Fall 2022 Undergraduate English Courses

01  TTH6  LIV   07899   IBIRONKE   TIL-251  Happiness in World Literatures  ON DECEMBER 2017, I went to Sierra Leone for the first time in my 24 years of life. Of course, I was met with pure glee by some, for the mere fact that I was connecting with the place my mother calls home. I was also met with confusion by others. Many mused on the safety of the continent and what it means to travel to an African country reeling from an epidemic and natural disaster. Yet, I knew Sierra Leone’s recent history was not...

01   CAC   TTH6   07900  SPELLMEYER     FH-B1 With the rise of mass-market magazines catering to busy working people, short stories started in the Nineteenth Century as chapters taken from a longer work--a novel or novella. Very quickly, though, they became a genre of their own. And now this accidental genre has become the quintessentially modern form—the literary art of the “turning point”--presenting a world in which a single day or even an hour can completely change your life. As we’ll see, the short...

01    MTH3    07901    JACKSON    HH-A7 We will study some of the most popular fantasy novels of the past century, including works by T. H. White, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. K. Rowling, Robin Hobb, Holly Black, and Neil Gaiman, among others.  Some key questions will guide us: How do fantasy works reflect broader historical and cultural trends?  How and why has captured so much literary market share, especially for Millennials and Gen Z audiences? Is it about imagining or performing identity? Is its...

01  CAC  MTH2      07902      MANGHARAM   CA-A2   Global Women's Writing: The Politics of Domestic Work This course will examine how definitions of gender and sexuality are reproduced, negotiated and deployed through literature on domestic work. We will ask: How is the economic value of women’s labor calculated differently from that of men? What circumstances constitute women's domestic labor, both paid and unpaid? How is global domestic labor gendered and organized? How are the household, the local, the...

01 MW5 CAC  07928 BUCKLEY FH-A4 03 TTH4  CAC 07930 GLISERMAN HH-A5  04 MTH3  CAC  07931  IANNINI FH-A5 06 MTH3  CAC 07932 SILVER  HH-A4  07 TTH5  CAC  07933  SPELLMEYER HH-B2 08 TTH4 CAC 07934 WALLACE FH-B4  11 MTH2  CAC  07937 PIWINSKI CI-201 12 TTH5  CAC 07938 ROSENTHAL SC-215 14 TTH6  CAC 07940 SELMER HH-B2  15 TF1 CAC  07941 IORIO HH-A3  17 MW5 CAC   07943 MARTIN SC-220 18 TTH7  CAC 07944 EVANS HH-B6  90 ASYNCHRONOUS    07944 KING ONLINE  91 ASYNCHRONOUS    19456 IANNINI ONLINE This course provides an introduction to principal methods and materials in contemporary literary studies. In order to suggest...

01  CAC   MTH2   07946   GOLDSTONE/ MCGILL   AB-4450   The digitization of wide swaths of the print record has opened up new challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. This course introduces students to some of the key techniques used by humanities scholars to organize, manipulate, and analyze digital sources—attending both to longstanding scholarly institutions and practices that shape our understanding of digital texts (critical editions, brick-and-mortar archives, and quantitative...

01  MW5    CAC 18573      KERNAN    VH-104 In the Spring of 1998 at Dartmouth College, a plethora of African American theater’s most distinguished scholars and practitioners participated in the National Black Theatre Summit “On Golden Pond.” Chief among their objectives was to grapple with three questions that surrounded the African American stage from its inaugural moments. Does African American theater have a defining aesthetic? And, if so, what are its tenets and how can we account for them? After...

01  CAC   MW5   07915   DYE  SC-216 This course studies the thematic and structural development of the black novel as a vehicle for social and political change over the twentieth century. Considering novels written by Black writers in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Africa, we will discuss the formal elements of Black novels and uncover the thematic connections among various long works of fictional prose. We will also discuss how Black writers deconstruct the novel form to articulate political desires...

01   CAC     TTH5   07916      MATHES   FH-A4 This course examines the interwoven nature of black musical and literary production from the 19th through the early 21st century. In our readings and musical selections, we will analyze musical influences on the thematic and formal elements of literature; at the same time, we will examine the use of literary ideas and points of reference as they are incorporated within different black musical forms. As we consider literary works within the context of black...

01  CAC   TTH6   07917   WALLACE   HH-A5 This course covers the extraordinary career of one of America’s greatest writers ever: Toni Morrison. For fifty years, Morrison was one of the leading lights of modern African American fiction, undoubtedly one of the most important of the twentieth (now twenty-first) century. Few have been more prolific. None has done more longer to shine a light on the racial unconscious of American writing and on the expressive resources of America’s subjugated cultural...

