own writing, as we pay close attention to hers. The course will center on our conversation, which should be rigorous, stimulating, and entertaining.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.393. The Poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. 3 Credits.
Chaucer's poetry is timeless because he wrote so well that he always rewards reading (and the Middle English in which he wrote is very easy to master) and he is always worth reading because his poetry is at once so eye-opening and such a pleasure, a way of stretching our sense of the present by understanding (really understanding) the past. This class will pursue such understanding by paying particular attention to Chaucer's masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Our goal will be to learn to enjoy Chaucer's poetry by reading it carefully enough to take the full measure of what exactly it is about.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.395. Films about Writers, Novels about Film. 3 Credits.
In this course, we'll explore relations between media via films about writers and fictions about film. Along the way, we'll visit with an array of troubled wordsmiths, glittering stars, obsessive fans, and unscrupulous executives; in at least two or three cases, we'll read a novel about cinema and then watch that novel's own cinematic adaptation. Texts may include films by Billy Wilder, Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Cord Jefferson as well as fictions by Elizabeth Bowen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Manuel Puig, Abdellah Taïa, and Sharlene Teo.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.396. Anticolonial Thought. 3 Credits.
This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the early twentieth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the Americas and around the world, we consider the shifting claims of empires and the colonial subjects, anticolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations. We’ll focus largely on the Americas and the Caribbean, where the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and American empires all competed, but we’ll also consider these movements in their worldwide adventure, a “global” perspective that accounts for how processes of decolonization were understood in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere. Our focus will often be on manifestoes and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we’ll also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Lenin and DuBois’s calls to think about the relationship between racial capitalism and imperialism to Getino and Solanas’s revolutionary cinema protesting American neocolonialism, how have the claims of anticolonial political thought found their expression?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.405. WHO'S YOUR DADDY? Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Family. 3 Credits.
In this course we will read a selection of foundational texts by Sigmund Freud, and pair them with a cluster of literary works--the Oedipus Cycle of Sophocles, William Shakespeare’s tragic drama “Hamlet”, Henry James’s short novel “The Turn of the Screw,” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” and Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play”—which have inspired psychoanalytic ideas and multiple critical generations of psychoanalytic literary interpretation. The goal of this course is to acquaint you with the essential components of Freud’s theory, to assess the relationship of that theory to the literary models from which Freud drew inspiration, and to acquaint you with the variety of forms that psychoanalytic literary criticism has taken up to the present. Questions regarding paternity, maternity, sibling rivalry, the couple form and the nature of the family as a historically pervasive yet flexible psychic structure will orient, but not limit, our class discussions. Building out from psychoanalysis, we will conclude with a consideration of the family abolition argument.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.410. Art and Literature of Revolution in the Americas. 3 Credits.
This course asks how early 20th-century writers and artists in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean have pictured and imagined the histories of revolution in the Atlantic world. How did the Haitian and Mexican revolutions spur the art of the Harlem Renaissance? How did the writers and artists of the Black diaspora arrive at new histories of self-emancipation? Writers and artists to be considered include Elizabeth Catlett, Alejo Carpentier, Mariano Azuela,The course will be taught in the study room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and students will participate in the research for and production of an upcoming museum exhibition at the museum.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.411. Reading Romantically. 3 Credits.
The course is designed to question our assumptions about what counts as reading : what we read, to what ends and with what effects. The Romantic era (roughly 1750-1830) is particularly well suited to raise these questions, as it saw the shift to more private reading, greater social focus on literacy, new modes of mass distribution of print, as well as the cultivation of the idea of "literature." Even as so-called "literature" allied itself with print culture, it trained its audience to "read" rocks, and faces and skies, to interpret fragments and blanks, to equate reading with dreaming. Lingering in the eighteenth century for the first half of the course, we will encounter the culture of "lecture" and inscriptions, the guides to oratory and recitation, scrapbooks newspapers, and the slow move away from understanding reading as a fully embodied and shared phenomenon to an activity primarily of individual minds, with consequences that affect us still.This course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.416. Jane Austen. 3 Credits.
All of Austen's completed novels, as well as a selection of her letters. We will examine both her influence on the novel form, and her work's relation with her social context. We will also consider why Austen has such unprecedented cultural authority today. Open to both undergraduates and graduate students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.417. Black Print Culture. 3 Credits.
Students interested in Black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections, and will create an online exhibition. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.060.617, are not eligible to take AS.060.417.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.430. All That Jazz: African American Literature and Music, Origins through the 1950s. 3 Credits.
This course examines fiction writing, memoir, and film that engages the creation and meaning of jazz music. Beginning with writers who explore the late 19th experience of urban black musical cultures roughly designated “ragtime,” the course will offer a deep engagement with the representations of the “blues” and “swing” music of the long New Negro Movement between 1915 and 1940. The final section of the course considers the post-war novelists and memoirists who charted the emergence of the “Be bop” jazz musician as tragic hero, countermanding New Negro representations of entertainer par excellence. Each text will be paired with musical selections from a prominent artist. Questions of the political significance of music, black urban habitus, and musical codings of gender, race and sexuality as an oppositional or counter-hegemonic formation will be important to the course. The seminar will also have sessions to investigate key archival repositories in Baltimore, like the Eubie Blake Center and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. Texts and artists considered include: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Scot Joplin, Eubie Blake, Stomping the Blues, Bessie Smith, Satchmo, Louis Armstrong Hot Fives, Jazz, Duke Ellington, The Blacker the Berry, Fletcher Henderson, Home to Harlem, Ella Fitzgerald, Good Morning Blues, Count Basie, A Drop of Patience, Thelonius Monk, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday, Chico and Rita, Dizzy Gilespie&Chano Pozo, Night Song, Charlie Parker.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.436. Settler Colonialism: Theory, History, Literature. 3 Credits.
This seminar offers an introduction to a key concept in contemporary critical theory and literary and cultural studies: settler colonialism, understood as a specific form of colonialism undergirded by the expropriation of land and resources rather than the exploitation of labor and thereby involving the attempted elimination and replacement of Indigenous polities and societies by an invading force. The course will have a dual focus: 1) tracing the theoretical distinction of settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism and tracking the critique implicit in this distinction of dominant forms of leftism that arguably presuppose a settler-colonial frame of reference; 2) tracking the history of what James Belich has called the “Anglo settler revolution” of the nineteenth century and engaging in a comparative analysis of the literatures produced in the course of that revolution in what are now Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.060.636, are not eligible to take AS.060.436.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.444. From Papyrus to the PDF: The Transmission of Texts. 3 Credits.
Texts are conveyed to readers in songs, scrolls, books, and digital files. Some of them survive over extended periods because they are successfully transferred from one form to another, while others are frozen in the past, Many are lost altogether. The form in which a text is communicated often determines how it is read -or if it can be read at all. The study of texts as they move between readers and through time illuminates more than the history of the “book” though, since the medium of the message has often shaped how we understand all aspects of the humanities. This course surveys the long history of "books," paying attention to oral and scribal traditions as well as print and the digital, paying special attention to the interactions between materiality and social contexts.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.470. Humanities Research Lab: Port of Call - Baltimore. 3 Credits.
This course, conducted as a humanities research lab, will focus on the literature, history and future of the Port of Baltimore and its relation to other world seaports. We’ll start by exploring some great literary works focused on Baltimore’s harbor, and we’ll compare and connect them to works set in other port cities from New York City to Havana, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone. Alongside this, we’ll study the function of modern ports—their “critical logistics,” environmental challenges, and roles in creating civic imagination. We’ll conduct field visits at dredge facilities, marine terminals, and or sites of postindustrial redevelopment, and we will visit archives that record the changing shape of the port of Baltimore. This is a literature class because our big questions are fundamentally about stories: how do Baltimore and those who live or travel here tell the story of the seaport? What stories are missing? What does it mean to find or recover these stories? Answering those questions will also require us to learn and integrate historical and archival methods and observational and interview techniques, so students should bring to the class a spirit of curiosity and openness to collaboration and experimentation. Undergraduates Only.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.489. Performative Politics. 3 Credits.
