College Catalog Archives

Samiya Bashir

See Creative Writing.

Jin Chang

The novel, aesthetic theory, literary theory, Continental philosophy.

Jay M. Dickson

The novel, British modernism, Victorian literature, queer studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies.

Michael Faletra

Medieval British literatures, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Arthurian literature, narrative theory, Celtic studies, and children’s literatures. On leave fall 2020.

Maureen Harkin

Eighteenth-century British literature and visual art, romanticism, nineteenth-century novel, literary theory, Irish literature, film.

Nathalia King

Literary, narrative, and rhetorical theory, the novel, text-image relations, and theories of consciousness.

Laura Leibman

Early American literature and culture, American poetry, poetics and ethnopoetics, Native American literature and culture, postcolonial theory, gender theory, American studies.

Lucía Martínez Valdivia

Early modern lyric and poetics, Reformation literature and culture, book history, music and literature, aesthetics, cognitive poetics.

Kritish Rajbhandari

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century postcolonial and diasporic literatures, Indian Ocean literature and culture, postcolonial theory, critical theories from the global South, translation.

Peter Rock

See Creative Writing.

Pancho Savery

African American literature, American literature and cultural history, modern and contemporary literature, creative writing, American Indian fiction.

Gail Berkeley Sherman

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, gender studies, feminist theory, biblical narrative, medieval literature.

Dustin Simpson

American modernist poetry, nineteenth-century French poetry, contemporary poetry in English, theories of lyric, history and forms of lyric, love poetry.

Lisa M. Steinman

Modern and contemporary poetry, creative writing, romanticism, eighteenth-century poetry. On sabbatical 2020–21.

Sarah Wagner-McCoy

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, transatlantic literature and culture, Irish drama and Irish studies, pastoral and environmental writing, the politics of classical education in postbellum America. On sabbatical 2020–21.

Simone Waller

Early modern prose, early modern drama, Shakespeare, literature of the English Reformation, early modern historiography, Tudor political literature, publics and the public sphere.

The English department offers courses in English and American literature; some courses also include works from other national literatures. The department offers introductory courses in drama, fiction, and poetry most semesters: nonmajors and prospective majors should begin their study of literature with these courses. Two of these introductory courses are required for the major; they are also a prerequisite for most of the department’s upper-division offerings.

In each academic year, the department offers at least 12 courses at the upper-division level. Among these are a junior seminar (intended principally for majors) and courses in American and British literature in various genres from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Some courses are listed under general rubrics such as “Studies in Shakespeare” or “Poetry and History.” (Students may register for more than one course under the same rubric, provided that the subject matter differs.) Courses in the catalog not offered in the current academic year will normally be offered in one of the next two academic years.

In consultation with their academic advisers, students majoring in English should plan to take courses from a range of genres, topics, and periods within the department. Students may also include in the major one 300-level course in creative writing, or, for students pursuing the major with foreign literature emphasis, one 300-level course in translation given in other departments within the Division of Literature and Languages. (Students with special curricular needs may petition to allow a second 300-level course in literature in translation to count toward the major).

1. Two units of 200-level English courses in different genres.*
2. At least six units of 300- or 400-level Reed English courses (study abroad courses are not applicable), one of which may be in creative writing or literature in translation. 
3. Two of the eight units above must be in literature prior to 1900, one of which must be in literature prior to 1700.
4. One semester of the junior seminar.
5. Junior qualifying examination.
6. Two units in foreign literature not in translation to meet part of the divisional requirements.
7. English 470.

1. Two units of 200-level English courses in different genres.*
2. At least six units of 300- or 400-level Reed English courses (study abroad courses are not applicable), one of which may be in creative writing.
3. Two of the eight units above must be in literature prior to 1900, one of which must be in literature prior to 1700.
4. One semester of the junior seminar.
5. Junior qualifying examination.
6. Two units in 200-level humanities (or, by petition, courses that address questions of cultural history relevant to the student’s major).
7. English 470.

Note: In addition, two units in literature in translation are required to meet part of the divisional requirements.

*Poetry and fiction/narrative are recommended. Literature 266, when offered, may be used to fulfill this requirement as well.

Students who plan to write a creative thesis in their senior year will fulfill major requirements with one of these two emphases, and with additional courses in creative writing, as follows:

Requirements for the English Major with a Concentration in Creative Writing
   Foreign Literature Emphasis
1. At least four total units of creative writing courses, one (or more) in each genre (poetry, prose). Three units must be completed before the senior year. Two units must be at the 300 or 400 level.
2. Two units of 200-level English courses in different genres.
3. At least four units of 300- or 400-level Reed English courses (study abroad courses are not applicable).
4. Two of the six units (in #2 and #3) above must be in literature prior to 1900, one of which must be in literature prior to 1700.
5. One semester of the junior seminar.
6. Junior qualifying examination.
7. Two units in foreign literature not in translation (also fulfills a division requirement).
8. English 470. (Note: in the senior year, student may not take creative writing courses in the same genre as their thesis.)
9. If a student satisfies all requirements of both the critical and creative tracks in the major, they must choose to propose three creative or three critical thesis topics (i.e., not both).

Requirements for the English Major with a Concentration in Creative Writing
   Cultural Emphasis
1. At least four units of creative writing courses, one (or more) in each genre (poetry, prose). Three units must be completed before senior year. Two units must be at the 300 or 400 level.
2. Two units of 200-level English courses in different genres.
3. At least four units of 300- or 400-level Reed English courses (study abroad courses are not applicable).
4. Two of the six units (in #2 and #3) above must be in literature prior to 1900, one of which must be in literature prior to 1700.
5. One semester of the junior seminar.
6. Junior qualifying examination.
7. Two units in 200-level humanities (or, by petition, courses that address questions of cultural history relevant to the student’s major.)
8. English 470. (Note: in the senior year, student may not take creative writing courses in the same genre as their thesis.)
9. If a student satisfies all requirements of both the critical and creative tracks in the major, they must choose to propose three creative or three critical thesis topics (i.e., not both).

Note: In addition, two units in literature in translation are required to meet part of the divisional requirements.

200-level courses are intended primarily but not exclusively for sophomores; 300-level courses usually require two 200-level courses as a prerequisite. The department recommends that all majors take at least one course in each of the principal literary genres: poetry, drama, and fiction. Most English courses are offered with variable topics and may be repeated for credit, unless otherwise noted.

Each student must pass a junior qualifying examination before beginning the thesis. The qualifying exam is generally taken at the end of March or at the beginning of April, over a weekend in the spring semester of the junior year, although it is offered also at the beginning of each semester. The exam usually consists of three parts, involving questions about a piece of fiction, two poems, and a critical or theoretical essay (which are handed out to be read before taking the exam). Students are given a weekend over which to work on the qualifying exam, although no more than six hours are to be spent writing on the examination questions.

With some explicitly announced exceptions, departmental courses are open to first-year students only with the consent of the instructor. Students wishing to enroll in a particular course and lacking the prerequisite for it should consult with their adviser and the course instructor.

Majors or prospective majors intending to study abroad should confer with an adviser in the English department. Because of the integrated structure of its curriculum, and the importance of the junior seminar, the department strongly recommends that students taking a year abroad do so in their sophomore year.

A Minor in English
The goal of the English minor is to ensure a strong understanding of literary study, including work at the advanced level. Flexibility in defining the fifth unit allows students to pursue an interest in a topic taught at the 200 or 300 level, or in creative writing.