01   MW5   CAC   07925   KERNAN   HH-B4 Afrofuturism In the words of Mark Dery, Afrofuturism "treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture and, more generally, African American signification that appropriate images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future." First and foremost, then, during this seminar, we will take up the connections between African American signification and technoculture. Over the course of the semester, we...

01    CAC     07293         FLITTERMAN-LEWIS  MU-301      W 6,7         FILM SCREENING                    AB-1180   This course will consider the film noir- the hard-boiled detective thriller- in terms of gender, power, and sexuality. Whether it is seen as a genre (with a specific set of conventions regarding iconography, character types, plot motifs, and narrative organization) or a cycle of films (marked by a distinctive nocturnal visual style and a thematics of chaos and cynicism amplified by dramatic textual effects), the single defining...

01  CAC       07294    FLITTERMAN-LEWIS   MU-301      M 6,7           FILM SCREENING               AB-1180   Ever since the first public screening of motion pictures for a paying public took place (on December 28, 1895 in Paris), people have been asking the film-theoretical question "What is Cinema?" At the same time, they also asked—in different but precise ways—"What is Film Theory?" This seminar will attempt to answer both questions by looking at the work of different film theorists in relation to other critical approaches to the cinema...

01  LIV   TTH7    07912    IBIRONKE     TIL-103C 20th Century Literature and Inequality  From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately [to accomplish] that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations... But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth...

01   MTH1    CAC  07926   MANGHARAM  HC-S124 Encountering the Other in World Literature World literature has often been theorized as a ‘window into the world,’ provided by circulating texts - in translation or in English - that are consumed by an elite, global audience. But what are the stakes of gazing through that window to observe cultures and peoples different from ourselves? Is world literature bound to end up as an exploitative consuming of difference, or are there other ways of reading, other...

01   CAC   TF2   07903    SCANLON   HH-A2 The Middle Ages is often thought of as time of simple piety and “quiet hierarchies.”  In fact, the period was often a time of great social upheaval and intellectual ferment.  This course will survey a variety of English writings from 1350 to 1450, all of them concerned to one degree or another with the problem of dissent.  We will begin with Piers Plowman, by William Langland, a poem firmly associated with radical social and religious reform for over two centuries...

01   CAC    MTH3    07921    KLEIN   FH-B6 This course is an intensive study of Old English, the language written and spoken in England from approximately 450 to 1100 AD. The goal of the course is to give students the basic skills necessary to read and interpret Old English texts. We will examine a variety of poetic and prose writings, including Old English alliterative shorter poems dealing with exile, gender roles, and early medieval cults of the cross; chronicles and historical narratives designed to...

01   CAC  MTH2   07922   OPAL    SC-S124 The Medieval Cosmos In this course we will read medieval texts from a variety of genres that handle, in some way, the construction of the cosmos. These include representations of space and astronomical entities, the divine and infernal realms, or simply the relationship of human life and action to eternal structures. Some of the texts are philosophical allegories that show everything all at once, others are dramas of the creation of the world, some are love...

01    CAC    MW6    07908   BUCKLEY   HH-B3   In this course we will survey the rich and varied dramatic literature of the nineteenth century, a period during which the stage was transformed into a modern, popular institution. We’ll explore melodrama, realist drama, naturalist drama, and the varied works of the early dramatic avant-garde, looking at their relation to political and social change, shifting ideas of the world and its relation to the self, and changing forms of spectacle, entertainment, and...

01   CAC   TF1    07909    KING   SC-206 Bernard Shaw believed that most nineteenth-century women wanted nothing more than to get married. This course will attempt to prove him wrong. We will examine women novelists, poets, and social critics of nineteenth-century England who were themselves evidence against Shaw’s dim view of women and who created literary heroines to reflect and advance the changing role of women in both the domestic and public spheres. We will explore the role of women in...

01  TTH4  CAC   20249  WILLIAMS  HH-A3 Nineteenth-century Novels and their Adaptations Why has the nineteenth-century novel inspired so many adaptations? Should an adaptation try to remain absolutely faithful to the original? (no! not necessarily). What do we look for in an adaptation? What are some of the different kinds of adaptation (for example: history “from below,” updating, cross-cultural retelling)? We will examine and analyze changes in content and changes in form. What are some...