Performative politics, political theater, politics as performance art — the language we use to describe politics today is often drawn from the performing arts and performance theory. In this course, through readings in drama and performance theory, and through performance-minded attention to political events, we will study what theater scholar Janelle Reinelt and politics scholar Shirin Rai have called the shared “grammar of politics and performance.” Case studies will center on US politics since World War II, but students are invited and welcome to bring their knowledge of other periods and cultures to the conversation. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.501. Independent Study. 3 Credits.
This course is a semester-long independent research course for undergraduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.502. Independent Study. 1 - 3 Credits.
This course is a semester-long independent research course for undergraduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.509. Senior Essay. 3 Credits.
The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.521. Tidewater Initiative 1. 1 Credit.
This course is taken by students working with the Tidewater Initiative by permission of the Director of the Tidewater Initiative. For those in their first semester with the program.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.060.522. Tidewater Initiative 2. 2 - 3 Credits.
This course is taken by students working with the Tidewater Initiative by permission of the Director of the Tidewater Initiative. For those past their first semester with the program.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.060.602. Proseminar. 3 Credits.
This course is intended to train students in skills required by the discipline, help prepare them for a range of futures, and integrate them into the university community.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.606. The Single Author Seminar. 3 Credits.
What is the value and use of engaging deeply with a single author's work? Each member of the seminar will independently select an author to focus on for the semester based on their own research interests, and read a substantial body of the work of whatever author you choose. As a group, we will organize our discussion by themes that can unite many writers: the canonical masterpiece, the 'forgotten' minor work; historical context. We'll also address collaboration, institutional history, and other challenges to the individual author as a meaningful object of study. This seminar will provide practice in engaging in scholarly conversation that does not revolve around shared primary texts.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.608. The Humanities in Ruins. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar will examine the long history, dating back to the eighteenth century, of reflection on the nature of the modern university and the place of the humanities within it. With a focus on the much-discussed “crisis” of the contemporary humanities, it will examine the emergence and evolution of the humanistic disciplines. Have the humanities in the academy always been in crisis? What could this possibly mean and what does it imply about how we practice the humanities today?
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.611. Method. 3 Credits.
The past few years have seen several consequential texts investigating the methods of literary criticism: writing by John Guillory, Jonathan Kramnick, Anaheid Nercessian, Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh, and others have responded forcibly to both longstanding disciplinary debates and newly pressing economic forces. Among the most notable features of this discussion has been a new attention to writing as the medium of method; while drawing on a long theoretical history (likely to include work by Weber and Adorno) we will spend a good deal of time with the methodogical implications of contemporary critical prose.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.615. Literature and Early Modern Human Rights. 3 Credits.
Today human rights and capabilities are two intertwined concepts, each subject to contemporary critique. In the early modern period, these were much debated and literature was a key site for the development of these imperfect, variable and contested discourses. Reading literary works from the European tradition, in particular in Europeans' engagement with dissident groups both within (women, religious dissidents, the Irish) and outside Europe (Ottoman, African, American), we will explore themes of: exclusion, embodiment, risk, vulnerability, and the languages and practices of equivalence and domination in the variable discourses of humanitarianism, population and resource management and natural law in authors including Shakespeare, Grotius, Montaigne, Hobbes, Behn, Locke, Astell, Swift, Montagu and Defoe.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.617. Black Print Culture. 3 Credits.
Students interested in black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.618. Milton. 3 Credits.
Close reading and reconsideration of the poetry and prose of John Milton, with an eye to readings and possibilities opened up by current critical approaches.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.623. The Sentimental Imagination. 3 Credits.
This course will explore the literature of sentimentality and theorizations of the sentimental from the eighteenth century to our own moment. A major focus will be the flexibility of the designator “sentimental” (is all writing sentimental?) and relations between sentimentality and related forms and terms (melodrama, excess, affect).
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.630. All That Jazz: African American Literature and Music, Origins through the 1950s. 3 Credits.
This course examines fiction writing, memoir, poetry, and film that usefully encounters African American writings on jazz music in conversation with the recordings of selected jazz musicians. Beginning with writers who explore the late 19th experience of urban black musical cultures roughly designated “ragtime,” the course will offer a deep engagement with the representations of the “blues” and “swing” music of the long New Negro Movement between 1915 and 1940. The final section of the course considers the post-war novelists and memoirists who charted the emergence of the “Be bop” jazz musician as tragic hero, countermanding New Negro representations of jazz musician and vocalist as entertainers par excellence.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.060.430 are not eligible to take AS.060.630.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.632. Conjugality and Early Modern Imaginaries. 3 Credits.
This course considers the 'conjugal imaginary' in early modern European religious, scientific, economic, and political thought. Readings in early modern literature (More, Erasmus, Shakepseare, Milton, Cavendish, Behn, Locke, Astell) as well as theorists of family, feminism, and sexuality (Engels, Foucault, Cooper, Butler, Lowe, Kottman, Federici, Wynter). Topics include: the ‘sexual contract’ and patriarchalism; the 'private' as opposed to the 'public' sphere; the disciplining of the body; the establishment of racialized and gendered categories of humans; the definition of labor as production or reproduction; coercion and consent; the new anthropological logics regarding the global (in cross-confessional intimacies or with with partners outside Europe); and the new sciences of population and economies of resource management that shaped the emergent colonial logics. We will ask how early modern sexual regimes of consigning the family and sexuality to the intimate and economic spheres shape the meaning of politics in the period 1500-1700.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.634. Warfare, Welfare Windrush: Literature in Britain at Mid-Century. 3 Credits.
It has lately been recognized that the middle of the twentieth century was a period of exceptional literary invention. The 1930s through the 1960s gave us challenging, fascinating, sometimes infuriating texts that offer crucial windows onto the birth of the postwar world order and thus into the life of our own time. This course will examine British mid-century writing addressing the aftermath of World War II, the rise of the welfare state, and the “colonization in reverse” that brought the Windrush writers from the Caribbean to England. Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, T.S. Eliot, Richard Hoggart, George Lamming, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, and John Wyndham.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.654. The Romance. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar takes a long view of the romance—the genre of literary imagination, par excellence—as originating and recurring in the Anglo world as a crucial technology of settler indigenization on stolen land and also of Indigenous resistance to settler fantasies of realization, from twelfth-century Norman England and Ireland to nineteenth-century North America and Australasia. Texts may include: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; Wace, Roman de Brut; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Simon Pokagon, Queen of the Woods; Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.656. The Novel as Philosopher of History. 3 Credits.
This course will explore the intersection between philosophies of history and theories of the novel. We will be examining the novel’s function not only as an aesthetic and philosophical object, but also as a self-conscious historical artifact. The first part of the course will include readings of from history, philosophy, and literary theory to explore various perspectives on how the novel has been both shaper and receptacle of history, while the second part will delve into close-readings of several primary texts—a historical novel, an experimental novel, and a graphic novel—to investigate the different ways in which this protean form has been mobilized to engage with questions about the relationship between aesthetic form and historical knowledge.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.658. 1922 and Its Neighbors. 3 Credits.
A course focusing on works published in the _annus mirabilis_ of modernism, 1922, and the years nearby. In addition to reading these texts in detail, we’ll consider what it means to periodize at a granular level and how our primary texts and theoretical readings take up the problem of the neighbor as well as questions of of hospitality, community, social obligation, and domesticity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.659. Bodies on Stage in Early Modern Drama. 3 Credits.
This course analyzes the staging of the human body, up to and including that body’s capacity to fragment, die, transform, and merge with its surroundings, across a range of early modern drama, from anonymous playwrights, Udall, Lyly, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Heminge and others. Concurrently, we shall read and respond to relevant texts on theater and embodiment in primary philosophy, literary criticism, and recent early modern literary scholarship, with a particular focus on animality, race, gender and disability. What is dramatic form? What does the imagined or projected integrity of literary form have to do with normative expectations about the integrity of the human body? How do forms of bodily difference inflect, challenge or complicate the stability of those norms? Possible secondary authors include Aristotle, Nicholas Abraham, Gail Kern Paster, Lynn Enterline, Karen Raber, Eoin Price, Noemie Ndiaye, Andy Kesson, Katherine Schaap Williams, Ian Smith, and Aaron Kunin.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.660. Metaphor and Violence. 3 Credits.