Requirements for the Minor:

Five units of English and/or creative writing courses, which must include two units of 200-level English courses and two units of 300-level English courses.

1. Two units of 200-level English courses, two units of 300-level English courses, and one unit of creative writing; or
2. Three units of 200-level English courses and two units of 300-level English courses; or
3. Two units of 200-level English courses and three units of 300-level English courses.

English 201 - Introduction to Narrative

American Autobiography
Full course for one semester. This course examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century autobiographies and memoirs, with a focus on the way the self is developed and narrated in those life writings; the problems of memory, truth, and distortion; the ways autobiographers give symbolic form and meaning to their diverse experiences; and such crucial determinants as race, ethnicity, and gender as they shape identity and the representation of the “I.” Some of the works will be by immigrants, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jewish Americans, with an eye to those writers’ self-consciousness as American subjects. In addition to autobiography theory, we may read texts by Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, and Gertrude Stein and a graphic memoir by Art Spiegelman. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

The Art of Speech
Full course for one semester. Studies suggest that Americans fear public speaking more than they fear death itself. Yet many of us would agree that skilled orators have the ability to change not only minds, but also the world. In this course we will examine the hallmarks of exceptional speeches. Using influential speeches from antiquity to the present, we will pay attention to rhetorical devices, pathos, ethos, structure, audience, openings, visuals, body language, vocal variety, humor, storytelling, and “sticky” endings. Assignments will include oral presentations and written analyses. Oral presentations will develop skills in delivering original speeches, giving effective speech evaluations, and becoming comfortable with impromptu speaking. This course is open to first-year students. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Arthurian Literature
Full course for one semester. Stories about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table have exhibited an unusual hold on the imaginations of readers from the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century: Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, and others have seemingly taken up long-term residence in the English literary imagination. In this course, we will take a diachronic approach to a wide range of Arthurian texts, from romances and pseudohistories to poetry and more modern novels. The course will begin by examining the origins of Arthurian material in early medieval Wales before focusing on the international popularity of tales of King Arthur and his companions beginning in the twelfth century. A significant portion of the course will also be devoted to the study of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a text that straddles the medieval and modern worlds. During the final weeks of the class we will read a sampling of more modern understandings of Arthurian legend. In addition to the Morte d’Arthur, texts under consideration may include the Welsh Culhwch and Olwen, Nennius’s History of the Britons, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, early Merlinic prophecies, high medieval courtly romances by Chrétien de Troyes and others (including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Medieval Celtic Literatures
Full course for one semester. This course will focus on early medieval texts from Ireland, Wales, and England in order to understand the particular concerns and narrative techniques of Celtic literatures and to consider their transformation and integration into later English traditions. At the same time, students will interrogate the usefulness of the term “Celtic” as an accurate descriptor of Welsh and Irish cultures. Other issues under consideration will include the shift from orality to literacy in early Ireland and Wales; the tensions between the pagan past and the Christian present; the construction of notions of gender, heroism, and sovereignty; and, most importantly, the impact of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonization upon Welsh and Irish literary cultures. Specific texts under consideration will include the Irish Táin, The Voyage of Bran, The Wooing of Etaín, The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, and The Tales of the Elders of Ireland; Welsh texts from The Mabinogion and from the Arthurian, Aneirin, Merlin, Taliesin, and Heledd traditions; and finally Anglo-oriented texts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Chrétien de Troyes. All texts will be read in translation. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Monsters and Marvels in the Middle Ages
Full course for one semester. In this course we will explore the contours of the medieval imagination as it made sense of the world in a variety of literary and historical texts from the sixth through the fourteenth centuries. We will focus on the function of marvels and monsters as plot devices, as ways of representing cultural anxieties, and as modes of construing the relationship between self and “other” and between the natural world and the social world. We will focus mainly on texts from the British Isles and France, including Beowulf, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the Lais of Marie de France, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Gerald of Wales’s Journey Through Wales, Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Middle Welsh Mabinogion, as well as shorter excerpts from Isidore of Seville, Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, and others. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. 

U.S. Novels of Formation from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties
Full course for one semester. In 1902, the English journalist William Thomas Stead announced “The Americanisation of the World”: “The advent of the United States of America as the greatest of world-Powers is the greatest political, social, and commercial phenomenon of our times.” The Young Republic had finally come of age. Novels of formation, adapting the conventions of the European bildungsroman, allegorized the nation’s rapid growth through their protagonists’ development from youth to maturity. Yet between the 1880s and the 1920s, the conventional goals of bourgeois adulthood—education, marriage, career, artistic achievement—were in turmoil. Novels of education became central to debates on racial uplift and integration; increasing economic inequality and the disillusionment of the immigrant experience permeated traditional plots of self-making. The New Woman and the flapper revolutionized the Victorian courtship plot and World War I ended millions of young lives. Indeed, the future of the novel itself seemed uncertain in the face of modernist experimentation. Authors may include Henry James, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Zitkála-Šá, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Willa Cather, Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Raphaelson, William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

English 203 - Introduction to Theory

History and Problems of Literary Theory
Full course for one semester. This course begins with a brief survey of the history of literary criticism and theory. It will then take up a series of distinct problems: What is the nature and function of mimesis? What is the role of intention in the production and reception of literary works? How does figurative language operate in literary contexts? How can we define “fiction,” and how best understand its relationship to what we take to be the “real” world? What are the constraints on what counts as a plausible reading of a literary text? Throughout the semester we will make recurrent reference to a small set of literary texts, including Hamlet and Frankenstein. Theorists to be considered range from Aristotle through Judith Butler and Dan Sperber. Prerequisite: Humanities 110. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Introduction to Digital Humanities
Full course for one semester. Digital humanities combines the methods of the traditional humanities with the tools provided by computing. These tools provide innovative ways to analyze, present, and share data. In this class students will look at the theory behind how digital media can create a dynamic, multimedia environment for interdisciplinary scholarship, and will learn how to use and assess specific digital tools. We will cover methods and best practices for how to do textual analysis, visual storytelling, digital maps, data visualizations, archives, websites, video abstracts, and digital portfolios. Writing assignments will embrace the impact of digital forms and genres on writing, and cover grant applications and proposal writing. This course is open to first-year students. Conference. Previously numbered as English 201; students who have previously taken this course should not enroll in this topic as English 203. Not offered 2020–21.