01   CAC   MW5   07924    LUCIANO   HC-S120 Queerness in the Nineteenth Century US This seminar examines the politics of sexuality and gender in nineteenth-century US fiction through a queer lens. We will explore depictions of the range of bodily intensities and practices from which the category of “sexuality” as we have come to know it precipitated. What counted as sex in the nineteenth century? How did people comprehend their own sexuality, and that of others? How did the nineteenth-century body...

01  CAC    MTH2     07904   FULTON   CA-A3 This course provides a survey of Shakespeare’s great plays and poems written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We will study a broad range of genres, including some sonnets, comedies, histories, and tragedies. Attention will be given to Shakespeare’s context, the history of Shakespeare criticism and reception, and especially to film and stage interpretation. Since plays are written to be performed works of art rather than individually read, we will discuss and...

01 CAC   MTH2    07905   COIRO    HH-A5                   Reading Milton’s poetry is an exhilarating and deeply thought-provoking experience. The core of Milton’s poetics is the insistence that we, the readers, must decide what is right and wrong at every juncture. In this class we will take that challenge. Milton rivals Shakespeare as foundational to English and American literature and history. For years to come, you will discover many and uncanny echoes of Milton in later literary work and in contemporary discourse. We...

01  CAC   TTH5     07919    FULTON   CA-A4 Arguably the most influential event in the history of English literary culture was the translation and printing of the English Bible in Renaissance England. This was the birth of the modern English Bible, largely as we know it, but it was not an easy one. The process of modernization started in the tumultuous reign of Henry VIII when the pioneering translator William Tyndale was burned at the stake. The English Renaissance Bible culminated with the King James...

01   CAC    TTH4   07907   ZITIN   FH-B6 Quarreling in Verse This course introduces the literature of eighteenth-century Britain by zeroing in on one of its characteristic features: the literary debate. The main activity of the course will be the very close reading of paired poems that are in dialogue with one another. Sometimes these poems are competing adaptations of traditional subjects (for example, seduction poems or impotence poems); sometimes, authors pick fights with one another more directly,...

01   CAC   M 4,5   07923   YOUSEF   HC-S120 Jane Austen: Romance, Realism, and the Novel of Ideas  Jane Austen wrote in an age of revolutions and war, and in the midst of profound cultural and economic change. She revolutionized the novel with her choice of subject matter, her reinvention of romance, and her formal innovations. This course will offer an opportunity to study her novels in depth—on their own, and in relation to important political and philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment (eg. Locke on...

01  TTH 3:00-4:20    14260   FLITTERMAN-LEWIS   ONLINE      Asynchronous Content          FILM SCREENING                  Ever since the first public screening of motion pictures for a paying public took place (on December 28, 1895 in Paris), people have been asking the film-theoretical question "What is Cinema?" At the same time, they also asked—in different but precise ways—"What is Film Theory?" This seminar will attempt to answer both questions by looking at the work of different film theorists in relation to other critical...

01   CAC  MTH2   07922   KLEIN     SC-S124 Medieval Childhood and Human Development This seminar is a survey of childhood, parenting, and human development as depicted in medieval writings from the fifth through the fifteenth centuries. We will consider medieval "children's literature," textual accounts of child oblation and baptism, genealogies and ancestral records, familial structures and domestic spaces (both monastic and secular), medical texts dealing with conception, birth and nursing,...

01   CAC   M 4,5   07923   YOUSEF   HC-S120 Jane Austen: Romance, Realism, and the Novel of Ideas  Jane Austen wrote in an age of revolutions and war, and in the midst of profound cultural and economic change. She revolutionized the novel with her choice of subject matter, her reinvention of romance, and her formal innovations. This course will offer an opportunity to study her novels in depth—on their own, and in relation to important political and philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment (eg. Locke on...

01   CAC   MW5   07924    LUCIANO   HC-S120 Queerness in the Nineteenth Century US This seminar examines the politics of sexuality and gender in nineteenth-century US fiction through a queer lens. We will explore depictions of the range of bodily intensities and practices from which the category of “sexuality” as we have come to know it precipitated. What counted as sex in the nineteenth century? How did people comprehend their own sexuality, and that of others? How did the nineteenth-century body...

01   MW5   CAC   07925   KERNAN   HH-B4 Afrofuturism In the words of Mark Dery, Afrofuturism "treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture and, more generally, African American signification that appropriate images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future." First and foremost, then, during this seminar, we will take up the connections between African American signification and technoculture. Over the course of the semester, we...