Pushing off from Samuel Johnson’s allegation that in Donne’s poetry “heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together”, this seminar will reconsider the status of metaphor and the nature of authorial agency. Can metaphors themselves enact violence? Or is such a question a category mistake? This seminar will build out from the intuition that figurative assemblage and social hierarchy are necessarily related, but it does not presume in advance that we all agree about how this relationship works. We will read an array of divergent accounts of how metaphors operate across literary criticism, rhetoric, and the philosophy of language (Aristotle, early modern rhetorical manuals, as well as Lakoff, Black, Davidson, Donoghue), and we will consider key metaphoric relationships (body as landscape, orgasm as death, kingdom as family, love as slavery, sexual violence as hunting) as they surface in early modern literature. Literary texts will include poetry by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Marvell and Pope.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.664. Logics of Sacrifice. 3 Credits.
This seminar will investigate the staging of sacrifice at the border between scripture and literature. Imagined variously as a crucial site of affective investment, a bloody spectacle of corporeal destruction and a means of familial or communal rescue, sacrifice connects the history and theory of religious doctrine to political questions of sovereign power and aesthetic questions of form and genre. In this graduate seminar we will examine a sequence of sacrificial scenes primarily from classical literature, Hebrew scripture and early modern literature. We will conclude with a final discussion of contemporary art and culture. Across these transhistorical discussions, we will study and test the affordances of an array of theories of sacrifice. What forms of agency are modeled by the available logics of sacrifice? How does sacrifice operate across drama, lyric poetry and the early novel? Can we refuse the logic of sacrifice? Possible texts and authors include: Euripides’ “Hecuba” and “Iphigenia at Aulis”, late medieval passion plays on the death of Jesus, George Buchanan’s “Jephtha”, John Lyly’s “Gallathea”, William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” and “The Merchant of Venice”, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”, George Herbert’s “The Temple”, John Milton’s “The Passion”, Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko”, and philosophical and theoretical writings by Søren Kierkegaard, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Rene Girard, Eugenie Brinkema and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.669. Desiring Poems. 3 Credits.
What do we want from poems? What does literary criticism have to do with desire? How might we understand the relationship between literary critics and texts, authors, and characters as an ambivalent, fraught and complex space of attachment? Focusing on poetry, this course will read a sequence of early modern lyric poems and shorter narrative poems and a transhistorical array of critical writings in which the interpretation of poetry is brought into relation with other forms of attachment, cathexis, and longing. Authors and texts will include: Plato, “Phaedo”; Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love; Heather Love, “Emotional Rescue”; Sigmund Freud on sublimation; Sappho; Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet; Shakespeare’s sonnets; Oscar Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W.H.”; John Donne, Holy Sonnets; Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne; George Herbert ,”The Temple”; Aaron Kunin, Love Three; Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions; Keats’ Odes; Anahid Nersessian, Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.679. Realism: Theory and Practice. 3 Credits.
This seminar will offer an in-depth examination of the theory and practice of the nineteenth-century realist novel in three traditions: American, British, and French. Our aim will be to understand the central theories and controversies surrounding realism, as well as to interrogate the centrality of realism to novel theory and narrative theory. Authors will likely include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Frank Norris and William Dean Howells. Theorists and critics will likely include Erich Auerbach, M. M. Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, René Girard, Roman Jakobson, Henry James, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukács, Boris Tomashevsky, Ian Watt and Émile Zola.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.683. Literature and Social Theory. 3 Credits.
What if the social doesn't just "contain" literature but takes its cues from it? This course will address the fundamental and ongoing questions about the way people live and the role of social practice in defining, producing, and using literature. In this course we will ask about the material production of texts; about the role of readers in appropriating them; about the alliance of literature to class and institutional settings; about the human interactions that literature models for us and their problems; and about the connection between literary studies and globalization. Rather than regard “the social” as simply a shorthand for “social problems,” and literature’s relationship to it as merely indexical or diagnostic, we will explore more complex versions of both sociality and its relationship to literature. Course materials takes up bodies of knowledge that fall in the contact zone between sociology and literary theory—Marxian hermeneutics, discourse-network theory, media studies, book history, narratology, object-oriented ontologies, and systems theory--and assess their worth for changing conversations in literary studies without rendering literary criticism obsolete. In fact, we will seriously consider the idea that literary criticism has much to say about truly complex sociological and social phenomena, and conditions of modernity, perhaps doing sociology better than sociology in its present form. Another question we will ask is if Kantian aesthetics can be reconciled with Bourdieuian sociology, studying pieces of interpretation and theory that do exactly that. Aside from many canonical sociological texts, students will be given a solid introduction to British Cultural Studies, the Frankfurt School, Poststructuralism, Affect Studies, and Book History.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.684. Modernism and Human Value. 3 Credits.
This course considers modernist and modernism-adjacent texts that raise questions not only about human values but also about the very value of humanity or human beings in the world or the cosmos. Writers to be studied may include Richard Jefferies, Rabindranath Tagore, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mourning Dove, Graham Greene, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens, and Olaf Stapledon.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.687. Literature and Political Geography. 3 Credits.
Across the Western literary tradition that forms the inheritance of the European literary renaissance, classical voyages of discovery, settlement, or return had long furnished the stuff of major literary genre of epic, with the Biblical figure of Exodus prizing movement into promised territory, wandering and arrival. Yet how is space also an assumption of polity that must be invented, a biopolitics, a zoopolitics, and a mediation of flow? We take these questions of space to understand the pre-history of European modernity around the making of enclosed space(s), exploring the fierce debate in early modernity about the political organization of space, the borders or walls that shield or exclude (as in the city, the nation, the home, the prison, the church, the plantation), and to consider concepts of border and flow. We will focus on English works by Milton, Bradstreet, and Cavendish, and sharpen these questions with critical thinkers Foucault, Derrida, Latour, Sassen, Soja, and Stoler, among others. The class welcomes students whose interests lie primarily in national literatures other than English, who may write their final papers on primary texts and literatures not discussed in class, but that must engage the theoretical texts assigned for the seminar.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.689. The Performance of Politics. 3 Credits.
When someone says that a politician is being “theatrical” or that a protestor is following a “script,” it is rarely meant as a compliment—but why? The implication is that true politics is never theatrical, never scripted, never performed, never entangled with spectacle. Put so baldly, this claim is hard to believe. If, instead, we take for granted that all politics is performed, we are left with several unanswered questions. What would an eye trained on performance (theater, dance, film, comedy, spoken word, etc.) see in our politics that someone else would not? Are there distinct performance traditions in politics, as there are in the performing arts? How do activists and office-holders enter these traditions, learn their ways, and apply them in everyday settings? How are civilians expected (or trained) to engage with this performance of politics—either as spectators or co-performers? What are the key genres of political performance, and what should citizens, activists, and other engaged people know about them? This course surveys key concepts in performance theory (e.g., theatricality, performativity, ritual, play) and asks students to apply these tools to two things: political events and performance-based works of art. Case studies will center around US political and performance history, and may include: the origins of US liberal-democratic political culture in stoical forms of theater, the theatricality of the Civil Rights movement, and the recent transformation of transgressive play from a radical-left to a far-right style of political performance. Students will be invited to bring their expertise in other periods and other political/performance cultures, and to help sharpen our analysis by testing our ideas against those alternate contexts.
AS.060.690. Fascism in Theory and Practice. 3 Credits.
“Fascism” has returned to the political vocabulary of the times suddenly and without much intellectual preparation. This graduate seminar proposes to put on a firmer conceptual footing the possibility of understanding the present political and social crisis as the “return” of fascism as a political culture across the Euro-American world and beyond. We shall examine historical and contemporary developments in (and encounter texts from) a range of regions across the world: Western Europe, the United States, Russia, and India. We shall read works of literature, theory and philosophy, literary and linguistic analysis, and sociology by such figures as Sinclair Lewis, Bertolt Brecht, Filippo Marinetti, Julius Evola, Ezra Pound, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood, and Alexander Dugin, among others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.060.691. The World Viewed. 3 Credits.