English 205 - Introduction to Fiction

The American Short Story
Full course for one semester. This course introduces students to the techniques of analyzing narrative fiction with a focus on the American short story as it has developed from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will analyze traditional and innovative narrative techniques in the short story, including point of view and focalization, time and space, plot compression, the relation of narrative structure and temporality, diction, and figurative language. Additionally, we will consider the short story as shaping and responding to American history and the diversity of American experience. We initiate questions about an American literary history of the short story by beginning with a recent volume of Best American Short Stories. We study works exemplifying major literary movements (e.g. romance, realism, allegory, impressionism, experimentalism), and end with the Canadian writer Alice Munro to question the boundaries of the “American” short story. Readings may include works by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, Anzia Yezierska, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Bharati Mukherjee, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Tsing Loh, Helena María Viramontes, Jennifer Egan, and others. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

British Women Writers since 1900
Full course for one semester. Using Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist literary polemic A Room of One’s Own as its point of departure, this course studies British women fiction writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through their concerns with establishing communities, whether in literary, familial, social, political, ethnic, or gender-based terms. Paying attention to various subgenres of fiction (such as the gothic romance, the bildungsroman, the novel of courtship, the modernist novel, and the postmodern novel), we will study writings by figures who may include Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jean Rhys, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, and Ali Smith. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Decolonization and the Novel in Africa
Full course for one semester. Taking root during late colonialism, the novel emerged as a prominent genre in the shaping of postcolonial societies in Africa. In the wake of decolonization, writers turned to the novel, reinventing the genre to imagine new individual and collective identities and assess the legacies left behind by the colonial past. Since then, writers from the regions have variously responded to the failures of the nation-state, neocolonial formations, and the promises and pitfalls of globalization. This course will examine various novelistic responses to the sociopolitical changes in different parts of Africa during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. In what ways did the novel become a catalyst for cultural transformation in postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean? How did the novel become the privileged genre of decolonization? Starting with the critiques of colonialism in the early decolonial period, we will explore topics including narratives of modernity and tradition, postindependence disillusion, critique of patriarchy and gender, migration, displacement, and globalization in various contexts. Attending to the heterogeneity of the regions, we will discuss the novels in comparative frameworks, assessing the similarities and the differences apparent in the cultures and historical contexts from which they emerge. We will read works by Tayeb Salih, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Dambudzo Marechera, and Chimamanda Adichie. Theoretical reading may include writings of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and Achille Mbembe among others. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

Detective Stories and Crime Fiction
Full course for one semester. Often derided as a “lower” form of storytelling, crime fiction has been for decades one of the most popular genres of literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Engaged with central questions of what constitutes illicit actions in civilized societies, and how they might be detected and policed, the form also crucially concerns itself with matters both epistemological and ontological (especially concerning hidden identities). This course examines the development of classic crime and detective fiction, starting in the nineteenth century with Edgar Allen Poe’s pathfinding C. Auguste Dupin stories, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (often called the first popular detective novel in English), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s wildly popular Sherlock Holmes stories. The course will then proceed through the so-called golden age of detective fiction in the United Kingdom and the rise of hard-boiled detective fiction in the United States (both of which coincided with the era of literary modernism). We will finish by looking at how in recent decades the genre’s codes have been rewritten, particularly in light of questions about identity politics with regards to established social orders. Primary texts will also include works by Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, and China Miéville. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

The Marriage Plot from the American Renaissance to the New Woman
Full course for one semester. “No story of love was surely ever less of a ‘love story,’” Henry James wrote of The Scarlet Letter. “To [Nathaniel] Hawthorne’s imagination the fact that these two persons had loved each other too well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was the idea of their moral situation in the long years that were to follow.” Hawthorne’s historical novel of adultery and sin in Puritan New England was hardly exceptional in the nineteenth-century U.S. literary canon. Most accounts of early nineteenth-century American fiction denounced the marriage plot central to the development of the novel in Britain and Europe as maudlin sentimentalism at odds with the highbrow aesthetics and morals of the American Renaissance. In recent decades, however, feminist literary critics have worked to recover these antebellum texts. This course investigates the cultural history of the novel and the marriage plot in the nineteenth-century United States. Which British novelistic conventions could be imported, and which required reimagining? Why are women absent from so many “classic” American novels? How does the representation of women change in the early twentieth century? Authors may include Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, Hannah Crafts, Henry James, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Memory, Desire, and the Modern Novel
Full course for one semester. T.S. Eliot begins his 1922 poem The Waste Land with the admixture of memory and desire, reflecting literary modernism’s preoccupations both with the subjective life and with time and historicity. This course will examine the ways in which fictions from roughly the first half of the twentieth century repeatedly return to questions of a remembrance of eros past, both in their thematic content and in their formal narrative complexities. Marcel Proust, the most influential literary explorer of these questions, will occupy a central position in our analysis, but we will also examine novels by transatlantic modern authors who may include Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, and Vladimir Nabokov. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman
Full course for one semester. This course examines one of the most important forms of the nineteenth-century novel, the bildungsroman, or novel of formation, focused on the ways in which the protagonist reacts to a changing society and forges identity within it. We will read works drawn from the following authors: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. In addition to works of fiction we will read a number of critical texts by major scholars of narrative on topics including narrators and narrative structure, the function of novelistic character, the concept of realism, and the nature and history of literary genres. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2020–21.

English 211 - Introduction to Poetry and Poetics

Full course for one semester. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, tone, form, speaker, and audience. We will read texts from a wide historical range and consider the historical development of selected forms and techniques. The course will also examine what some poets and critics have regarded as the nature and function of poetry and what bearing such theories have on the practice of poetry and vice versa. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. May not be repeated for credit. 

Not offered 2020–21.

English 212 - British Poetry

British Romantic Poetry
Full course for one semester. An introduction to literature in Britain from c. 1790 to 1830 with an emphasis on the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Readings will also include selections from the most influential prose writers of the period, including Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Hannah More, and recent critical studies of the history, political context, and aesthetic debates of this revolutionary era. Prerequisites: sophomore standing or permission of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Early Modern Woman
Full course for one semester. Queen Elizabeth I was both an exception and an ideal in early modern England: a woman, ruling a patriarchal nation, about whom countless poems were written. She was also a poet in her own right, serving as both literary subject and object, and the same was true of women at all levels of society. This course introduces students to the range of poetry written by and about women in early modern England. In particular, it examines the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets represented the relationship of English womanhood to the world that produced and surrounded it, at home and abroad. What can we learn from both idealized and realistic portrayals of early modern women? To what extent do changes in literature reflect shifts in English history and culture, including the intersections of religion, politics, science, and class and gender relations? In considering these questions, students will develop a formal analytical vocabulary and skills central to the reading and studying of poetry. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. This course is open to first-year students. Conference.

English 213 - American Poetry

Ethnopoetics
Full course for one semester. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the complexity and pleasure of poetry. We will be learning about the aesthetics of ethnic American poetry by reading it in the context of Western and non-Western poetic traditions. We will use the historical circumstances and theories of ethnicity to help us understand both the political and the aesthetic choices behind poetic allusions, language, genre, diction, rhythm, and figurative language. The poems we read are chosen from a variety of genres, authors, and historical periods, ranging from sonnets to blues, Phillis Wheatley to Joy Harjo, and the Renaissance to the present. Our aim will be to understand how the various techniques and genres open to poets enable them to produce works of art which speak to us and push us to think. The course emphasizes close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

English 242 - Introduction to Drama

American Theatre Post-Angels in America
Full course for one semester. In a 2018 article “The Great Work Continues,” the New York Times asked how American theatre has changed since the first production of  Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1993, and named the best 25 American plays written since then. The list included plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Bruce Norris, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel, August Wilson, Anna Deveare Smith, Wallace Shawn, Edward Albee, Eve Ensler, and others. This course begins with a study of Kushner, laying the groundwork for further study of the current state of American theater. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference.

