From the mid-20th century to 2025, women writers have been major players globally in the upsurge of what is now referred to as speculative fiction--a literary supergenre or umbrella term for a spectrum of “what if” fictions: fairy tale, science fiction, horror, dystopian, magic realism, surrealism, fantasy. We will explore together short stories and novels written since 2000. Class discussions will aim at interpretation and appreciation of these peculiar and powerful literary texts as well as reflection on their particular historical and cultural context.

In particular, we will be curious about how these authors play with a spectrum of gender - in their own lives and in their writing. The texts include fiction written in English and fiction translated into English; we will address the issue of reading works in translation. Speakers and students of languages other than English, are encouraged to offer their insights into the necessary friction between an original text and its English translation.

Among the authors to be read: Mansoura Ez Eldin, N.K. Jemisin, Samanta Schweblin, Eden Robinson, Vandana Singh. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

This course will explore and enjoy how film makers across the globe have adapted short stories into remarkable and compelling films that stand apart from the sources as works of art in themselves. We will start with the stories but look at how the films go beyond fidelity to the original to create works with their own aesthetics and integrity. Films will include Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami's heart-warming Where is the Friend's House?, the Turkish film Winter Sleep (based on a work by Anton Chekhov), the neo-Western Brokeback Mountain, the Indian film Seven Sins Forgiven (based on a story about a woman whose six husbands mysteriously die), and the Korean hit film Burning.

A workshop in the writing of short lyrics and the study of the art and craft of poetry.

Topic for Spring 2026: Writing the Travel Essay

Taken a trip lately—junior year abroad, summer vacation, spring break? Looked back fondly or in horror at a family road trip? Turn your experience into a travel essay. We study the genre of the literary and personal travel essay as well as the more journalistic travel writing found in newspaper travel sections and travel magazines. And, of course, write our own travel narratives. The course focuses on the essentials of travel writing: evocation of place, a sophisticated appreciation of cultural differences, a considered use of the first person (travel narratives are closely related to the genre of memoir), and basic strong writing/research skills.  

How does literature help us understand what it means to be happy? What kinds of happiness do the “happy endings” of fiction propose (and why is happiness associated with endings, not middles or beginnings)? In this course, we’ll survey various ways literature has presented happiness: sometimes as a feeling, either vividly immediate (joy, pleasure, elation) or longer term (contentment, fulfillment); at others, as an objective condition, such as prosperity or flourishing. We’ll start with some ancient Greek-Roman philosophy, then focus on novels and poetry of the Enlightenment, when the pursuit of happiness (with life and liberty) became a political imperative. Readings will include works by Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, and Olaudah Equiano. We’ll conclude with recent texts that consider how happiness may thrive and fail under current class, family, labor, and other social conditions.

From ancient pastoral to contemporary ecopoetry, how have literary texts 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, Tracy K. Smith, Jericho Brown, and Tommy Pico. Prose by Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauret Savoy, and Helen Macdonald.

From medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary graphic novels, genres that combine words and pictures invite us to consider the relationship between what were once called the "Sister Arts" of literature and the visual arts. This course will explore the various, complex, and fascinating interactions between texts and images in "blended" genres: children's picture books, ekphrastic poetry (poetry that describes and responds to visual artwork), concrete poetry (poetry in the shape of images), graphic novels, comics, and illustrated novels. We'll also look at works of visual art that include text. We’ll consider the different qualities of visual and verbal representation, and the tension between temporal and spatial orders when these two modes of representation directly engage each other.

This course explores the role of written and cinematic narratives along with photography in response to traumatic historic events, focusing on select regions of Africa and on African Diaspora societies in the U.S. and Caribbean. We’ll explore the roles of (and relationships between) narrator, witness, audience and victim, both historically and in light of new social media, and discuss how these relationships give rise to particular representations of perpetrators, victims and saviors. Topics to be considered in relation to such narratives might include: colonization, genocide, apartheid, the  continuing impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and systemic racism on African-American and Caribbean societies. Works might include Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart or No Longer at Ease; Chimamanda Adiche, Half of a Yellow Sun; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; short fiction of the Apartheid Era; short fiction/essays by James Baldwin; Films: Fruitvale Station, 13th, Kinyarwanda, Lumumba.  Students will be introduced to postcolonial literary theory and trauma narrative theory.