This course will be devoted to reading Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, a book which occupies an influential but anomolous place in both film theory and philosophy. We’ll read some of the film theory on which the book draws, and watch some of the films to which it refers, but most of our time will be spent patiently studying the book itself. In most seminars and in exam preparation one is trained in the necessary skills of reading more, and reading quickly; this seminar, by contrast, will require that you read slowly and intensely. No previous knowledge of film theory is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.693. Literary and Economic Value. 3 Credits.
This seminar is designed to explore some fresh ways of bridging what seems like the gap between “value” in the sense of our value judgements about literary works, and “value” in the economic sense – especially in Marx’s sense of value as a social relationship, rather than a quantity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.697. Enchantment and Inquiry. 3 Credits.
This course explores texts from the 19th and 20th centuries that query the distinction between magical, occult, and supernatural discourses and scientific and rational inquiry. Modernism has often been seen to usher in a new and thoroughly disenchanted literature. But this view overlooks texts from across the wider period that challenge the boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘heterodox’ knowledges. Ranging across genres including experimental literatures, life writing, ghost stories and folk tales this course explores how and why writers such as H.G. Wells, Vernon Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Shirley Jackson, R.K. Narayan, and J.M. Coetzee imagine the re-enchantment of the world.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.800. Independent Study. 5 - 10 Credits.
This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.
AS.060.803. Pre-Dissertation Summer Work. 9 Credits.
This course is for English graduate students who are pre-candidacy and need to be credited for work over the summer.
AS.060.811. TA Apprenticeship. 1 Credit.
For English PhD students in their first spring semester. They will get their first bit of experience with TAship responsibilities.
AS.060.822. Teaching Assistant. 3 Credits.
For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.
AS.060.833. Third-Year Teaching. 3 Credits.
For English PhD students/candidates in their third year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.
AS.060.839. Independent Study for Oral Exam Preparation. 6 Credits.
This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams
AS.060.855. Fifth-Year Teaching. 3 Credits.
For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.
AS.060.857. Fifth-Year Service. 3 Credits.
For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively performing an administrative/service role with the program/department or university that precludes any teaching responsibilities.
AS.060.859. Fifth-Year Fellowship. 3 Credits.
For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. For those who receive external funding and will neither do the expected teaching or participate in any kind of departmental service as required.
AS.060.881. Dissertation Prospectus Workshop. 3 Credits.
For English PhD students who have successfully passed their exam and have entered "candidacy." The DGS will host workshops over the course of the spring to help with writing the dissertation prospectus that will outline their dissertation project.
AS.060.883. Dissertation Prospectus Writing. 6 Credits.
For English PhD students who have successfully passed their exam and have entered "candidacy." This indicates they are actively writing/working on their dissertation prospectus that will outline their dissertation project.
AS.060.893. Individual Research. 3 - 9 Credits.
This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.
AS.060.895. Journal Club. 1 Credit.
SA.903.728. English for Academic Purposes I.
This non-credit, 10-week course is designed for students whose first language is not English. It is suitable for those preparing for the English Proficiency Speaking Exam as well as for students who have already passed. Weekly sessions help students refine their academic speaking skills, enabling them to communicate effectively and confidently in SAIS courses, in the English Proficiency Speaking Exam, and in their future careers. This advanced speaking course provides students with all the skills they need to deliver well-structured presentations and to participate effectively in nuanced discussions. Students develop advanced elaboration techniques to discuss complex issues in depth, provide persuasive examples and data, and foster the logical flow of ideas. Additionally, students gain an understanding of analytical modes which allows them to enhance their ability to develop arguments by considering implications, making evaluations, and providing recommendations.
SA.903.729. English for Academic Purposes II.
This advanced speaking course provides students with all the skills they need to deliver well-structured presentations and to participate effectively in nuanced discussions. Students develop advanced elaboration techniques to discuss complex issues in depth, provide persuasive examples and data, and foster the logical flow of ideas. Additionally, students gain an understanding of analytical modes which allows them to enhance their ability to develop arguments by considering implications, making evaluations, and providing recommendations.
SA.999.401. Pre-Term English Listening & Speaking.
Listening & SpeakingThe course provides students with the opportunity to hone and refine their listening and speaking skills before the semester begins. Listening comprehension is developed through audios and videos of academic presentations. Speaking skills will be practiced through discussions, debates, and formal presentations. Vocabulary specific to SAIS-related disciplines (politics, history, energy, economics, development,?etc.) is of prime importance. The acquisition of high-level academic vocabulary is emphasized, as is the correct use of advanced grammar, syntax, and usage points. Advanced grammar points are reviewed as the need arises. As the course is student-centered, the class progress depends largely on interactive dynamics of participation and collaboration. Students who meet all the requirements and pass the course will receive either a "HP" (high pass) or "P" (pass) on their transcript.
Cross Listed Courses
Center for Africana Studies
AS.362.201. African American Poetry and Poetics. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will follow the development of black poetry primarily as it has evolved in the United States. Beginning with the first published African American writers of the eighteenth century and ending with several important poets writing and performing today, we will consider the shape of the African American poetic tradition as commonly anthologized and as defined by our own theoretically-informed readings of the assigned literature. Attention will be given to both canonical and neglected literary movements and groups. Readings will include poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris, and others.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.311. Black Utopias. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will read literary and historical texts that present visions of black utopia. Authors include “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), Marcus Garvey, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.402. Arts and Social Justice Practicum. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking. It also provides students an opportunity to explore the history and legacies of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary intersections of art and social justice in Baltimore City. Local artists and scholars will share their expertise using art to challenge social injustice. In turn, students will examine their personal creative practices and how they can be used to create and advocate for change. Throughout the semester, students will develop individual art projects that respond to course topics and are rooted in the principles and process of social practice art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Center for Economy and Society
AS.197.214. The Moral Life of Mining. 3 Credits.
This course takes South Africa as a point of departure for a broader investigation of how mining shapes morality in modern life. Focusing on diamond and gold mining between the late-nineteenth century and the present day, we will read across different and sometimes contradictory frameworks for posing questions of right and wrong, e.g. Christian theology, moral economy, moral reasoning, Black Consciousness philosophy, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Our syllabus will draw from a wide range of fields and genres, including Calvinist and liberation theology, literary fiction, social and economic history, political speeches, and corporate mission statements, and include visual as well as written texts. Students will also have the chance to converse with guest speakers who have historical, scientific, and/or industry expertise in mining on the African continent. The overarching course objective is to understand how the problem of mining in Africa – in all its exploitation and innovation, ground-level grime and c-suite extravagance – has shaped evolving and conflicting moral vocabularies.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Classics
AS.040.321. Women in Greek Drama: Feminist Perspectives from Text to Stage. 3 Credits.
This course explores the portrayal of women in ancient Greek drama through the lenses of feminist theory, gender studies, and the intersection of performance and gender. By analyzing key passages from significant texts and contextualizing them within their social, cultural, and theoretical frameworks, students will examine how ancient narratives about women continue to resonate with contemporary gender issues. The course will culminate in the creation of a theatrical piece—a compilation of women's monologues from ancient Greek drama—allowing students to design, adapt, and perform their interpretations in a final performance.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.040.349. Reading Homer, Iliad. 3 Credits.