European X
Full course for one semester. As with its nine previous iterations, this course looks at European drama in its social and political context in a limited time frame from the perspective of different countries. In this version, we will be covering the late 1970s and early 1980s. Probable authors will include Heiner Müller, Caryl Churchill, and Brian Friel. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Introduction to Shakespeare
Full course for one semester. In this course we will read major plays from several genres: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest. Engaging with criticism, performances, and films, we will approach the plays both as literary texts and as embodied theatrical events. We will give special attention to Shakespeare’s poetic language, dramaturgy, and complex treatments of power, politics, community, family, sex, and the self. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Shakespeare, Text, and Performance
Full course for one semester. This course will consider the relationship between literary analysis and theatrical or cinematic performance in several Shakespearean plays. We will pay particular attention to images of plays and playing in the scripts, to the different political and ethical implications of different performances, and to changes in conventions of representation. Plays to be examined include Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, Henry V, and Much Ado about Nothing. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Shakespeare’s Comedies
Full course for one semester. We will read six of Shakespeare’s comedies, from the following groups: “romantic comedies”: As You Like It and Twelfth Night; “problem comedies”: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure; and “mixed-genre plays”: Henry IV Part One (history/comedy) and The Winter’s Tale (tragicomedy). Shakespearean comedy works to release constraints on festivity and freely chosen love, deflates pomposity, and allows its characters to undermine authoritarian-imposed limits, solemn conventions, and rigid logic; but Shakespearean comedy also tests the limits of self-indulgence. It often comes close to tragedy and even death before pulling back to a rebirth into social harmony, however questionable it may be. We will analyze the role of gender relations (especially the function of heroines’ cross-dressing), the difficulty of establishing definitive moral norms, the power of erotic desire and the role imagination plays in its fulfillment, and the nature of individual identity, especially as it is tested when characters are immersed in unfamiliar worlds. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Full course for one semester. In this course we will explore the astonishing breadth of Shakespeare’s tragedies by reading his major masterpieces in the genre (such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear) alongside plays that complicate and expand our understanding of the tragic (such as Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, and The Winter’s Tale). We will consider Shakespeare’s tragedies in relation to classical and medieval precedents as well as theoretical accounts of the genre from antiquity to the twentieth century. Engaging with criticism, performances, and films, we will approach the plays both as literary texts and as embodied theatrical events. We will give special attention to Shakespeare’s poetic language, dramaturgy, and complex treatments of power, politics, community, family, sex, and the self. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

English 251 - Introduction to Anglophone and Postcolonial Literature

Irish Literature
Full course for one semester. This course is an introduction to Irish literature and its sociocultural contexts. Beginning with the writings of Jonathan Swift and Maria Edgeworth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the course devotes the bulk of its time to the literature of the Irish Renaissance 1890–1940, including the work of W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Flann O’Brien. We conclude with readings from recent Irish literature and the Troubles, including work by Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. There will be additional readings on social and literary history exploring nationalism and national character, colonialism and the relationship between Ireland and England, romanticism, the Anglo-Irish and the Protestant Ascendancy, and the Troubles, 1968–98. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2020–21.

English 261 - Introduction to Film

Film Noir
Full course for one semester. This course will focus on film noir in American cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, examining its plotlines and narrative methods as well as its distinctive visual style. Students will be introduced to the language of film analysis and trace the genre’s sources in “hard-boiled” detective fiction, German expressionism, and the cultural climate of the United States in the decades in which the films were produced. Questions about visual framing, narrative structure, and genre will inform readings and discussions, as will the films’ representations of tensions in postwar social roles. The course will conclude with a consideration of one or two more recent examples of “neo-noir.” Required readings on film and narrative theory; directors will include Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, and Michael Curtiz. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

English 301 - Junior Seminar in English Literary History

Full course for one semester. This course offers a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English and American literary history. Offered in two or three sections each year with different emphases, this course engages the in-depth study of one work and its precursors, influences, and effects, or may study a range of works attending to intertextual transformations and generic change. The course will also include substantial reading in literary theory, and students will develop their own critical history, together with an annotated bibliography of the work of a major author. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisite: junior standing and two 200-level English courses. Conference. May not be repeated for credit. 

English 303 - American Studies Seminar

Dead and Undead 
Full course for one semester. This course examines changes in the way Americans have understood and dealt with death from the Puritans through the postmodern era. Special attention will be paid both to elegies and to gothic literature about the “undead,” particularly the grim reaper, skeletons, ghosts, mummies, vampires, and zombies. Literary works by major American authors will be examined in the context of American history and material culture related to death, particularly cemeteries and places where the dead are prepared for burial or cremation. The timid should beware, as course assignments will include field trips to local graveyards in order to do iconographic and seriation studies. This course offers an introduction to the methods of American studies and digital humanities. Prerequisites: at least one 200-level English class or one course in American history. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Jews across the Americas
Full course for one semester. This course examines the diversity of the American Jewish experiences in South America, North America, and the Caribbean.  Moving from the early colonial era to the present, we will examine Jewish life through a variety of literary genres ranging from poetry to fiction to graphic novels. This course offers an introduction to the methods of American studies and digital humanities, and focuses on how to read literature in the context of primary historical sources and material culture. Prerequisites: at least two 200-level English classes or Introduction to Judaism (Religion 151) OR any other course in Jewish literature or history. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference.

Studies in Nonfiction Prose

English 311 - Studies in Nonfiction Prose

Autobiography: Writing American Selves
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce problems of narrative through the study of American autobiography and memoir. We will examine various strategies writers employ to describe the self, whether in isolation or in relationship to family and the surrounding culture(s). We will focus on the language of self-representation; the function and expression of memory; problems of truth, fiction, and lying in autobiography; the relation of performativity to identity; the ways autobiographers give symbolic meaning and form to their experience; and the relation of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to self-representation. We’ll look at ways that writers experiment with diverse forms, such as graphic autobiographies, or autobiographical novels. In addition to readings in autobiographical theory, texts may include works by the following writers: Henry Adams, W.E.B. DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry James, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, Lillian Hellman, Joanne Greenberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Ernesto Galarza, and Art Spiegelman. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in Drama

English 320 - Studies in Drama

History Plays: Shakespearean and Contemporary
Full course for one semester. From Henry V to Hamilton, dramatizations of history raise questions about what’s at stake when we tell stories of the national past. How do we use representations of the past to understand, critique, and shape the present? What are the claims of historical fidelity against imaginative license? What does it even mean to tell a “national” story? This course explores these questions by looking at two moments in the history of the history play: the Shakespearean and the contemporary. We will begin by considering some of Shakespeare’s most searching examinations of power, politics, social obligations, and what it means to be a nation. Using Shakespeare’s history plays to define the genre, we will then consider comparable works by contemporary British and American playwrights: these may include Suzan-Lori Parks, David Hare, Moira Buffini, Mike Bartlett, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Prerequisites: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Renaissance Revenge Tragedies
Full course for one semester. Elizabethan statesman Francis Bacon called revenge “a kind of wild justice” that good government and rule of law should prevent. No wonder, then, that an immense body of drama turned to revenge plots to explore contradictions and failings in the legal, political, and moral codes meant to govern individuals’ relationships with each other and public institutions. In this class, we will explore how the theme of revenge interacted with and spurred the development of drama in Renaissance England. From early translations of the Roman philosopher Seneca’s tragedies through to the decadent plays of the Jacobean stage, tales of clandestine affairs and “murder most foul” spurred innovation in stagecraft while simultaneously providing a means to contemplate power and its abuses. Placing famous examples of the genre, such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in conversation with lesser-known works, such as Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and John Webster’s The White Devil, we will concern ourselves with three major topics: 1) how the representation of crimes and their discovery on stage influenced plays’ structure and rhetorical style; 2) how allusion and citation among plays produced recognizable character types, including the Machiavel, revenger, and stoic; and 3) how stage conventions regarding the representation of madness and violence interacted with social norms concerning gender and emerging concepts of race. Carrying our discussion of these topics through to contemporary theatrical productions such as Gregory Doran’s Hamlet, starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, we will consider the cultural work revenge tragedies and their theatrical legacy continue to perform today. Prerequisites: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference.