01   MTH1    CAC  07926   MANGHARAM  HC-S124

01  CAC   TTH5   07950   DIAMOND   MU-111 In this course we will explore the depth, breadth, and creativity of performance and feminist theorizing with a special focus on an ecofeminism and politics. We’ll work the terrain of feminist theory through performance--that is, at the intersection of body and discourse. Thus, with theoretical texts, we’ll sharpen our analyses with performance questions (who is speaking? in what time/space? producing what effects?). And when we consider theater, video, and...

01  CAC   MTH2   07946   GOLDSTONE/ MCGILL   AB-4450   The digitization of wide swaths of the print record has opened up new challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. This course introduces students to some of the key techniques used by humanities scholars to organize, manipulate, and analyze digital sources—attending both to longstanding scholarly institutions and practices that shape our understanding of digital texts (critical editions, brick-and-mortar archives, and quantitative...

01  MW4  CAC   07947  JURECIC  SC-206 In the 21st century, disease seems to belong to the clean, well-lighted place of fact and biology. And yet, illness and medical treatment take place in culture and are complicated by language, history, economics, and politics. Literature about illness and/or medicine often explores the meeting place of science and culture, along with shifting understandings of patient and doctor, health and illness, body and mind. In this course, we’ll discuss how literature about...

01 MW 3:00-4:20     03144  JACKSON   ONLINE Allegories are a strange narrative form: narrative because they aren’t always literary (written and oral)—they can, for instance, be visual or take shape of visual and discursive forms. Many well-known artists worked in the medium of allegory: think here of Bronzino, Rubin, Raphael, or Salvator Rosa. They can also be visually conceptual, as with emblems. But they must unfold a narrative; and they must tell more than one story, however hidden or buried...

01  TTH5   CAC    07948   GLISERMAN   SC-207 Literature and Psychology explores the emotional relationships between text and reader, and within the text. One central thematic focus of the course, in addition to emotions, will be trauma–an experience of maximal emotions and disruption. Whether we read to escape, to discover, or even to fulfill requirements, we have a purpose, a motive, and more than likely some expectations. Moreover, we have a number of years of existence during which time we have...

01  TF3   CAC     06789    KITZINGER/ GOODLAD     FH-B2 Serial Storytelling Across Media This course explores serial narrative as a contemporary mode of storytelling, from the emergence of the serialized novel in nineteenth-century Europe up through the multimedia serials of our own digital age. Working across centuries, media, and new technologies for delivery, we will investigate the enduring power of this versatile narrative form — in particular, 1) how serial narratives interweave fiction with familiar...

01 HYBRID IN PERSON   TH 9:00-10:20  CAC  03146  EVANS  SC-207  / ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE Relational Aesthetics “So relatable.” It’s the worst response you could ever give in a literature class, but why? This course takes up the surprisingly complicated concept of “relations” from four, different disciplinary vectors—the social sciences, science studies, art history, and literary criticism. Our goal, in the end, will be to gain a better understanding how central the representation of relations has been in...

01  CAC   TTH5  07950   DIAMOND   MU-111 In this course we will explore the depth, breadth, and creativity of performance and feminist theorizing with a special focus on an ecofeminism and politics. We’ll work the terrain of feminist theory through performance--that is, at the intersection of body and discourse. Thus, with theoretical texts, we’ll sharpen our analyses with performance questions (who is speaking? in what time/space? producing what effects?). And when we consider theater, video, and...

01   CAC   MTH3   07910   GOLDSTONE   FH-B5 What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all activein the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise anddecline of empire—and their work registers and responds to a world of crisis. Yet Joyce, the Irish experimentalist, writes nothing like Hammett, the...

01  CAC   TTH4   07911  MILLER, R.   SC-103 What was life like on the East Coast in the decade leading up to the Civil Rights Movement? The two writers we will read this semester, Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin, rose to prominence during this time: both wrote novels where the central characters struggle with faith; both wrote about life in a nation where racism was assumed to be a constant. But their frames of reference were radically different: O’Connor writes about misfits in the South,...

01  LIV   TTH7    07912    IBIRONKE     TIL-103C

01  CAC   MW4   07913   JACKSON   FH-B5 Fantasy Fiction Under the rubric of “Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture,” we will study some of the seminal works and writers of twentieth-century fantasy fiction, focusing on award-winning authors: Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, to Michael Crichton, Lois McMaster, Terry Pratchett, and Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler (the architects of the sci-fi crossover), among others.  What is the genre’s key influences?  How has fantasy fiction reflected broader...