This course proposes an in-depth exploration of Homer’s Iliad in translation. Our goal will be to learn the skill of slow reading in order to gain a fuller understanding of the poem. We will study, on average, two books per week. Core topics include: understanding the tradition of oral poetry out of which the Iliad emerged in the 8th century BCE, the past it evokes, and the historical and social context in which – and in response to which - it grew. We will examine the poem’s extraordinarily complex structure and self-positioning within the so-called ‘epic cycle’, as well as themes it treats, including: kingship and reciprocity, the role of honour and glory, family, death, memory, and – most poignantly of all - the role of song and art in the midst of war. The course will be writing intensive, and will require the submission of a short piece of critical writing each week.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.040.619. Epics and Empire: Postcolonial Perspectives on Vergil’s Aeneid. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar (welcoming advanced undergrads with instructor permission) examines epic literature’s entanglements with empire, colonialism, ethnicity, indigeneity, and slavery via critical readings of Vergil’s Aeneid. Students will gain methodological and pragmatic familiarity with movements to ‘decolonize’ and globalize the study of antiquity. As a counterbalance to Classics’ historical service to imperialism, we will read Vergil alongside other literary epics on race, identity, and belonging, representing diverse global languages, belief systems, geographies, and positionalities. We will also survey classics of postcolonial thought, from Fanon to Hartman, and apply their theories and methods to primary sources. Our hope is to incubate reparative approaches to the Aeneid and epic literature while also evaluating novel methodologies of comparison, reception, resistant interpretation, and critical fabulation. Classics graduate students will read the Aeneid in Latin. Undergraduate and non-Classics graduate students may read in translation but should plan on substantial engagement with an additional epic of their choice. All will hone professional skills as they produce a final research paper suitable for conference presentation or open-access web publication on race-time.net.
Comparative Thought and Literature
AS.300.222. Acting by Accident in Literature and Film. 3 Credits.
When is an action just an accident--and when should it be called intentional? What about a double murder that is planned to look accidental … but goes very wrong in practice? And who is responsible in these situations? This course explores these and other fascinating stories of planned actions, accidents, and unintended consequences. Reading and watching twentieth-century literature and movies, we will follow a range of different creators as they think about what an intentional action is and is not, and how accidents impact how we understand our world. What can these works tell us about how we intend, act, or make meaning at the limits of our control? Texts will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Justine Triet, and fiction by Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Wright, James Cain, and Patricia Highsmith.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.300.311. God and Modern Literature. 3 Credits.
Modernity has often been described as the age in which God has died. But concern with the nature and experience of divinity pervades modern literary texts. In this course we will sample a variety of works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that investigate the possibilities and limitations of religious belief under the conditions of modernity. Authors to be read include Kierkegaard, G. M. Hopkins, George Eliot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Solvej Balle, and Jon Fosse. This class counts towards the requirements of a text-based course for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.319. Fictions at Work. 3 Credits.
When you are working for a business, how do you distinguish your ideas, actions, and responsibilities from the firms’—if that is even possible? What is corporate culture or a corporate person, and how is it similar or different from any other kind of culture or person? These and related questions inspired and fascinated writers from the nineteenth century through the present. By reading and thinking about short stories, novels, films, and a play, we will explore these issues and potential resolutions to them. The course especially considers how problems of action, agency, and responsibility in capitalism become an intriguing challenge for writers and filmmakers. Texts by Herman Melville, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, and George Saunders, and David Mamet; films Charlie Chaplin, Boots Riley, Kitty Green, and Bong Joon-ho.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.300.323. Shakespeare and Ibsen. 3 Credits.
William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in Updated description: the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied by Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest; by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder. As part of the course, we will try to organize at least one excursion to a Shakespeare or Ibsen performance in the Baltimore-D.C. area. This class counts towards the requirement of text-based courses for the minor in comparative thought and literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.336. Forms of Moral Community: The Contemporary World Novel. 3 Credits.
Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.300.337. The Tragic Tradition. 3 Credits.
This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, de la Barca, Racine, Goethe, Strindberg, Lorca, and Beckett.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.346. Revolution in Theatre, 1880-1930. 3 Credits.
The years 1880-1930 constitutes one of the most intense periods of experimentation in Western drama. We will look closely at texts and performance practices from this time to trace how dramatists upended the conventions that had governed the theatre since the time of Shakespeare and imposed a completely new understanding of the artform. Authors to be read will include August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W. B. Yeats, Sophie Treadwell, Luigi Pirandello, Federico García Lorca.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.349. Capitalism and Tragedy: from the 18th Century to Climate Change. 3 Credits.
In contemporary discussions of climate change, it is an increasingly prevalent view that capitalism will lead to the destruction of civilization as we know it. The notion that capitalism is hostile to what makes human life worth living, however, is one that stretches back at least to the early eighteenth century. In this class, we will examine key moments in the history of this idea in works of literature, philosophy, and politics, from the birth of bourgeois tragedy in the 1720s, through topics such as gender, imperialism, and economic exploitation, to the prospects of our ecological future today. Authors to be studied will include: Lillo, Balzac, Marx and Engels, Ibsen, Brecht, Heidegger, Achebe, and current politics, philosophy, theology and film on climate change.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.355. Literature and the Idea of Nature. 3 Credits.
This course traces the changing idea of nature and our relation to it. We will study this topic through the close attention to a variety of exemplary literary texts from a range of different historical situations. These include drama, poetry, novels, and essays, as well as topics such as renaissance pastorals, the dream of dominating our environment through mechanical reason, the idealization of nature in romantic poetry, and contemporary confrontations with our planet’s sixth mass extinction, climate change, and problems of environmental justice. We will read texts by Tasso, Shakespeare, Defoe, Hölderlin, Leopardi, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, Hemingway, Carson, Albee, as well as writings in current ecological humanities.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.372. Children’s Literature and the Self: From Fairy Tales to Science-Fiction. 3 Credits.
- You know, Hela, you’re an anxious human being. She:- I’m a human being?- Why, of course. You’re not a puppy.She pondered. After a long pause, surprised:- I’m a human being. I’m Hela. I’m a girl. I’m Polish. I’m mommy’s little daughter, I’m from Warsaw…. What a lot of things I am!Janusz Korczak, Ghetto DiaryThis course isn’t what you expect. We will tackle painful topics: orphanhood, loneliness, jealousy, death. You will learn that “Snow White expresses, more perfectly than any other fairy-tale, the idea of melancholy” (Adorno). We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will not watch any Disney films. Who is a child? “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today,” wrote in 1919 Janusz Korczak, pediatrician, and children’s author who believed in children’s rights. We will read folk tales, authorial fairy tales (Oscar Wilde), fantasy books (Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls) and science-fiction (Stanislaw Lem’s Fables for Robots). We will also investigate the special connection between children and animals (Juan Rámon Jimenez, Margaret Wise Brown). Many iconic children’s literature characters, such as Peter Pan, “a Betwixt-and-Between,” Little Prince, and Pippi Longstocking, are outsiders. All along we will consider how children’s literature reflects and shapes ideas of selfhood, from archetypal to post-humanistic ones.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.402. What is a Person? Humans, Corporations, Robots, Trees. 3 Credits.
Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.405. Illness across Cultures: The Ethics of Pain in Literature and Film. 3 Credits.
Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.300.418. The Modernist Novel: James, Woolf, and Joyce. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.300.429. Literature of the Everyday: The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. 3 Credits.
The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this course, we will closely read a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy, and Woolf from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.116 are not eligible to take AS.300.429.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
AS.300.618. What is a Person? Humans, Corporations, Robots, Trees.. 3 Credits.
Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.300.623. Modern American Poetry: Engaging Forms. 3 Credits.
A dive into the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes (among a few others), exploring American modernism’s aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations. How do these texts’ formal ambitions engage with philosophical thinking as well as social concerns and political theorizing? Writing assignments: two short presentation papers and either two 10-12 pages papers or one, multi-drafted, 20-25-page seminar paper.
AS.300.629. Theory, Now and Then: Autonomy, Form, Critique. 3 Credits.
This course explores recent developments and disputes in critical theory in relation to their longer philosophical genealogies. The three topics—autonomy, form, and critique—have been the subject of much recent debate, contention, and new analysis, yet each was also a source of critical and philosophical interest in years past. Our aim will be to make sense of today’s exciting and controversial interventions in conversation with earlier theory. “Historical” theory writing will include Poe, Adorno, Benjamin, Lukács, Cavell, R. Williams, Shklovsky, and Jameson; contemporary theory will include Stephen Best, Barbara Fields, Sharon Marcus, Walter Benn Michaels, Sianne Ngai, Nicholas Brown, Rita Felski, Caroline Levine, Mark McGurl, and Toril Moi.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, & Colonialism
AS.305.288. The Aesthetics of Resistance. 3 Credits.