Studies in Fiction

English 333 - Studies in Fiction

American Feminist Fiction, Post-1945
Full course for one semester. While some feminist literary history simply traces a teleology from “prefeminist” to fully feminist to “postfeminist” works, this course asks instead: How is feminist fiction in dialogue with feminist theory?  Rather than ask of a work, “Is it feminist?” we will ask (with Rita Felski) “Feminist—for whom?” and “How is it feminist?” We will consider the poetics and politics of (white) women’s liberation novels and fiction that explores women’s experience of multiple categories of identity (including race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age, and [dis]ability). In addition to fictional narratives, readings will include feminist theory. Writers whose works may be studied include Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Joanne Greenberg, Gayl Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula Le Guin, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, Rita Felski, Shulamith Firestone, Gilbert and Gubar, Gayle Greene, bell hooks, Teresa de Lauretis, Janice Radway, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Bonnie Zimmerman. Prerequisites: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Description and Narration
Full course for one semester. This course will focus on the relations between description and narration in examples drawn from American, French, and English fiction. In what ways does description serve various narrative drives? In what ways does description assert its separate purposes and what might those be? Primary texts include Callistratus’s Descriptions, Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, Melville’s Typee, Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, Woolf’s The Waves, Stein’s Three Lives, and Joyce’s Dubliners. Theoretical readings will be drawn from the work of M.M. Bakhtin, Michel Riffaterre, Roland Barthes, Elaine Scarry, W.T.J. Mitchell, and Paul Ricoeur. Weekly writing assignments and active participation are required. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

James Joyce
Full course for one semester. Critics and scholars have repeatedly hailed James Joyce as the most influential and important fiction writer of the twentieth century, noting that he effectively rewrote the forms and capabilities of the short story, novel, and epic. Over the track of his career, Joyce’s fiction progressed from its roots in literary naturalism to more complex modernist forms, exhibiting his uncanny ability to master and also invent different rhetorical discourses. This course will track the full range of this development, from his earliest fictions in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way through brief selections from his last and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. We will focus particular attention on the entirety of Ulysses. We will also pay attention to critical, biographical, and historical contexts for Joyce’s work. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

The Literary Imagination and the Working Hand
Full course for one semester. American authors have conceived of the writer’s work in ambivalent terms: sometimes as drudgery for pay, sometimes as artisanal craft, and sometimes as a sign of the intellect’s accession to a realm of freedom and truth. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this ambivalence about the writer’s place in society is manifest in the literary text as a range of attitudes that moves from empathy with the working classes to alienation from their condition. The project of this course is to compare the material and social labor performed by the characters to the imaginative, rhetorical work done by its narrator(s). Our close readings will be grounded in the following questions: Are characters and narrators ontological equals or do they occupy different positions in an allegorical hierarchy? Are the text’s representations of material labor and the work of the literary imagination congruent or in conflict with one another? How prominently and to what purpose does a character’s work figure in the narrator’s consciousness of his or her own project? When and why is a character’s work echoed in the narrative’s style (i.e., the redundant nature of the character’s work is represented by verbal repetition in the text)? Finally, how does the represented status of material, ethical, and artistic work contribute to the text’s argument about which values are either ideally or distinctly American? Primary texts include Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (Broadview 2004), Melville’s Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales (Barnes and Noble 2006), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (Modern Library 2001), Willa Cather’s My Antonia (Penguin 1994), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (Modern Library 2001), Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics 1990). Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Modernity and Memory in the Indian Ocean
Full course for one semester. The Indian Ocean has been a site of cultural exchange across continents for several millennia, but it has often been marginalized from discussions of modernity based on Euro-American and trans-Atlantic models. What does it mean to be modern in the context of the Indian Ocean, a region crisscrossed by multiple empires, competing religions, and movements of migrants, merchants, slaves, pilgrims and soldiers? How have individuals and communities in the Indian Ocean been framed by larger transnational processes like colonization, decolonization, slavery, trade, migration, and displacement? Using literature as the primary mode of thinking, this course will consider the ways in which the unique history of circulation of people, objects, and ideas in the Indian Ocean shapes ideas of modernity distinct from those developed in the West. The aim is to explore the refashionings of modernity in literary and theoretical texts that return to archival sources to announce critical rewritings of the past. Paying close attention to narrative techniques and forms, the course will examine how the uses of non-Western modes of representation and epistemologies provide modes for critiquing various theoretical positions on modernity. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

The Novel and Romanticism
Full course for one semester. What is a romantic novel? Emphasis on the transcendental aspects of romanticism has tended to define the romantic era as one dominated by the great poetic texts of the era, but the period also marks an extraordinary high point in the development of the novel. In this course we will look at the novel’s figuring of transcendence; at its response to the events, aesthetic theories, and dominant figures of romanticism; and at the variety of forms the novel spans at this time. Readings drawn from among the following authors: Rousseau, Goethe, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Emily Brontë. There will also be substantial readings from important critical accounts of romanticism, including Frye, de Man, Butler and Chandler. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Place, Space, and Memory in Modern Fiction
Full course for one semester. This course focuses on place and space in the rhetoric and ethics of modern fiction, and on the related themes of identity, history, and memory. Drawing on urban, feminist, and literary theory (Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Henri LeFebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Barbara Mann, and others), students will explore relations between fiction and place/space.  Readings for the class foreground a paradigmatic case of varying narratives of place and space in modern fiction by focusing on works by Israeli, Palestinian, and American authors, in which memory and history construct the disparate places of homeland in the same space, in conversation with identities of galut and diaspora. We will also analyze selected visual and poetic texts, and supplement our study with historical and sociological readings. Readings may be drawn from works by the following writers: Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Orly Castel-Bloom, Ghassan Kanafani, Khulud Khamis, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmud Darwish, Joan Leegant, Philip Roth, Sayed Kashua, and Etgar Keret. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Postbellum, Pre-Harlem: The Literature of Reconstruction
Full course for one semester. Born too late for the slave narrative and too early for the Harlem Renaissance—“Post-Bellum–Pre-Harlem,” as he puts it—Charles W. Chesnutt missed two major African American literary movements. Chesnutt’s life (1858–1932) spanned crucial moments in American history—the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of post-Reconstruction violence, the establishment of schools for black children led by black teachers, the emergence of the convict labor system, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. This course examines Chesnutt’s fiction as the core of the literature of Reconstruction and its aftermath, from the pernicious myths of the plantation school to the protest fiction of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Methodologically, we will draw on recent work in African American archival recovery and periodical culture, examining the cultural politics of publication history. Genres will include realism, regionalism, and sentimentalism; the slave narrative and the social problem novel; journalism, legal writing, and essays. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 and two 200-level English courses or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Postcolonial Hauntings 
Full course for one semester. Haunting is central to postcolonial thought and literature. This course will examine the aesthetics of haunting in postcolonial novels from the latter half of the twentieth century. These novels invite us to radically rethink the relations between the past and the present in terms of their contemporaneity and interdependence instead of a linear progression from the colonial past to a postcolonial liberated present. We will reflect on alternative temporalities opened up by literary evocations of ghosts, phantoms, and specters, and explore the themes of memory, loss, and trauma in various historical and cultural contexts. How might the language of haunting help us understand the unresolved histories of colonial, racial, nationalist, sexist, and ethnic oppression? How do these texts register the experience of loss in the past sustained through violence in the present? In what ways does the novel imagine the possibility of justice by opening up a space for reinterpreting the past in the present? Putting literary texts in conversation with various postcolonial and poststructuralist theories, psychoanalysis, and Afro-pessimist thought, we will consider how particular writers respond to the failures of decolonization, the contradictions of the postcolonial nation, the possibilities of resistance and revolution, and the afterlives of empire and slavery. Readings may include works of fiction by Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Erna Brodber, and Fred D’Aguiar, and theoretical writings of Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Gayatri Spivak, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe. Prerequisite: sophomore standing and two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. 

