This course takes a whirlwind world tour through the imaginative literature of writers of color across the globe. Each work will provide a distinct, exhilarating, and sometimes heart-breaking experience of a world culture from the inside. However, a number of overlapping threads will connect the works: generational change and conflict amid cross-cultural globalization; evolving ideas of love, desire and identity amidst cultural traumas; colonialism and its after-effects; the persistence of suffering. The syllabus will include: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things; Wajdi Mouawad’s family drama set in a war-torn Middle East, Scorched; Han Kang's contemporary novel about gender struggle in Korea, The Vegetarian; the Argentinian Mariana Enriquez’s stunning short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire; and Yaa Gyasi’s epic novel that traces a family’s history from West Africa to post-slavery America, Homegoing. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

A workshop in the writing of the short story; emphasis on class discussion of student writing, with reference to older and contemporary established examples of the genre.

What makes for excellence in writing for children? When Margaret Wise Brown repeats the word "moon" in two subsequent pages-"Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon"-is this effective or clunky? What makes rhyme and repetition funny and compelling in one picture book (such as Rosemary Wells's Noisy Nora) but vapid in another? How does E.B. White establish Fern's character in the opening chapter of Charlotte's Web? What makes Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira a a novel for children rather than adults-or is it one? In this course, students will study many examples of children's literature from the point of view of writers and will write their own short children's fiction (picture book texts, middle-reader or young adult short stories) and share them in workshops.

In 1774, an anonymous author wrote of "the perfection, the beauty, the grandeur & sublimity" to which Americans would advance the English language. In this course, we will explore the complex history that allows us to conclude that American English is not perfect and is but one English among many. We will study Old English, later medieval English, the early modern English of Shakespeare's day, and the varying Englishes of the modern British isles as well as those of modern America. We will read linguistic and literary histories along with literary passages from multiple times and places. We will ask, how does the history of the language affect our views of the world and our selves? And how are we continually shaping English's future?

The great tragedies and the redemptive romances from the second half of Shakespeare's career, during the reign of James I, such as Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. These plays portray humans pushed to the limit of endurance and raised to the heights of blessedness, and also find Shakespeare challenging the limits of genre. Study of the plays’ language and poetry will be complemented by a survey of their stage histories and an immersion in their present incarnations in performance and in adaptations across the world.

Sensual and emotionally powerful, American poetry of the body explores living and knowing through physical, bodily experience. From Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” to contemporary spoken word performances, body poems move us through the strangeness and familiarity of embodiment, voicing the manifold discomforts, pains, pleasures, and ecstasies of living in and through bodies. We’ll trace a number of recurring themes: the relationship between body and mind, female embodiment, queer bodies, race, sexuality, disability, illness and medicine, mortality, appetite, and the poem itself as a body.  Poets include Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Rita Dove, Thom Gunn, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Tyehimba Jess, Jos Charles, Max Ritvo, Laurie Lambeth, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been variously depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present.  We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Paule Marshall, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, and Berenice Abbott, and others. Filmmakers may include Vincente Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.

Fantasy, romance, “true” crime, experimental absurdity, Gothic-early English fiction originates narrative types that energize the novel throughout its history as literature's most popular form. This course begins with Aphra Behn's romance, Oroonoko, set in a South American slavery colony, and Daniel Defoe's tale of a pickpocket and sex worker, Moll Flanders. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift has captivated a world readership with its vertiginous mix of fantasy and satire. Henry Fielding laughs at his readers' class and gender anxieties in Joseph Andrews, while Horace Walpole invents a whole new fictional sensibility with the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. The course concludes with a parody of storytelling itself, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Frances Burney's Evelina, which anticipates the courtship comedy of Austen and the humorous characterization of Dickens.