This course surveys the stories and storytellers of key moments of resistance or revolution, such as the 1848 Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, the 1968 Student Movement, Occupy, Arab Spring, and Women Life Freedom. We will critically examine how such moments are, or become, narratives and how, as such, they may or may not acquire afterlives. To this end we will investigate a variety of materials, produced from a variety of points of view: the press, participants, observers, commentators, instigators, theorists, and those reconstructing the events after the fact as histories or fictions. Key themes include notions of personhood, citizenship, solidarity, equality, and futurity, as well as the aesthetics of how social uprisings are represented in a variety of media. Readings might include texts by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, C.L.R James, Peter Weiss, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Audre Lorde, Joshua Clover, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
First Year Seminars
AS.001.100. FYS: What is the Common Good?. 3 Credits.
What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What does Aristotle’s theory of the common good teach us? Or the Federalist Papers, the design of Baltimore’s public transportation system, meritocracy in higher education, the perniciousness of pandemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons, restorative justice, or intimate love? Drawing from film, journal articles, literature, and other sources—authors/creators include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Sandel, and more—this First-Year Seminar is as much about how we ask and interrogate challenging, timeless questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging our material and each other, we will work together to hone the habits of scholarly inquiry essential to this practice: reading, writing, talking. The seminar will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map, and manifest, versions of the common good.
AS.001.192. FYS: How Not to be Afraid of Poetry. 3 Credits.
What is poetry? And why don't we like it? Can poetry save the world? Can it save us? This seminar will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary, something necessary to our world. Assignments will include attending to details small and large in poems, doing a recitation, becoming an expert about a single poet, exploring banned poems, attending poetry events (JHU poetry readings, attending the Baltimore International Poe Festival, visiting the Poe sites, going to bookstores), keeping a poetry journal that you will submit three times over the course of the term, and creating an anthology of poems (group or individual) for a final project. The class is a seminar, and requires you to talk and think aloud: requirements are attendance, class participation, a poetry recitation (weeks 4-6), a presentation of your chosen poet (Weeks 9-11), and a group final project presentation (last day of class).
AS.001.205. FYS: Games: History, Theory, and Practice. 3 Credits.
From game theory to gamification, games have become a central part of everyday life. More and more, in fields as diverse as economics, entertainment, and education, the game has become the principal model for interpreting and interacting with the social world, and with ourselves. This First-Year Seminar will look at the history of games in the modern world, with an eye to understanding their increasing prominence in the 20th and 21st centuries. What social and technological changes brought about this shift? And yes -- we will play, and seek to analyze, some games as well (both analog and digital).
AS.001.235. FYS: Painting, Poetry, and the Novel. 3 Credits.
Poets, novelists, and essayists have gravitated to painting and its powers as a way of testing the powers of their own medium; the visual arts have served them as stimulus and challenge. This course broadly concerns the relation of these two art forms; more narrowly, it concerns attempts by writers to respond adequately to paintings that moved them We are likely to read work by Virgil Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, W,H. Auden, Mark Doty, and Rainer Maria Rilke; and study paintings by Cezanne, Klee, Brueghel, Morisot, Turner, and Monet.
History
AS.100.275. Passing in American Culture. 3 Credits.
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.323. Malcolm and Martin: Evolutionary Revolutionaries. 3 Credits.
This is a seminar-style course devoted to the writings attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (El-Hajj El-Malik Shabazz). While the two the key African American male icons of the Civil Rights Movement era gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, they are typically discussed as representing two ideological camps: racial integration deeply committed to the idea of American exceptionalism and democratic perfection, and black nationalism, a non-state ideological move that adjudged the U.S. nation state on the same terms as any other imperial power. We will explore these binaries in their thought and the social movements connected to them and also engage with multiple cinematic representations of the two figures that have carried them forward into contemporary times.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.354. Playing in the White: Black Writers, the Literary Colorline and Writing Whiteness. 3 Credits.
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.373. Crime, Punishment, Felony and Freedom: Law and Society in Premodern England, 1066 to 1688. 3 Credits.
This course explores the development of English law and the English legal tradition from the Norman Conquest through the English Revolution (ca. 1066-1688). We will begin by tracing the impact of the Norman Conquest of England and examine the origins and development of English legal and political institutions such as kingship, the common law, the evolution of legal procedure, and the court and jury system, ideas of franchise, treason and the emergence of Parliament. We will also consider how English law constructs legal categories including aliens, women, heirs, traitors as well as the legal framework for the emergence of the English Church under the Tudors. When applicable the implications of these institutions for developments in the contemporary American and British legal systems will be addressed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.655. Reading Seminar in Black Women's History. 3 Credits.
The second part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines a variety of historical traditions in the field of black women’s history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
AS.100.672. Medieval Materialities: Objects, Ontologies, Texts and Contexts. 3 Credits.
We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
AS.010.483. Three Artists (Three Sick Women): Art, Illness, Death. 3 Credits.
What happens when the artist becomes sick? How does illness become the subject of artistic practice? And what does art concerned with sickness tell us about the entanglement of gender and medicine in contemporary life?This course draws inspiration from Anne Wagner’s book, Three Artists, Three Women (1996), in which she explores an expectation that undergirds modernist art history: that the work of artists who are also women must reveal their femininity. We take up the challenge to this normative expectation with the work of three artists (who happened also to be three sick women) active in the post Second World War period. A German-Jewish immigrant to the US, Eva Hesse is known today for the fragile latex sculptures she made before dying from a brain tumor. Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish concentration camp survivor, employed her sculptural practice of body casting to index the symptoms and effects of her metastatic breast cancer. Hannah Wilke, an American feminist performance artist, painstakingly documented her treatments for terminal lymphoma. These artists’ careful explorations of their bodies and their illnesses trouble assumptions about femininity and feminism in the late twentieth century. They also afford an introduction to post-minimalism in the US, nouveau réalisme is Europe, and international conceptual and performance art. We constellate their interconnected work with that of others whose practices are infused in diverse ways by illness and its permeable definition: Indira Allegra, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Yayoi Kusama, Wangechi Mutu, David Wojnarowicz, Florentina Holzinger.Readings in art history will be complemented with historical and contemporary approaches in feminist theory and critical disability studies, as well as a selection of literary and hybrid-form writings on art, illness, and death, including: Ingeborg Bachmann, Johanna Hedva, Audre Lorde, Paul Preciado, Gillian Rose.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.010.683, are not eligible to take AS.010.483
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Interdepartmental
AS.360.304. Introduction to Computational Humanities. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students and researchers from humanities disciplines to ideas and practices from the computational sciences. The course aims to provide the understanding needed for self-sufficient exploration and well-informed criticism of how computational methods relate to traditional scholarship. The semester begins with a history of computational research, then covers three major aspects of computational inquiry for the humanities: 1) representing primary sources, domains, and scholarly knowledge, 2) interacting with such representations via basic computer programming, and 3) introducing data-driven machine learning ("AI") to complement existing humanistic practices. Lectures and labs will also cover specific methods that immediately assist the scholar with practical tasks, such as regular expressions for pattern-based information retrieval and topic modeling for unsupervised primary source exploration. No prior experience with computation or programming is needed, and the course is particularly suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate students pursuing applied research in the humanities.
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2)
AS.360.305. Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.360.306. Computational Intelligence for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.360.604. Introduction to Computational Humanities. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students and researchers from humanities disciplines to ideas and practices from the computational sciences. The course aims to provide the understanding needed for self-sufficient exploration and well-informed criticism of how computational methods relate to traditional scholarship. The semester begins with a history of computational research, then covers three major aspects of computational inquiry for the humanities: 1) representing primary sources, domains, and scholarly knowledge, 2) interacting with such representations via basic computer programming, and 3) introducing data-driven machine learning ("AI") to complement existing humanistic practices. Lectures and labs will also cover specific methods that immediately assist the scholar with practical tasks, such as regular expressions for pattern-based information retrieval and topic modeling for unsupervised primary source exploration. No prior experience with computation or programming is needed, and the course is particularly suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate students pursuing applied research in the humanities.