Short Story Cycles
Full course for one semester. In the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, North America has seen remarkable development in the short story cycle, a form of narrative also found in many other periods, cultures, and languages (The Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron, Dubliners). This narrative form differs from story collections in its degree of unity, and from the novel in the relative independence of its constituent parts (stories rather than chapters). How does the development of this genre inflect the history of the novel? In this class, we will explore the constructions of gender, ethnicity, and the ethics of reading in short story cycles from authors such as Anderson, Anzaldúa, Barth, Hemingway, Garcia, Erdrich, Kingston, Jewett, Munro, Naylor, O’Brien, Salinger, and Stein. Readings will also include critical and theoretical essays on narrative and on the history of the novel. In addition to brief response essays, students will write a research paper. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. 

Theories of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Fiction and Theory
Full course for one semester. This course will explore how human consciousness is represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels and theory, focusing on the topics of sensation, emotion, thought, language, memory, object relations, and intersubjectivity. Working from contemporary to modernist fiction, we will examine how the syntax of relations among narrators and characters or among plots and sentences participates in the modeling of consciousness. Every literary text will be paired with texts drawn from philosophy, phenomenology, psychology, and cognitive science. Writers will include Emma Donoghue, Jennifer Egan, Nicholson Baker, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Henry James. Theorists will include Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, William James, Freud, Lacan, Nussbaum, Damazio. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Networks
Full course for one semester. The idea of the network was central not only to the ways in which Virginia Woolf conceived of relations between and among people in her novels but also according to the terms by which she understood her own fictional career. Woolf’s affiliations with her Bloomsbury Group cohort, her literary collaborators and rivals, and the younger writers she mentored informed her own sense of herself as an author, and were ultimately turned into literary capital regarding the complex manner by which selves are constituted through their engagements with others. This course will explore this dynamic not only through Woolf’s own fiction and essays but also those within the works of Woolf’s modernist network both during her lifetime and after by figures such as Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Bennett, Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth Bowen, and Ali Smith. We will also read critical and theoretical readings relevant to the concept of the network and to these writers. Prerequisite: sophomore standing and two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. 

Studies in British Culture

English 337 - Studies in British Culture

The Age of Oscar Wilde
Full course for one semester. The Victorian fin de siècle, or end of the century, was intellectually and culturally dominated by the figure of Oscar Wilde. Not only did his fictions, plays, and essays cause a sensation in British society, but the aftershocks of the scandal of his trial for “gross indecency” changed the way the late Victorians viewed sexual and gender roles. This course will look at this period primarily through Wilde’s writings, his influences, and his lingering effect on British culture. We will also look at works by Wilde’s contemporaries, who may include Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Richard Marsh, and H.G. Wells. There will also be substantial critical and theoretical readings. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Romanticism and Emotion
Full course for one semester. The romantic era was marked by a particular fascination with and exploration of intensity in aesthetic and emotional response. From the tear-stained pages of its sentimental novels to the various explorations of joy, dejection, fear, and terror that dominate the era’s poetry and gothic fiction, it is evident that the precise nature of certain strong emotions, especially those of the writer/creator, were a major focus of intellectual interest. Drawing on a number of recent studies of the history of emotion, we will read authors including Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, and Percy Shelley. Topics to be addressed in the course of these readings include which emotions are most frequently invoked or explored by romantic writers; characteristic forms and techniques; the nature of the cultural constraints, or spurs, to the expression of various emotions, and how attitudes towards such expression change over time, especially after 1789. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

William Blake and His Contemporaries: Word and Image
Full course for one semester. William Blake, the poet, artist, and printmaker of the British romantic period, was the maker of illuminated books integrating word and image in powerful multimedia works of art. Though largely unknown in his own day, Blake’s reputation as artist and visionary has only continued to rise since his “discovery” in the later nineteenth century. We will study Blake’s illustrated books, from the Songs of Innocence and Experience to Jerusalem. We will analyze Blake’s iconography, poetic methods, political and religious beliefs, mythological system, and methods of production. We will also examine his historical moment, and his relationships to contemporary romantic authors and visual artists like Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Fuseli, as well as important interpreters of Blake’s corpus like Northrop Frye, W.J.T. Mitchell and E.P. Thompson. Students will make use of the online Blake Archive’s collection of all extant copies of the illuminated texts. The final project for this course will be a digital exhibition of Blakean image-texts for which each student will contribute a short catalogue essay. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in American Literature

English 341 - Studies in American Literature

American Pastoral: Literature and Environment
Full course for one semester. This course explores the relationship between idyllic fictions and concrete experience through two transformative centuries of American environmental history. Examining literature’s role as both the product and producer of “nature’s nation,” we trace the changing values attached to wilderness, farming, and the nonhuman environment, from early modern fantasies of the exploration and settlement to present-day prophesies of environmental doom. We will examine the many ideological functions of pastoral imagination across literary genres, including enlightenment travel writing, romantic poetry, transcendentalist essays, regionalist fiction, muckraking journalism, and children’s fiction. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, American studies background, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

English 356 - Studies in African American Literature

African American Women Playwrights 
Full course for one semester. In this course we will study several twentieth-century African American women playwrights. We will look at them both as artists and as writers responding to specific historical circumstances. Writers will include Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, Dominique Morisseau, and Adrienne Kennedy. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

August Wilson’s Twentieth-Century Cycle
Full course for one semester. Between 1982 and 2005, African American playwright August Wilson wrote 10 plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, in which he offered an alternative view of American history as seen through the perspective of black characters. Those formally marginalized now took center stage, and the cycle celebrates their struggles to establish community and maintain a sense of history. We will read the entire cycle chronologically by decade depicted, starting with Gem of the Ocean (1900s) (2003) and concluding with Radio Golf (1990s) (2005). This is thus a course in both African American history and literature. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

The Black Panthers
Full course for one semester. In October 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Fifty years later, it is time to assess this movement through a study of its literature. We will read the major works of Newton, Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and others, concluding with a look at the Panthers’ work in Portland. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Contemporary African American Fiction
Full course for one semester. In 2011, University of Chicago professor Kenneth Warren published What Was African American Literature? in which he argued that African American literature as an entity was a product of the Jim Crow era. When Jim Crow died, according to Warren, so did African American literature. What came after was something new and different. This course will interrogate Warren’s idea by first looking at several theoretical texts by Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright from the 1920s–1950s to get a sense of the early form of the debate. We will then read two “African American” novels by George Schuyler and Richard Wright to ascertain what African American literature was. The rest of the semester we will engage in reading texts from 1998–2015 to test Warren’s theory. Authors will include Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Suzan-Lori Parks, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Teju Cole, and Paul Beatty. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in Medieval Literature

English 352 - Studies in Medieval Literature

Chaucer
Full course for one semester. The late-fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer is surely one of the greatest masters of irony in English literature. In this course we will study a generous selection of his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. The first section of the course will focus on developing students’ facility with Chaucer’s language and with medieval culture through a study of the General Prologue. As we proceed through the tales, we will pay careful attention to Chaucer’s representation of gender and class through his use of irony and satire, his manipulation of genre, his relationship to his source materials and to medieval Christian authorities, and his subtle exploration of a poetics of instability. Throughout the course we will also consider and reconsider the implications of Chaucer’s ambiguous social status within the Ricardian court, as well the validity of thinking of the poet as a “skeptical fideist.” Students will learn to read Middle English fluently by the end of the semester, though no previous experience with early forms of English is required. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference.