Christopher Isherwood’s autofictional Berlin Stories (1945)—featuring Sally Bowles, immortalized by Liza Minelli—inspired John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera and, later, the film adaptation (1951, 1952). These, in turn, inspired the musical Cabaret (1966). The legendary Bob Fosse directed and choreographed Cabaret for the screen (1972); the rest is cinematic history. On stage or screen, Cabaret departs from novel and play. The famed musical transforms the ‘original,’ taking the Cabaret as motif and theme, a seedy nightclub run by a sinister Master of Ceremonies. Joel Grey was the original Emcee, while Alan Cumming reinterpreted the role in Sam Mendes’ West End and Broadway productions (1998, 2014). Amid these adaptations and revivals, Isherwood published Christopher and His Kind, shedding further light on his nocturnal Berlin years (1976). This memoir was dramatized for the screen, which at last reveals the ‘real’ Sally Bowles, Jean Ross (2011). An intertextual mesh of media, stories, genres, authors, characters, and agendas, the history of Cabaret is an exciting story in itself. In this course, we will analyze most of the works mentioned, while tracing the intertextuality and history of Cabaret. That history includes the ‘divine decadence’ of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, and the beginnings of the Second World War. But the lives and afterlives of Cabaret also trace a complex queer genealogy, before and after Stonewall, which continues to this day. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

The term “speculative fiction” has emerged as an inclusive gesture towards the most exciting fiction being written right now. Under its umbrella thrive fiction categories like Gothic, horror, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, dystopian, and environmental fiction (plus heady blends of all these).

Writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQIA+ writers have figured prominently in the contemporary (post 2000) explosion of speculative fiction—writing about “what if” in the future or in the past has proved liberating as a critique of colonial legacies, an exploration of transcultural and transnational experiences in the lives of immigrants, and a re-imagining of gender.

Entering the world of Anglophone speculative fiction requires, too, reflecting on the particular historical and cultural contexts of these texts and exploring the speculative fiction genre through scholarly essays and online literary magazines. Among the authors: Helen Oyeyemi, Vandana Singh, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Larissa Lai, and Claire Colman.

“Reader, I married him,” Jane Eyre tells us as her novel draws to a close. Many nineteenth-century novels end with a marriage. So despite suggestions within the body of the novel that women's traditional role is not a satisfying one, the heroine often seems contented in that role by the novel's end. But what happens if the heroine chooses wrongly? In this course, we will consider novels that look at a heroine's life after a marriage that she comes to regret, as well as some novels in which the bad romantic choices do not result in marriage. What do these novels of romantic mistake have to say about women's lives? Probable authors: Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, James, Austen, Eliot.

A survey of major developments in literary theory and criticism. The emphasis is on breadth of coverage. Discussion will focus on important perspectives and schools of thought from Plato to the present day. We will consider, for instance, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, post-colonialism, race theory, and post-humanism as they have contributed to the interpretation of literature.

English 120 introduces students to a level of interpretative sophistication and techniques of analysis essential not just in literary study but in all courses that demand advanced engagement with language. In active discussions, sections perform detailed readings of poetry drawn from a range of historical periods, with the aim of developing an understanding of the richness and complexity of poetic language and of connections between form and content, text and cultural and historical context. The reading varies from section to section, but all sections involve learning to read closely and to write persuasively and elegantly. Required of English majors and minors.

At various times over the past century and a half, America has welcomed, expelled, tolerated, interned, ignored, and celebrated immigrants from Asia and their descendants. This course examines the fictions produced in response to these experiences. Irony, humor, history, tragedy and mystery all find a place in Asian American literature. We will see the emergence of a self-conscious Asian American identity, as well as more recent transnational structures of feeling. We will read novels and short stories by writers including Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, Mohsin Hamid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Min Jin Lee. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement

English 120 introduces students to a level of interpretative sophistication and techniques of analysis essential not just in literary study but in all courses that demand advanced engagement with language. In active discussions, sections perform detailed readings of poetry drawn from a range of historical periods, with the aim of developing an understanding of the richness and complexity of poetic language and of connections between form and content, text and cultural and historical context. The reading varies from section to section, but all sections involve learning to read closely and to write persuasively and elegantly. Required of English majors and minors.

A workshop in the writing of the short story; emphasis on class discussion of student writing, with reference to older and contemporary established examples of the genre.

What makes for excellence in writing for children? When Margaret Wise Brown repeats the word "moon" in two subsequent pages-"Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon"-is this effective or clunky? What makes rhyme and repetition funny and compelling in one picture book (such as Rosemary Wells's Noisy Nora) but vapid in another? How does E.B. White establish Fern's character in the opening chapter of Charlotte's Web? What makes Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira a a novel for children rather than adults-or is it one? In this course, students will study many examples of children's literature from the point of view of writers and will write their own short children's fiction (picture book texts, middle-reader or young adult short stories) and share them in workshops.