AS.360.605. Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required.
AS.360.606. Computational Intelligence for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge.
Modern Languages and Literatures
AS.211.111. Introduction to Latinx Literature and Culture. 3 Credits.
This course is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature that introduces students to the major trends in the tradition. While Latinx literature draws on literary traditions that span more than 400 years, our course will focus on more contemporary forms of the tradition, its “canon,” and how authors are currently “queering” this canon. Emphasizing the historical and aesthetic networks established in the Latinx literary canon that continue into the present while exploring the relationship between genre and socio-historical issues, we will read from a diverse tradition and range of genres that reflect the contested definition of “Latinx” and its shifting demographics in the U.S. We will also investigate how U.S. Latinx literature speaks to and expands “American” literary traditions, and how unique ethnic identities such as Mexican American, Nuyorican, Cuban American, and Dominican American offer different yet interconnecting representations of what it means to be Latinx in the U.S. This class ultimately underscores the heterogeneity of Latinx literature and asks how particular generic conventions stage the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class to establish a historically grounded understanding of the diverse literary voices and aesthetics that comprise U.S. Latinx literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.314. Jewish in America, Yiddish in America: Literature, Culture, Identity. 3 Credits.
iddish was the language of European Jews for 1000 years. From the 19th century to the present day it has been a language that millions of Americans — Jewish immigrants and their descendants–have spoken, written in, conducted their daily lives in, and created culture in. This course will examine literature, film, newspapers, and more to explore how Jewish immigrants to America shaped their identities—as Jews, as Americans, and as former Europeans. What role did maintaining, adapting, or abandoning a minority language play in the creation of Jewish American identity—cultural, ethnic, or religious? How was this language perceived by the majority culture? How was it used to represent the experiences of other minoritized groups? What processes of linguistic and cultural translation were involved in finding a space for Yiddish in America, in its original or translated into English? The overarching subjects of this course include migration, race, ethnicity, multilingualism, and assimilation. We will analyze literature (novels, poetry, drama); film; comedy; and other media. All texts in English.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.211.325. Otherness: Cinema, Music, Literature. 3 Credits.
This course is a comparative journey through literature, music and cinema. The term 'Otherness' is known to be rooted in the Self-Other opposition as it emerged in German Idealism, adopted by psychoanalysis and transformed to Post-Colonial and Feminist theories. This theoretical framework will allow us to explore the role of the Other in literature, cinema, and music. Students will become familiar with the historical development of the notion of the “stranger” through reading, listening and analyzing various contemporary works of prose, cinema and music from various countries. We will analyze the ways in which these works depict Otherness and will investigate questions regarding their social, political and philosophical framework as well as the literary, musical and cinematographic devices they employ. At the center of our discussion will stand questions: Who is the Other? How do stories, music and films shape and challenge our perspective of the Other and of ourselves?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
AS.211.333. Representing the Holocaust. 3 Credits.
How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.
Prerequisite(s): Cannot be taken by anyone who previously took AS.213.361
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.361. Dissent and Cultural Productions: Israeli Culture as a Case Study. 3 Credits.
This course explores the interplay between protest and cultural productions using the Israeli society as a case study. We will examine the formation and nature of political and social protest movements in Israel, such as the Israeli Black Panthers, Israeli feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the 2011 social justice protest. Dissent in the military and protest against war as well as civil activism in the context of the Palestinians-Israeli conflict will serve us to explore the notion of dissent in the face of collective ethos, memory and trauma. The literary, cinematic, theatrical and artistic productions of dissent will stand at the center of our discussion as well as the role of specific genres and media, including satire and comedy, television, popular music, dance and social media. We will ask ourselves questions such as how do cultural productions express dissent? What is the role of cultural productions in civil activism? And what is the connection between specific genre or media and expression of dissent? All material will be taught in English translation.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.211.373. Religious Themes in Film and Literature. 3 Credits.
This course studies the representation of religious themes in modern literature and cinema. Most of the works it covers are not defined as sacred but include religious themes as part of their narrative, images, language, and symbolic meaning. The course will cover materials related to the three monotheistic religions and general questions across religions, nations, and cultures. It also includes asking general theoretical questions such as: what is faith, and why do we need it? What are the differences between genres and media when representing religious topics, how god is represented in artistic forms, and how contemporary tensions between tradition and modernity enter the creative sphere?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.383. Haunting Flesh: Women, Horror, and the Body. 3 Credits.
A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.387. Theories of Peace from Kant to MLK. 3 Credits.
That the nations of the world could ever work together seems utopian, but also unavoidable: migration, war, and not least climate change make some form of global coordination increasingly necessary. This course will give historical and philosophical depth to the idea of a cosmopolitan order and world peace by tracing it from its ancient sources through early modernity to today. At the center of the course will be the text that has been credited with founding the tradition of a world federation of nations, Immanuel Kant’s "Toward Perpetual Peace" (1795). Confronting recent and current political discourse, literature, and philosophy with Kant’s famous treatise, we will work to gain a new perspective on the idea of a world order. In addition to Kant, readings include Homer, Erasmus, Pico della Mirandola, Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Emily Dickinson, Tolstoy, Whitman, Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King as well as lesser-known authors such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Ellen Key, Odette Thibault, Simone Weil, and Claude Lefort. Taught in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.440. Literature of the Holocaust. 3 Credits.
How has the Holocaust been represented in literature? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the social and aesthetic traditions of representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that literature expresses? And where does literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — originally written in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer). A special focus will be works written during and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. All readings in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.441. Literary Translation Workshop. 3 Credits.
This course is grounded in the double conviction that translation is the most intimate form of reading and that literary translation is a form of literary writing. The goals of this course are to better understand the potential and challenge of translation as we learn to practice it ourselves. We will study what translators say about their craft and work closely with a wide range of translations. There will be two parts to each seminar: --discussion of assigned readings and analysis of published translations --workshopping of our translations. Students are free to translate from any language into English. Reading knowledge of a language other than English is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.211.473. Monsters, Haunting, and the Nation. 3 Credits.
This course examines the intersection of speculative fiction, horror, science fiction, and hauntings with latinidad. Reading a variety of short stories, novels, and films, we investigate how genre fiction addresses the unique experience of Latinxs in the Americas, compelling us to reimagine what the speculative can be as it intersects with race and ethnicity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.213.374. Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy. 3 Credits.
What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.213.427. Lunar Poetics: Lucian to Kepler and Beyond. 3 Credits.
When the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in his famous "Somnium" (1608) creates a fictitious dream narrative in which the earth is observed from the moon, it becomes clear that the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview entails a radical change of perspective that can be achieved only by means of the imagination. What appears as a sunrise is in reality due to the earth's own movement. Where appearance and reality diverge, the new model requires a fictional account without which it remains incomprehensible. Orbiting around Kepler’s short tale, this seminar will focus on cosmic narratives and poetic explorations of outer space, from Lucian's True Stories and Icaromenippus (2nd century CE), one of the earliest literary treatments of a journey through space, Plutarch’s dialogue On the face of the Moon (late 1st century CE), to Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) and Kant's »Of the Inhabitants of the Stars« (1755). What is the epistemic function of literary representations of the cosmos? Are space-travel narratives thought experiments? What role does fiction and the imagination play in the science of astronomy? By pursuing these and related questions, this course will question common assumptions about the relationship of science to fiction and the literary imagination while tracing key junctures in the history of astronomy.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.213.606. The Melancholic Imagination. 3 Credits.
Melancholia is marked by two competing tendencies: on the one hand, it clings to the objects of this world as if they could provide a path to transcendence and, on the other, it recognizes the weight of these objects, their transience, and concomitant senselessness. This course will examine the melancholic disposition from Robert Burton’s 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy onward to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of boredom in Being and Time. We will consider the religious dimensions of melancholia as explored in different contexts by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg and will pay particular attention to Warburg’s notion of the Pathosformel while reflecting on literary works by Flaubert, Adrian, Chekhov, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Pessoa, Rilke, and W. G. Sebald.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.213.608. Literary Geographies: Landscape, Place and Space in Literature. 3 Credits.