Dante’s Divine Comedy 
Full course for one semester. In this course we will study Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy, seeking to understand this ambitious poem both on its own merits and as an index of the major literary, artistic, and intellectual currents of European culture during the High Middle Ages. The Divine Comedy as a whole narrates Dante’s fictional journey through the afterlife, where he witnesses the eternal torments of the damned souls in hell, the patient endurance of the restless Christian spirits in purgatory, and the ineffable delights of the blessed in paradise. As we follow Dante-pilgrim on his journey, we will look specifically at the poetic and narrative strategies that Dante-poet employs in thinking through the changing relationships between language and truth in the separate canticles of the poem, thinking about how an infernal poetics, for example, differs from a paradisiacal one. In light of ongoing debates in Dante studies, we will also focus on the extent to which Dante’s poem enjoins readers to a process of conversion and on the ways in which Dante establishes his own poetic and moral authority as a counterweight to the corruptions of the fourteenth-century church. Readings will be from the English translation by Robert and Jean Hollander, with the Italian text of Dante’s poem on the facing page. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference.

English 358 - Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature

Full course for one semester. Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) represents the earliest historical form of the English language. In the centuries before the Norman Conquest in 1066, Anglo-Saxon was the chief vernacular of lowland Britain, and texts written in the language constitute a rich and varied literary tradition. In this course, we will begin with an intensive study the grammar and vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon language, with an eye toward acquiring the ability to read the relevant texts in the original; students should be able to read Anglo-Saxon with relative ease by the end of the term. As the semester progresses, much conference time will be spent translating key passages of Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry together. Our time will be punctuated by ongoing discussions of readings in the history and literature of the period. Texts under consideration may include Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People, Asser’s Life of Alfred, Judith, the poetry of Cynewulf and Aldhelm, and other anonymous poetry from the Exeter Book. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or higher. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. May not be repeated for credit. Not offered 2020–21.

English 359 - Intermediate Readings in Anglo-Saxon

Full course for one semester. This course is designed for students who wish to continue their study of the technical aspects of the Anglo-Saxon language, to hone their skills at translation, and to read more deeply in the literature and history of the period. Texts under consideration may include Beowulf, the Christ poems, Alfred’s translation of The Consolation of Philosophy, and Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos. Prerequisite: English 358. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. May not be repeated for credit. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in Early Modern Literature

English 362 - Studies in Early Modern Literature

Early Modern Drama
Full course for one semester. A study of the origins (theatrical and literary) and the generic breadth of English drama in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In addition to some works by Shakespeare, we will read plays by a variety of early modern playwrights, including Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, Elizabeth Cary, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Marston, and John Webster. Considerable attention will be paid to the larger institutional context (theatrical, social, and political) within which these works originally appeared. Where possible and appropriate, we will also consider modern stage and cinematic adaptations of these works. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 and sophomore standing, or consent of instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

John Donne
Full course for one semester. Obsessed with death, love, piety, loss, science, and the power of the written word, John Donne lived and worked on very private and public levels throughout his career. This course will consider the writer who noted that “no man is an island” and pondered “for whom the bell tolls,” reading the prose works in which these words first appeared together with his poetry and letters. We will also consider adaptations of Donne’s poetry and concerns by other writers in other genres in the seventeenth century; the film Wit (2001; based on the 1999 play), which revolves around his famous “Death be not proud” sonnet; and critical receptions of his work since his death. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, one of which must be English 211, 212, or 213. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. 

John Milton
Full course for one semester. From imagining his presence at the birth of Christ, attacking censorship, defending divorce, and ultimately justifying the ways of God to man, John Milton’s literary, political, and religious interests were both wide-ranging and impassioned. This course immerses students in Milton’s major works with attention to generic range, reading his political prose, shorter poems, dramas, and the complete Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. This course will assume familiarity with and skills in prosodic analysis. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above (English 211, 212, or 213 strongly recommended), or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Renaissance Epic
Full course for one semester. If the poets and playwrights of Renaissance England saw themselves as part of a “rebirth” of classical literature, no genre posed a more formidable challenge than the epic. In this course, we will explore how early modern writers translated, reimagined, and critiqued the classical epic to create their own stories of heroism and collective identity in poetry and drama. We will spend most of our time with two masterpieces of the genre: Edmund Spenser’s allegorical Arthurian romance The Faerie Queene and John Milton’s sublime biblical epic Paradise Lost. We will also look at early English translations of Homer and Virgil along with dramatic adaptations by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. The course will assume familiarity with Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in Shakespeare

English 363 - Studies in Shakespeare

Shakespearean Mimesis
Full course for one semester. As Hamlet says, the purpose of playing is to hold the mirror up to nature. This course examines that purpose, exploring three main topics: 1) what mimesis meant to early modern literary theorists; 2) how within a partly deterministic framework of textual and rhetorical devices, Shakespeare creates the illusion of human character, freedom, and fatality; and 3) how readers and viewers of these plays can understand the implications of his artistry. The course focuses on not more than half a dozen plays (e.g., As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Henry V, and The Tempest), looking also at texts drawn from early modern literary controversies (e.g., Gosson and Sidney) and contemporary analyses of comparable issues (e.g., Bloom, Montrose, and Palfrey). Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Full course for one semester. In this course we will explore the astonishing breadth of Shakespeare’s tragedies by reading his major masterpieces in the genre (such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear) alongside plays that complicate and expand our understanding of the tragic (such as Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, and The Winter’s Tale). We will consider Shakespeare’s tragedies in relation to classical and medieval precedents as well as theoretical accounts of the genre from antiquity to the twentieth century. Engaging with criticism, performances, and films, we will approach the plays both as literary texts and as embodied theatrical events. We will give special attention to Shakespeare’s poetic language, dramaturgy, and complex treatments of power, politics, community, family, sex, and the self. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in Poetry

English 366 - Studies in Poetry

Beauty and the Poetic Text
Full course for one semester. What makes us perceive things as beautiful? Why do certain works of art move us emotionally, while others engage us intellectually? The concept of aesthetics is nothing if not fluid: it can relate to perception through the senses; the philosophy of beauty; the art (or science!) of what is pleasing; the study of good taste; the standards by which art is judged—the list goes on. We will embark on a transhistorical exploration of beauty and the senses in Western literature across multiple genres, beginning with Plato and moving through the ideas of beauty and the sublime in the medieval world, representation and the self in the Renaissance, taste, sentiment, and the senses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finally ending with the modern period and the turn toward self-conscious artistic creation. Likely texts include Shakespeare’s Sonnets and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as well as works by Longinus, Aquinas, Donne, Thomas Gray, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Emerson, Dickinson, Wilde, and Walter Benjamin. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, one of which must be English 211, 212, or 213. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference.

