AS.060 (English)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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 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

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.