This graduate-level course will explore the material topographies of literature, both real and imagined, engaging the landscapes, geographies, and environments of literary works both as a vital dimension of the text and as contributions to 'cultural ecology'. We will explore how topography may be engaged not as mere background or setting for literary situations, but as a dynamic and vital dimension thereof, and how the human experiences evoked can be radically recontextualized and engaged through environmental attention to the text. We will read theoretical and philosophical works on geography and topography in literature along with environmental literary theory in approaching literary works by writers from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries. Readings may include works by Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Thoreau, Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, Woolf, Borges, and other writers from the late 18th through 20th centuries. Discussions will invite phenomenological, de- or post-colonial, and ecological perspectives.
AS.213.623. Poetry and Philosophy. 2 Credits.
This course will trace the tensions, antagonisms, and collaborations between poetry and philosophy as distinctive but fundamental expressions of human thought and experience. We will engage poetry as a form of artistic expression that compliments, completes, or challenges other forms of knowledge, and consider the range of philosophy's responses to poetry and poetics. Readings will include works by philosophical poets and poetic philosophers including Hölderlin, Schlegel, Rilke, Bachmann, Celan, Stevens, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Valéry, Wittgenstein, and Agamben.
AS.213.627. Lunar Poetics: Lucian to Kepler and Beyond. 3 Credits.
When the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in his famous "Somnium" (1608) creates a fictitious dream narrative in which the earth is observed from the moon, it becomes clear that the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview entails a radical change of perspective that can be achieved only by means of the imagination. What appears as a sunrise is in reality due to the earth's own movement. Where appearance and reality diverge, the new model requires a fictional account without which it remains incomprehensible. Orbiting around Kepler’s short tale, this seminar will focus on cosmic narratives and poetic explorations of outer space, from Lucian's True Stories and Icaromenippus (2nd century CE), one of the earliest literary treatments of a journey through space, Plutarch’s dialogue On the face of the Moon (late 1st century CE), to Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) and Kant's »Of the Inhabitants of the Stars« (1755). What is the epistemic function of literary representations of the cosmos? Are space-travel narratives thought experiments? What role does fiction and the imagination play in the science of astronomy? By pursuing these and related questions, this course will question common assumptions about the relationship of science to fiction and the literary imagination while tracing key junctures in the history of astronomy.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.213.631. Social Imaginaries and the Public Sphere in European Literature, 1760-1815. 3 Credits.
We will examine the contribution of (post-)Enlightenment literature to the evolution of a modern social imaginary. First we will acquaint ourselves with some theoretical approaches to the concept of the social imaginary (Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Albrecht Koschorke). We will then read selected texts from European literature (from Rousseau and Ferguson to Lessing, Schiller, Kleist, Novalis and Fichte, among others) that are characteristic of the formation of a modern social imaginary at the epochal threshold between the 18th and 19th centuries. We will attend to the interface of social self-conceptions and the public sphere.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.213.642. What Is Called Thinking. 3 Credits.
The privilege of thinking has faced two challenges in recent years. The advent of artificial intelligence has called into question how unique thinking is when cognition can easily be mimicked, if not (re)produced, in machines through statistical models of language. An equally prevalent, if opposing, development in critical theory is the expansion of thought to include all purposeful action, such as the spreading of information among trees regarding available resources. The first half of the semester will be devoted to the definition of thinking offered by Aristotle and its interpretation in selected texts by Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. The second half will consider the surge of interest in automatons in romantic literature (Novalis, Hoffmann, Kleist and Poe) and culminating in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.213.702. Aesthetic Judgment, Political Agency: Kant to Kafka. 3 Credits.
Following Hannah Arendt’s seminal claim that Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” contains his unwritten political philosophy, this seminar investigates how the structure of aesthetic judgment defines the possibilities of political agency. We begin with Kant’s aesthetic theory and Arendt’s “Lectures on Kant” to understand how the ability to think from the standpoint of others constitutes the core of the political. Through this lens, we trace the genealogy of aesthetics from Baumgarten’s sensuous cognition to Herder’s empathy, Schiller’s aesthetic education, and Novalis’ poetics of the state. The course then examines exemplary and radical challenges to these models: the fanaticism of justice in Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas,” the aesthetic appeal for social justice in Bettina von Arnim’s “This Book Belongs to the King,” the fragmented political consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas,” the transition from disinterested distance to radical attention in Simone Weil, and finally, the law as inscrutable form in Kafka’s “The Trial.” Readings include: Baumgarten, Kant, Herder, Schiller, Novalis, Kleist, Arnim, Arendt, Weil, Woolf, and Kafka.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.214.479. Dante Visits the Afterlife. 3 Credits.
One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English. For undergraduate students only.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.214.626. Sacred/Subversive: Gender, Authority, and Devotion in Early Modern Italy. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar examines how women in early modern Italy used devotional language to negotiate questions of literary voice and authority, community and critique. We will approach devotion not only as a spiritual practice informed by the developments of the sixteenth- and seventeenth century (the intensified religious fervor of the Counter Reformation, the reassessment of female Biblical figures, the imposition of strict enclosure on convents), but as a framework through which to shape intellectual agency, claim authority, experiment with hybrid genres, and resist gendered cultural constraints. Close readings include a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers, with particular attention to Arcangela Tarabotti, whose work allows for powerful reflection on the tensions between piety, authority, and dissent. As we consider how the literary strategies of these early modern women maneuver between the sacred and subversive, we will draw on theoretical readings on voice, enclosure, and literary authority. Some familiarity with Italian is recommended.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.215.406. Novelist Intellectuals. 3 Credits.
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.215.650. Race, Aesthetics, Speculation. 3 Credits.
This seminar takes as its jumping off point the question of how the representation of race and ethnicity intersects with theories surrounding aesthetics, literary form, and speculation writ large, proposing that the investigation of these elements and their various imbrications offer an important aperture to consider the contemporary, and ways to reflect on the haunting remainders of history as they become manifest in cultural production.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.215.718. Public Humanities Writing Workshop. 3 Credits.
Humanists possess a reservoir of scholarly abilities that prime them for contributing to debates well beyond the academy. This semester-long workshop will introduce graduate students to the basics of writing for such broad audience. Each session will be organized around particular topics in public humanities writing, including the pitching, writing, editing, and publishing processes of newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. We will also consider the forms of writing that most allow scholars to draw from their academic training and research: reviews, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and profiles. Throughout the course we will see how the interdisciplinarity, comparativism, and multilingualism of fields from across the humanities can be helpful for reaching wide audiences. Beyond the nuts and bolts of getting started in so-called “public” writing, this course aspires to teach graduate students how to combine quality writing with academic knowledge, scholarly analysis with a general intellectual readership—and, ultimately, make academic knowledge a public good. Taught in English.
Prerequisite(s): Students who took AS.215.748 are not eligible to take AS.215.718.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Theatre Arts & Studies
AS.225.318. 21st Century Female Playwrights. 3 Credits.
This is a writing intensive class exploring the current wealth of women playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners: Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019 Prize for FAIRVIEW). We will discuss Script Analysis and read (and see) plays by numerous writers including Claire Barron, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Danai Gurira, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, and Hansol Jung. This class will include a mid-term and a Final Paper.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.225.325. Shakespeare: Page, Stage, Screen. 3 Credits.
An introduction to Shakespeare, in which every play we read we will also see performed. Close textual work and a focus on historical context will be accompanied by visits to local theatres, recordings of live performances, and Shakespeare films.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Seminars
AS.220.214. Readings in Fiction: What is a Fable?. 3 Credits.
Stories entertain us, but we can also receive guidance from them, and we can tell them to impart guidance to others, to exercise influence, to make a point. This course will explore the ways that stories make their points in the genre sometimes called “fable,” in works by authors ranging from Aesop to George Saunders, from the 4th century to the present. We’ll debate what fables actually are – Short morality tales about animals? Portraits of exemplary figures that demonstrate how to live? - in part by reading many examples of the form and some theories of it, in part by writing fables of our own.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive