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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1660-1789) promoted individual rights, attacked superstition and advanced science, dramatically expanded literacy and publishing, brought women as readers and writers into a burgeoning literary marketplace, and created the public sphere. Yet the era also massively increased the trans-Atlantic slave trade, devised new forms of racism and anti-feminism, and established European colonialism as a world system. This course will examine British literature that confronts these complexities. We’ll read novels like Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that portray encounters between Europeans and the non-European “Other”; poems by Alexander Pope and Mary Wortley Montagu that explore the nature of women and femininity; and texts that find the limits of Enlightenment reason in uncertainty, strong passions, and madness.

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.

In this course, we will explore the changing relationships of persons to social worlds in selected English novels of the nineteenth century. The English novel’s representation of imperialism and industrialization, its engagement with debates about women's roles, social mobility, class conflict, and its assertion of itself as a moral guide for its readers will be among the themes we will discuss. The assigned novels will probably include Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and Henry James's Daisy Miller.

This is an exploration of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American literature and culture of the early twentieth century, which encompassed all major art forms, including poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as music, the visual arts, cabaret, and political commentary. This movement corresponds with the publication of The New Negro anthology (1925). Literary authors we will study may include Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent. We will also enter into contemporary debates about “the color line” in this period of American history, reading some earlier work by W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, or James Weldon Johnson, in the context of early Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Jazz Age, and transatlantic Modernism. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement

A workshop in intensive practice in the writing of poetry. Students who have taken this course once may register for it one additional time.

“Evil be thou my good,” resolves Satan in Paradise Lost. This course will explore literary works that follow Milton’s lead in unleashing radical energies that invert or “transvalue” conventional values, whether their authors endorse such inversions or not. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Ellison’s Invisible Man all test the claims of darkness against light. We’ll also consider other examples, and theories, of the Gothic, and the sublime, that stage literature as an uncontrollable contest between irreconcilable forces. Theories of intention will suggest how such a lack of authorial control can seem a literary strength. Throughout we will assess the political potential of the Satanic principle—how it might inspire anti-capitalist, feminist, antiracist, and other oppositional modes of reading.

How do siblings, sibling relationships, and conceptions of brotherhood and sisterhood figure in Romantic-period authorship and texts? What is particularly Romantic about sisters and brothers? We'll consider such questions from several different angles, looking, for example, at the following: representations of siblings in literary texts; sister-brother writers (but also the importance of non-writing siblings); the relation of genius to genes; the complications of step-siblings, half-siblings, and siblings-in-law; the overlap or conflict of sibling relationships with friendship, marriage, romantic love, and self-love; and brotherhood as metaphor (revolutionary, abolitionist, Christian). Texts by Joanna Baillie, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, DeQuincey, Byron, Austen (Sense and Sensibility), M. Shelley (Frankenstein), P. Shelley, Keats.

An advanced, intensive writing workshop, open to six students, named for a late Wellesley professor who valued good writing. This is a class in writing non-fiction prose, the kind that might someday land a writer in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Our genre is often called "literary journalism," and here the special skills -- technical precision, ability for physical description, and psychological insight -- necessary for writing fiction are applied to real-life events and personalities. We will read and emulate authors like Joan Didion, Hilton Als, Janet Malcolm, Robert Mcfarlane, and Terry Castle, and each student will produce a 5,000 word-piece of their own.

Class will meet on these dates: Feb 5, Feb 12, March 5, March 12, with unscheduled time in between to be used for research and writing.