Courses
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
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)
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
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce students to debates in American literary studies around questions of race, politics, and the history of the American South. The course will center around a reading of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! alongside literary history, critical theory, and other pieces of fiction from the American South. We will use these texts to explore the transformations of ra-cial discourses in 19th and 20th century America, with close attention to how they influence the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the science fiction movement of cyberpunk as an aesthetic, narrative, and political reaction to late neoliberalism. We will read and discuss literature, film, and interactive media from this genre to develop an understanding of how cyberpunk texts register, refract, and attempt to reconcile antagonisms central to contemporary life.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine representations of, and confrontations with, climate change in science fiction. Special focus will be given to indigenous futurisms as uniquely valuable perspectives on the climate crisis. We will examine these narratives alongside climate change discourse, literary theory, and literary criticism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
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)
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)
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. Classes will provide the background necessary to read these texts both closely and historically and in the light of cultural continuities and differences. The course will also equip students to critique the categories by which texts have been made into such monuments, and so to read against their grain. Students should come away from the reading understanding how English literature has been traditionally understood as well as how it might be understood completely otherwise.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
A survey of major authors such as Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Joyce, and Rushdie. Substantial attention to formal conventions as well as stylistic innovation, to aesthetic value as well as social meaning.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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)
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)
Writing Intensive
Why is time travel such a consistent and perplexing theme in literature and film over the last 150 years? Why is modernity so concerned with peeking backwards or forwards? This course will examine the history of time-travel fiction, from its beginning in utopian fiction through its box-office dominance in the 1980s, and into today.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Drawing from the body of work engaging and recording the Hollywood gunfighter and outlaw folk-hero Clint Eastwood, the course will investigate American cinematic representations of slavery and its absence, the Civil War, and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. A focus on the cultural icon Clint Eastwood enables a close examination of American cinematic fantasies of the frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, particularly the creation of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolitan and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
A course on key novels written in Britain or its former colonies between 1900 and 1960. Major attention to the meanings of modernism across the arts as well as innovations in prose fiction.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
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)
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)
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
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)
This course will look at novels that are not only large in size, but which also think about the meaning and methods of trying to capture huge segments of the world into a piece of art. How much can be fit into a novel? What is gained and what is lost? How large is too large? We will read Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
We will take up a history of writing from and about various carceral sites (prison, detention camps, etc-- as well as Circe’ island and Jonah’s whale) to see what they can teach us about larger questions of the movement (or not) of certain populations, the ideology and economies of imprisonment, and campaigns for the abolition of prisons.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Cities have long taken on a central role in literature, but much of our reading about urban space is confined to a few Western hubs. And while the city has traditionally been a space for fictional characters to develop into national subjects, much of the most innovative contemporary writing sees the city as a character of its own. This course will address the representational challenges of globalization through fiction and genre-bending memoir about contemporary metropolises that act as its microcosm: Johannesburg, Lagos, Delhi, London, and New York. We will read primary works by Ivan Vladislavic, Chris Abani, Aravind Adiga, Zadie Smith, and Teju Cole, as well as supplementary excerpts from books including Capital, by Rana Dasgupta, Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, Ato Quayson’s Oxford Street, Accra, and Loren Kruger’s Imagining the Edgy City. Finally, the course will include theoretical readings about globality and representation, such as Fredric Jameson’s essay on “Cognitive Mapping” and Arjun Appadurai’s seminal book Modernity at Large.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
Climate imagination in early modernity. This is an introduction to study of the literature of climate imagination with a focus on pre-modern literature. During the period 1500-1750, the ground was laid for modern thinking about humans, climate, and their environment. We will explore how affective responses, conceptual frameworks, and storytelling developed around climate crises, including the "little ice age," flood, earthquake, disease, and storm; and around human entanglement with non-human beings and environments in the era of scientific revolution, early capitalist enterprise, early journalism, and colonial settlement. We will focus on English drama, nonfictional essay and journalism, and poetry that all grapple with the representation of climate crisis in Europe and its maritime and colonial worlds. Topics may include: genres of worldmaking (pastoral, georgic, myth); representations of anthropogenic climate change and civic response; race-making, indigeneity, and climate; Extreme Weather journalism; land management, gardens, extraction, forestry, rivers; Health and plague.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
This class will study Milton’s poetry and prose across the whole of his writing career, with special attention to Paradise Lost, the great epic poem retelling the story of the fall of humankind. We will consider Milton’s literary background, his contemporary political and social milieu, as well as critical debates that surrounding the poet, who was accused of being ‘of the devil’s party.’ Pre-1800 course.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The novel of ideas is often traced to 18th century French or 19th century Russian writing, but it has come broadly to signify works of robust philosophical contemplation. The inherently slippery term seems to indicate a work in which “form” is subsidiary to “content,” or at least, in which narrative structures adapt to prioritize thought rather than style, image, or even character. But how, exactly, and about what, do novels “think?” In large part, the novel of ideas is now conflated with a rote and recognizable brand of social realism. This course asks what might qualify as a novel of ideas today, both in terms of the novel’s changing relation to geographical space (and thereby the formal spaces in which philosophy might lurk), and of the particular “ideas” it critiques or puts forth. We will read novelists including J.M. Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk, Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Ronan Bennett within a longer literary-philosophical tradition, with reference to works such as Candide, War and Peace, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will provide a survey of some of the concepts in Marx’s work, especially those to be found in volume 1 of Capital, that might help us get a clearer sense of 21st-century politics and culture. We will move outward from reading Marx to reading recent and classic texts in the Marxist critical tradition. We will discuss explicitly economic ideas about commodities, surplus value, and concrete and abstract labor, as well as historical and political ideas like “primitive accumulation” and the “uneven and combined development” of nations. We will think about what reading Marx and the Marxist tradition can help us see about colonialism, gender, race, technology, and the environment, as well as how it can clarify the character of economic crises. Toward the end of the term we will turn to literary texts, not necessarily “Marxist” themselves, to help us understand important questions that Marxism cannot tackle by itself, like: who are people, anyway? What do they hope for, when they write? Is there a Marxist idea of beauty, and is it different than everybody else’s? Along with Marx, and anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist writers in the Marxist tradition, we’ll read work by the novelist NK Jemisin, and the poet Stephanie Young.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
Any era can be characterized by its oppositions and polarities, but perhaps few were more defined by their contradictions 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 wildly energetic literature of the period furnishes a singular lens through which to examine questions of consciousness, gender, celebrity, race, political theater, and even life during a pandemic that continue to shape our lives today. Authors studied may include Frances Burney, Ottobah Cugoano, Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, John Gay, Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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 monitory visions in poetry, short stories, non-fiction and novels attend to themes of malevolence, metamorphosis, memory, genetic mutation, totalitarianism, corporate control, feminism, 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, The Testaments, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, exploring Atwood's "writing with intent." Seminar discussion; midterm; class presentations; two short papers and one final project.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will read 19th- and 20th-century American and British literature about the sea, using an approach informed by recent scholarship in what has been called Blue Humanities or Oceanic Studies.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the interlocking political and historical dimensions of personal experience, an account of ourselves and our relations (“the quest for competitive advantage between groups, individuals, or societies”) that points us in the direction of what “is ‘common’ to the whole community.” What does it mean for people who are not the chief actors or theoreticians of political movements to construe the record of their experience as an act of political intervention, an aid in our total understanding of the structure of popular belief and behavior? Furthermore, what happens when attempt to historicize and critique these recorded experiences? The class asks its members to focus closely on an episode of autobiographical experience as both an historical fossil and tangible politicized moment, particularly the places where race, gender and economic power are visible. By producing a “critical discourse of everyday life—by turning residual, untheorized everyday experience into communicable experience… one can reframe ostensibly private and individual experiences in terms of a collective struggle.” To help our investigation we will read and analyze closely memoirs, many of them from the African American experience. We function partly as a writers’ workshop and partly as a critical review. The final goal of the seminar is a polished 20-25 page autobiographical essay.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
From quacks to plague, from humoralism to hypochondria, this course explores how early modern literature represents and occasionally satirizes medicine. Authors include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Nashe, Browne and Moliere.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This seminar will focus on the novels and short fiction of one of the most brilliant crafters of prose and plot ever to write in English. Extensive attention will be devoted to the intricacies of James’s language; to his transatlantic situation; to his relationship to other authors; and to his place in the histories of literature, criticism, and theory. In a few instances, we will read his work in relation to writing by his brother, the pioneering philosopher and psychologist William James.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
Using their speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
After a diagnostic introduction to his early poetry, this reading intensive seminar will concentrate upon Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), which we will read in its entirety.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
Dickinson’s poetry, more than most, has seemed to prompt creativity in others. In the past two decades, especially, poets, writers, critics, and filmmakers have found their own voices in response to hers. We will focus on the formal, aesthetic, historical and gendered aspects of her poetry as we try to understand, and benefit from, this power to elicit response. Exams are unlikely. Instead, expect close attention to your own writing, as we pay close attention to hers.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Geoffrey Chaucer is sometimes called the 'father of English literature', but the deftness with which he captured the variety of the human condition, in poetic forms that were each, in themselves, startlingly new, was in so many ways an inheritance too rich for literary tradition to absorb. One reason to return to Chaucer's writing now is to see how funny (and even obscene) verse narrative can be, and how compelling a fourteenth-century love story remains. It is also to open a window onto a culture entirely different from our own but in which the power of language (the role of free speech), the freedom of the individual, the status of women, violent tensions between cultures and ethnicities and the role of religion in civil society were not only topical, but made the more so by Chaucer's powerful political vision and thought. Chaucer 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) but he is always worth reading because reading him is at once so eye-opening and such a pleasure, a way of stretching one's sense of the present by understanding (really understanding) a particular moment in the past. This class will pursue such understanding by paying particular attention to Chaucer's masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. But we will begin with a quick and easy workshop on Chaucer's language, and try to define, along the way, some of the more interesting aspects of his style. 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 was about.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
Classicists, medievalists, and early modernists have always been interested in the history of the books (and the papyri and the rolls) in which the texts they study survive, and this course will survey these traditional modes of bibliography and their importance. We will also look at the social contexts of reading in all periods as a more theoretically sophisticated account of book history has urged us to do in recent decades. Particular attention will be given to modes of transmission of texts between written media, including the digital, but with an emphasis on the synchronic and diachronic importance of orality and aurality, dictation and transcription.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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 Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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 Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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 Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work 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
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
This graduate seminar will construct a history of critical theory through the lens of contemporary narratives about secularization and methodological critiques of secularism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar examines representations of people in motion in U.S. writing from 1900 to the present. Migration, international and intranational, will be central to our study, but we’ll also consider other forms of travel, transits of authorial and readerly attention, experiences of vagrancy and acceleration, and predicaments of stasis in primary texts as well as theoretical work around mobility. Authors and directors studied may include Simone de Beauvoir, Henry James, Gayl Jones, Jack Kerouac, Chang-Rae Lee, Claude McKay, Bernadette Mayer, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gertrude Stein.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The field now known as “global Anglophone literature” has emerged from a complicated and rapidly advancing disciplinary lineage. A host of past and present recordings – including postcolonial, Commonwealth, Third World, global, transnational, world, and the Global South – provide a record of the wider profession’s anxieties in relation to non-Western literary traditions. This course prepares graduate students to be able to articulate some of the subtle differences in approach that this nexus of closely related terms may obscure, from the heyday of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 90s to contemporary subfields like Indian Ocean studies. In addition to key critical texts by theorists including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti, Peter Hallward, and Emily Apter, students will be introduced to some outstanding recent methodologies and critiques from the adjacent body of work on comparative literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course asks in what ways did literature mitigate population category distinctions within a pre-history of human rights from the period 1500-1700. We will take the situations of sponsored violence, and in particular, war captivity, in order to explore how premodern concepts of duties, rights, atrocity, inhumanity (and prohibitions against abuse) arise and become a locus of mimetic complexity within the literature of the period. Prospecting a historical transformation between ancient, early modern, and modern conceptions of rights, duties, and the human, readings may include: Euripides, Suppliant Women; Seneca, Trojan Women; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Cicero, Grotius, Gentili, Vitoria, Las Casas, Spenser, Bradstreet, Milton, Dryden, and Behn, as well as literature depicting violence resulting from Britain's East India Company's global intrusions. Splicing apart the "human" from "rights" we consider theoretical material from the liberal tradition and its critique; the problem of 'failed universals'; the historical connection between natural law and human rights; the distinctions drawn around legal and gendered categories of person; and critical race theory, with readings from Asad, Foucault, Moten, Wynter, Cavarero, Brown, Butler, Rawls, Dworkin, Drucilla Cornell, depending on the class's interests.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
In Milton: Black and White we will consider Milton and the discourses of racialized categories (poetical, political, and embodied), specifically attending to his role in the historical developments of white identity; concepts of justice; the genre of epic; and universal notions of personhood through the liberal tradition. We will also consider how Black writers have responded to Milton (including Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, the gospel tradition, Toni Morrison, Chris Ofili) through readings of Paradise Lost and selected prose, as well as readings in contemporary critical theory.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Concepts include expansion, crowding, data collection, the miniscule, temporality, the planetary and the cosmic in the first age of European mercantile activity and colonial expansion. With readings from world-systems theory and theories of the anthropocene, our case studies will comprise pre-modern English literary texts, including Milton, Paradise Lost, Anne Bradstreet, The Four Monarchies, early modern science (Hooke, Newton), Defoe, The Storm, and early British and colonial American holdings in the Garrett Library. The class will be hands-on, working with material from Special Collections, and will include working towards a digital project (no digital project background necessary).