Phenomenology of Early Modern Lyric
Full course for one semester. Early modern England was home to a flourishing of lyric poetry arguably unmatched before or since. Often used as a blanket term for short-form poetry, the essence of lyric lies in its vivid representation of a voice, whether as a script for the reader or a dramatic depiction of a scene, rendering the reader a spectator. But how is this voice on the page made “real” to readers? How do early modern poems situate readers with respect to the action or moment of a lyric poem? Literary and linguistic theory interested in semiotics, phenomenology, reader response, and material culture will frame our approach to answering these questions, testing the boundaries between spoken and silently read word and song to better understand the ways lyric was and can be read and used. Focusing in equal part on the major poets (Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Milton) and less canonical figures like Anne Locke, Richard Barnfield, and Mary Wroth, we will consider the reader’s relationship to the speaker imagined in a poem—how readers are interpolated by texts rhetorically, grammatically, and materially, as audiences and as speakers. Students will develop a working knowledge of ancient and early modern rhetoric; modern theoretical texts will include Bergson, Saussure, Jakobson, Agamben, Austin, Barthes, de Certeau, de Man, Derrida, Wright, Culler, and Johnson, among others. This course will assume familiarity with and skills in prosodic analysis. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, one of which must be English 211, 212, or 213. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

English 384 - Poetry and History

American Modernism
Full course for one semester. Virginia Woolf wrote that on “or about December, 1910, human character changed,” voicing a widely shared excitement over an anticipated revolution in the arts. The American poets who stayed in the United States shared this excitement, but also faced unique cultural circumstances. We will do close readings of poems written over the first three decades or so of the twentieth century.  The poets on whom the class will focus may include William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Melvin Tolson, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes; we will look at how these writers responded to and helped shape American attitudes about the arts, including the visual arts. In investigating the poets’ ideas about poetry’s place and function, we will also look at how modernist poetry circulated in the United States in the early twentieth century, drawing on the Reed library’s collection of small magazines from the period. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or English 211 or a twentieth-century American history course, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Contemporary American Poetry
Full course for one semester. This course is devoted to the works of American poets writing in the decades after 1945, beginning with poets ranging from Richard Wilbur to Charles Olson and ending with those writing now. The emphasis will be on the heterogeneous nature of poetic practices and poetic traditions and practices in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century, and most class discussions will focus on individual poems and essays about poetics, especially those less commonly read these days. We will also consider questions about the relationships between poetry, poetics, and American culture, characterizing major historical changes in the United States in the period. Prerequisite: English 211, and either one upper-division English course or one twentieth-century American History class, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Studies in Cultural Contacts

English 370 - Studies in Cultural Contacts

Studies in Cultural Contacts: Strindberg and O’Neill
Full course for one semester. This course will be an in-depth study of two giants of modern drama from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, August Strindberg (1849–1912) from Sweden, and Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) from the United States. Topics to be discussed will include naturalism, expressionism, surrealism, family, heredity, alcoholism, drugs, and pipe dreams. Strindberg plays will likely include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), To Damascus (1898/1904), and The Dance of Death (1900). O’Neill texts will include Anna Christie (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941). Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Transatlantic Bestsellers 
Full course for one semester. This course examines the economic, political, and cultural exchanges that created transatlantic writing and reading practices through an intensive study of two bestselling novels and the literary forms they deployed. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) not only inflamed the conflicts that led to the Civil War but also revolutionized Anglo-American print culture, selling more copies in the nineteenth century than any book except the Bible and winning Harriet Beecher Stowe international renown. Charles Dickens enjoyed similar acclaim in the United States; when he died in 1870, it was said that he was mourned more than anyone else of his generation except President Lincoln. Great Expectations (1860–61), Dickens’s penultimate novel, solidified his reputation with near-universal acclaim. Reading the original serials of both novels, we will draw on the methods of book history to consider contemporaneous reviews and journalism, visual cultures, and the proliferation of adaptations of Dickens and Stowe. Throughout the course, we will trace novelistic genres through the Atlantic world: sentimentalism, realism, and the gothic; the slave narrative and black Anglophilia; the social problem novel and documentary nonfiction; and the origins of crime literature. In addition to recent work in transatlantic studies and history of the book, readings may include Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Jacob Riis. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 and two 200-level English courses or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2020–21.

Literary Theory

English 393 - Literary Theory

Meaning and Interpretation
Full course for one semester. In this course we address debates within philosophy of language, literary theory, and legal analysis concerning our practices of interpreting texts. In ordinary personal communication, people use various sounds, gestures, and marks to express thought and feeling. The course begins by examining this activity, asking what factors determine what we mean, and what we interpret each other to mean. Several distinctions matter to our investigation: 1) the distinction between what we directly mean or say and what we indirectly mean or imply; 2) the distinction between what we literally or explicitly mean and what we nonliterally, figuratively, or inexplicitly mean; 3) the distinction among texts as conveyers of authorial meaning, texts as understandable according to publicly available meaning, and texts as socially interpretable objects; and 4) the (putative) distinction between the exchange of sounds, gestures, and marks in a shared present context and the production, reception, and cultural and political deployment of text(s) across some distance in space and time. We examine the phenomena of vagueness, ambiguity, underspecificity, indeterminacy, and undecidability; develop accounts of lying, pretense, irony, and fiction; and finally engage controversies about the nature of genre, the meanings of texts, and the interpretation of statutes. Readings are drawn from the philosophy of language (e.g., Austin, Grice, and Kripke), from literary theory (e.g. de Man, Derrida, and Tamen), and from legal theory (e.g. Scalia). We also use a few short literary texts as test cases for some of our analyses. Prerequisites: two upper-division courses in philosophy or two courses in English, or Literature 400, or consent of instructors. Conference. Cross-listed as Philosophy 414: Meaning and Interpretation. Not offered 2020–21.

The Novel and Narrative Theory
Full course for one semester. “Narrative is to be found wherever someone tells us about something,” according to Monika Fludernik; hence, almost everywhere. In this course we will explore some of the most important critical terms and categories for understanding the workings of fictional narrative. These include point of view and focalization; temporality and the conversion of raw “event” into plot structure; the nature of literary characters and reader investment in them; endings and closure; atmosphere and tone; fiction and metafiction. We will work by pairing critical concepts with example texts, mostly drawn from novels and short stories (including Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and works from Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Joyce), but will conclude with one or two film texts in order to compare narrative methods. Theorists will include Barthes, Booth, Chatman, Culler, Foucault, Genette, Moretti, Ngai, Propp, and Shklovsky. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

English 400 - Introduction to Literary Theory

See Literature 400 for description.

Literature 400 Description

Other Classes

English 355 - Twentieth-Century Jewish Literature

See German 355 for description. May not be repeated for credit. Not offered 2020–21.

German 355 Description

English 470 - Thesis

One-half or full course for one year.

English 481 - Independent Reading

One-half or full course for one semester. Prerequisite: approval of the instructor and the division.