What was at stake in the production and consumption of literature in the age of television and nuclear proliferation? We will read and analyze U.S. fiction, drama, and poetry produced after 1945, a period during which minority voices, particularly (but not only) those of American Jews, became central in U.S. literary culture. We will explore the tension between literature as just another form of entertainment (or even a pretentious instrument of exclusion) and literature as a privileged site of social analysis, critique, and minority self-expression. Authors considered may include Chester Himes, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Lorraine Hansberry, Tillie Olsen, Fran Ross, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Susan Sontag, Alejandro Morales, Kathy Acker, Shelley Jackson, Tony Kushner, and Lan Samantha Chang. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

This course will explore the work and influence of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest directors of the classic Hollywood era. We’ll watch an extensive selection of Hitchcock’s most significant films, alongside films that show his influence. Readings will place Hitchcock within the context of his time and of the Hollywood studio system, and trace Hitchcock’s crucial importance to the development of the discipline of film studies.

Topic for Spring 2026: Courtship, Crime, and Cancelation at the Dawn of English Literature

“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.

We will study three great American novels: Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881, rev. 1908); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900); and Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country  (1913). We also will consider two film adaptations: The Portrait of a Lady (1996; dir. Jane Campion, starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich); and Carrie (1952; dir. William Wyler; starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones). In addition: portraits of women by the painters John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, and Mary Cassatt, and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keefe. Also: visits to the Davis Museum.

Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and was immensely successful. Shakespeare is also universally regarded as the greatest playwright in English. In this introduction to his works, we will try to understand both Shakespeare’s popularity and greatness. To help us reach this understanding, we will focus especially on the theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s writing. The syllabus will likely be as follows: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. 

Students in this course will gain a foundational knowledge of the major texts and developments of English literature from its inception. The course fulfills the 120 requirement for the English major and minor. Starting with Beowulf, we will survey the tradition’s most durably influential figures, including Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. We will also explore works more recently added to the canon, by Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Along the way, we will reflect on theories of the canon and on what a literary period is (for instance, the Middle Ages, the Romantic Era), and how periodization continues to shape the study of literature. Like ENG 120, this course emphasizes the close reading of significant texts, in class discussion and essay writing.

Participants in this seminar will delve into the workings of memory--a term that encompasses several different kinds of remembering and recollecting. What makes something memorable? Can we choose or shape what we remember? Does memory constitute identity? How has technology altered what and how we remember? As we ponder such questions, our primary focus will be on literature (including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Nabokov, and Toni Morrison). We'll also draw on philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science and explore creative arts such as drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, book arts, film, and music. Students will write in several genres--creative, critical, and reflective-and experiment with different ways of collecting, curating, and presenting memories in media of their choice.

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.

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, consent, 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.

Milton helped set the standard of literary power for generations of writers after him. His epic Paradise Lost exemplifies poetic inspiration, sublimity, creativity, originality, and unconventionality, offering a richness of meaning and emotion that seems to provoke violently incompatible interpretations, even radical uncertainty about whether his work is good or bad. This course will focus on how this poem challenges and expands our views of God, evil, heroism, Hell, good, Heaven, pain, bliss, sex, sin, and failure in startling ways. We will consider Milton as the prototype of a new kind of poet who pushes meaning to its limit, from his early writings, to Paradise Lost, to Paradise Regain'd at his career's end, and sample the range of critical responses his poetry has elicited.

Essential works of a group of poets unsurpassed in poetic achievement and influence: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats. Selected writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans. We’ll explore and interrogate prominent themes of Romanticism, including imagination, memory, creation; childhood, nature, the self; sympathy, empathy; questions of representation (for example, what issues arise when white, European, and for the most part male writers attempt to represent or “give voice” to “others”?); envisioning social justice; the lure of the unknown or unknowable; inspiration as "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; dejection and writer's block, bipolar poetry; influence (from opium to "the viewless wings of Poesy"); beauty, truth, fancy, illusion; rebellion, revolution, transgression, exile; the Byronic hero, the femme fatale, the muse; complexity, ambiguity, mystery, doubt; mortality, immortality. Open to majors and non-majors. No poetry background required.

Topic for Fall 2025: Writing Massachusetts: Four Authors

Transgender rights, gay marriage, and Hollywood and sports figures' media advocacy are only the latest manifestations of the rich queer history of the United States. This course will explore American LGBTQ history and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on consequential developments in society, politics, and consciousness since Stonewall in 1969. The course will introduce some elements of gender and queer theory; it will address historical and present-day constructions of sexuality through selected historical readings but primarily through the vibrant cultural forms produced by queer artists and communities. The course will survey significant queer literature, art, film, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the inventive new forms of recent decades. It will also emphasize the rich diversity of queer culture especially through the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with class, ethnicity and race.

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.