An introduction to writing for television. We’ll read, watch, and discuss pilot episodes of network and cable comedies and dramas. We'll study and practice the basics: script format, episode structure, story and character development, visual description. Each student will develop and write their own original TV pilot, and students will give and receive feedback through the workshop process.

From the raucous high humor of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale to the mock heroism of the Nun’s Priest and the gentle irony of the Franklin, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provide both a window onto medieval society and a glimpse of the English literary tradition in its beginning moments.  We will study a selection of Chaucer’s tales in their various and competing forms—saint’s life, moral fable, romance, dirty joke—paying special attention to his preoccupation with food, sex, gender, identity, and how people know what they know.  Although the selected tales will be studied in their original dialect, no previous study of Middle English or medieval literature is assumed. Relevant backgrounds from other contemporary writers will be supplied, and some time will be devoted to learning the sounds of Chaucer's English. In fact, one  of the joys of learning to read a medieval author like Chaucer is coming to appreciate the sounds of his poetry, written in a time when storytelling was still largely oral and communal.

From ancient pastoral poets to Amanda Gorman, how have writers made nature their subject? What can literature tell us about the diverse and changing ways in which humans perceive, construct, interact with, inhabit, and alter our environments? How do historical and cultural differences inflect writing about nature? Does the prospect of climate catastrophe impel writers to reimagine traditional genres? We’ll explore such questions through a broad selection of poetry and lyrical prose, countering circumscribed notions of environmental writing as a predominantly white or cis straight male realm and seeking to illuminate the vital connections between environmentalism and social and racial justice.

Readings from the English pastoral tradition and its classical roots; Shakespeare, the Romantics, Gerard Manley Hopkins; foundational American poets Dickinson and Whitman; and a broad selection of 20th- and 21st-century poets such as Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, Audre Lorde, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Ed Roberson, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Pattian Rogers, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Forrest Gander, Claudia Rankine, Annie Finch, dg nanouk okpik, Camille T. Dungy, Jennifer Chang, Ada Limón, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Prose by Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauret Savoy, and Helen Macdonald.

Topic for Spring 2024: The Pursuit of Happiness: American Dreams from Emerson to Hansberry

The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." We will focus in particular on what "happiness" means in this founding document and its historical context, and then we will study and explore this theme in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and move from them to novels by Henry James, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers, and Patricia Highsmith. We will also consider examples from film and photography, and will conclude with the African American playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

Through literary and interdisciplinary methods, this course examines the nature of race. While current debates about race often assume it to be an exclusively modern problem, this course uses classical, medieval, early modern, and modern materials to investigate the long history of race and the means by which thinkers have categorized groups of people and investigated the differences between them through the ages. The course examines the development of race through discourses of linguistic, physical, geographic, and religious difference--from the Tower of Babel to Aristotle, from the Crusades to nineteenth-century racial taxonomies, from Chaucer to Toni Morrison. Considering the roles physical appearance has played in each of these arenas, we will thoughtfully consider the question: What Is Racial Difference? Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

“Reader, I married him,” Jane Eyre tells us as her novel draws to a close. Many nineteenth-century novels end with a marriage. So despite suggestions within the body of the novel that women's traditional role is not a satisfying one, the heroine often seems contented in that role by the novel's end. But what happens if the heroine chooses wrongly? In this course, we will consider novels that look at a heroine's life after a marriage that she comes to regret, as well as some novels in which the bad romantic choices do not result in marriage. What do these novels of romantic mistake have to say about women's lives? Probable authors: Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, James, Austen, Eliot.

This course explores the role of narratives in response to mass trauma, focusing on regions of Africa and African Diaspora societies. Drawing on the emerging fields of trauma narrative, we will examine the effectiveness of oral, written and cinematic narratives in overcoming legacies of suffering and building peace. Topics include: violence in colonial and postcolonial Central Africa, the Biafran war, South Africa during and after Apartheid and Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. We will also explore the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its impact on African-American and Caribbean societies. Types of narrative include novels, memoirs, films, plays, and data from truth and reconciliation commissions. Students will be exposed to trauma narrative not only as text but as a social and political instrument for post-conflict reconstruction.

This course may serve as a capstone seminar for Peace and Justice majors and minors. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.