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
This course will be devoted to the histories and theories of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century poetry and performance, beginning with William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Upon hearing the poets read, William Hazlitt remarked that “[t]here is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment.” This early instance of reception history will provide the backdrop for our discussion throughout the semester. Besides Wordsworth and Coleridge, our reading list will include verse, theory, and criticism by Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Pritchard, Amiri Baraka, Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Lisa Gitelman, Frederich Kittler, Peter Middleton, John M. Picker, Susan Stewart, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
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 focused on the appropriation of land 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, Australia, and elsewhere in the Pacific. We will especially attend to narrative fictions—often (self-) identified as “romances”—that chronicle settlement and register the temporal disruption of indigenous persistence and resistance. Secondary texts may include: Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Primary texts may include: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; S. Alice Callahan, A Child of the Forest; Marcus Clarke, His Natural Life; Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush; Herman Melville, Typee; Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl; Simon Pokagon, Ogimawkwe Mitigwaki (Queen of the Woods); John Richardson, Wacousta or, The Prophecy; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; and the FX television series, Taboo.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism’s crisis-bound character and, therefore, its vulnerability. But finance isn’t the only thing that capitalism has brought to a boiling point: for attentive readers of Marx, the mounting climate disaster, the COVID pandemic, and the struggle for Black Lives have only further highlighted the complex interconnections among our energy and food infrastructures, histories of racist and settler-colonial violence, the patriarchal organization of sexuality, and the maintenance of capitalist profitability no matter the social cost. The aim of this seminar is, first, to show how a thorough reading of the first volume of Marx’s Capital goes a long way toward helping us see all these histories and crises as part of a single, many-faceted dynamic, and second, to highlight 20th- and 21st-century Marxist work that takes Marx in new directions, from critiques of racial capitalism, colonialism, and the patriarchy of the wage, to studies of climate crisis and the global recomposition of the labor pool. Along with Marx, we’ll read work by WEB DuBois, James Boggs, Silvia Federici, Thiti Bhattacharya, Jairus Banaji, Nikhil Singh, Andreas Malm, the Endnotes collective, James Parisot, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we take up Hester Blum’s blunt observation that “the sea is not a metaphor” in order to consider the visions and hopes black writers have associated with the sea, as well as the despair and trauma transatlantic slavery has left “in the wake,” to quote Christina Sharpe.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
What role did literary character play along the passage from ancient theories of dramatic action to contemporary theories of subjectivity and personhood? What role, specifically, did Shakespearean personhood play in the theorization of literature’s capacity to stage and represent a portable, exemplary “self”? How do group categories of race, gender and class qualify and inflect the ostensive individuation of character outcomes? As test cases, in this course we will consider an array of early modern literary persons from before and after Shakespeare as depicted in poetry, drama and prose : Heywood’s Lucrece, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cleopatra, Middleton’s Timon, Moliere’s Alceste, Milton’s Christ and Behn’s Oroonoko. This course will range widely across theorists of literary character and the reader/character relationship, considering Aristotle, Theophrastus, Sir Thomas Overbury, Sigmund Freud, Aaron Kunin, Blakey Vermeule, Toril Moi, Rita Felski, Amanda Anderson, and Thomas Metzinger, among others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
While we will spend some time with the history and theory of the essay, much of our time will be spent considering the contemporary essay and its form. Across the past decade, academics have increasingly published essays designed for non-specialists. We’ll study many of them, both as objects of critical attention and of practical value. Writing assignments will include the option to write essays.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
What are literary characters? Can we imagine literature without them? And how do they relate to questions of form and society? Starting with Aristotle, and moving through 20th- and 21st-century critics such as Lukacs, Barthes, and Woloch. We will pay special attention to the historical relationship between theories of character and approaches to the novel.
Distribution Area: Humanities
This seminar aims to think hard about the embodied reader and the material realm of reading. Our work will position reading less as a strict function of cognition and more as a matter of phenomenology, sensation, and material structures. Though we will attend to question of vision (and loss of vision) we will also highlight other senses: hearing, touch, smell, taste and bodily proprioception. Course materials will include recent studies that link reading and the senses, as well as texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, a moment when the idea of Literature emerged alongside a theorizing of media and mediation, and investigations linking aesthetics and phenomenology. Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be one guide for the seminar, but so will the ballad revival and the literature of abolition. Seminar participants are invited to target other periods and places in their own research projects for the seminar.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will look at the relationship between the logical and historical aspects of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, which special emphasis on key arguments in volumes 2 and 3 of Capitalism. We will ask questions about capital’s use of time and space in the service of accumulation, and read more recent secondary material all term from anti-colonial, feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Black radical traditions, in order to develop a fresh picture of the complex interrelation or different types of oppression and exploitation across capitalist history. Some familiarity with the concepts and argument of Capital, volume 1 will be helpful, but are not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Bringing theological commentary and psychoanalytic diagnosis into conversation with historicism, formalism, sexuality studies and premodern critical race studies, this course uses Edmund Spenser’s “Fairie Queene” to re-open the question of hermeneutics.
Writing Intensive
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
“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
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
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.
This course is for English graduate students who are pre-candidacy and need to be credited for work over the summer.
For English PhD students in their first spring semester. They will get their first bit of experience with TAship responsibilities.
For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.
For English PhD students/candidates in their third year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.
This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams
For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students to focus on their field of study. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.
Distribution Area: Humanities