Fall 2023 Undergraduate English Courses

01    CAC  TF3   08166   LEVAO  FH-B6 This course will introduce students to the pleasures of reading Shakespeare's plays and poems.  We will start with some discussion of verse and a selection of his Sonnets, then take on six plays from across his career to sample the challenges and excitement of the different kinds of works he wrote for the stage.  Works include:  Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Henry IV Part One, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest.    Format will be primarily lecture with...

01   CAC   08167   TTH4   JAGER   CA-A1 In this course we will read the Bible as we would any other work of literature, meaning that we will attend to its narrative, poetry, letters, and prophetic writings, to its characters, to its history and its ideas.  We will cover substantial portions of the Old and New Testaments, with particular emphasis on the books of Genesis, Exodus, Job, Psalms, the prophetic writings, the synoptic Gospels, and the book of Revelation.  We will also read several literary...

01   CAC   TF2   08169  SPELLMEYER     MU-111 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  CAC  08170   MTH2   JACKSON    FH-B3  

01   CAC    08171   MTH2   GOLDSTONE   FH-A1 This course introduces the academic study of science fiction, following the history of the genre from its beginnings in the late 1800s to the present. Though very familiar especially in its contemporary TV and film forms, science fiction has been many things over its history: a kind of prophecy, a way of envisioning alternatives to the present, a form of escapist fantasy, a meditation on technology, a challenge to the authority of science or of prestige...

01  CAC     TF3     08173       KING    FH-B5  Bernard Shaw believed that most women want nothing more than to get married. This course will attempt to prove him wrong. We will examine women novelists, poets, and social critics who are themselves evidence against Shaw’s view of women and who have created literary heroines to advance the changing roles of women in both the domestic and public spheres. Our reading list will include works from Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Sylvia Plath, Tayari Jones,...

01 TF3 CAC  08199 GOODLAD MU-111 02 MTH2  CAC 08200 WALLACE MU-111  04 TTH4  CAC  08201  ANDERSON MU-210 05 TTH5  CAC 08202 BARRIENTOS  SC-119  06 TF1  CAC  08203   SC-219 07 TTH6 CAC 08204 BRONSTEIN HH-A5  08 TTH7  CAC  08205 HUYLU MU-114 09 MTH3  CAC 08206 OBEROI MU-112 10 MW5  CAC 08207 IANNINI MU-115 11 TTH6 CAC  08208 IBIRONKE MU-211  12 MW6 CAC   08209   SC-120 14 TF3  CAC 08211   SC-204  90 ASYNCHRONOUS    08212 MANGHARAM ONLINE  H1 MTH2  CAC  08210 WILLIAMS BRT-SEM This course provides an introduction to principal methods and materials in contemporary literary studies. In order to suggest...

01   CAC   MTH1   08188   ALONGE   MU-204 This course explores the long historical cross-pollination between the Black musical and literary traditions from the late 19th century through the early 21st century. In our readings and listening, we will attempt to "creak" literary and musical genres, to borrow language from the poet Nathaniel Mackey, as a means to blur and traverse the imposed boundaries we often put on these modes of expression to experience further the "expressive possibilities these"...

01  MW4    CAC   08189    SANDERS   HH-B3 Black Women in Print:  Strategies of Publishing Literature for the Public Ear In a letter dated October 5, 1852, Mary Ann Shadd (Cary) asked William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, to publish meeting minutes of a fugitive and emigrant community in Windsor, Canada. Shadd appeals to Garrison because this black community had “resolved to speak” about “false reports of destitution” but found that “the great difficulty is to get the public ear” (1). The...

01   MW4   CAC   08195   OWENS   HH-B4

01    CAC    TTH4     07207  FLITTERMAN-LEWIS  MU-301          TH 6,7         FILM SCREENING                    MU-301   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...

01  TTH5  07650    FLITTERMAN-LEWIS   MU-301      M 6,7      Film Screening                      MU-301 The relation between film and its social context is extremely complex. Rather than proceeding from a universal common film "language," films are made and understood according to a wide range of national, ethnic, economic, and cultural differences which affect not only the content but the very "look" and structure of the films themselves. Furthermore, films can treat issues of class, race, and gender according to dominant...

01  CAC  MW4      07031   FRESKO    AB-4140      M 6,7           FILM SCREENING               AB-4140  

01   CAC   MW5    07092   LAWRENCE   SC-219 This course offers a survey of contemporary literature from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, including several works originally published in Spanish. Our readings will concentrate on recent novels and short stories from the Americas whose imagined geographies traverse the boundaries of nation and region. Authors studied may include Roberto Bolaño, Edwidge Danticat, Cormac McCarthy, Cristina Rivera Garza, Junot Díaz, and Mariana Enríquez. 

01 CAC     TTH7   08185    IBIRONKE     MU-111 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 threatened...

01   CAC   TTH6   08187     ROBOLIN      HH-A2 Very Contemporary African Literature This upper-level course will examine 21st-century African literature across a wide generic, stylistic, linguistic, and geographic range.  The works published in the last fifteen years include novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and memoirs in conventional and experimental forms.  While we will predominantly study texts written in English, we will take up several in translation.  This very contemporary African literature...

01  CAC   08174   MW7   OMIROVA    HH-A3                  

01   CAC    TF1    08179   KING   SC-106 In this course we will explore an array of 19th-century poets in an attempt to answer such questions as, What is it that makes a poem uniquely “Victorian”? What are these writers able to accomplish with the poetic form that 19th-century novelists perhaps could not? How do these poems reflect and create the culture and values of the time? The requirements for the course will include one paper, weekly responses to discussion questions, an oral presentation, and class...

01  TTH6  CAC   08180   SPELLMEYER   HH-A3 In the year 1801, most people on the planet were still ruled by kings, queens, or emperors.  The slave trade continued while millions lived as serfs, from Eastern Europe all the way to Japan.  Often regarded as property, women weren’t permitted to have wealth of their own or attend a college or university. A hundred years later everything had changed, and in this change the novel played a central role.  Through novels, readers reimagined everything: who they...

01   CAC   MW6   08181   IANNINI   HH-A4

01  CAC    TTH5    08175   LEVAO    FH-B5 This course will explore the first half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, plays written by him during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, up until her death in 1603. Eight major works will represent the Folio's three genres of comedy, history, and tragedy and include some of the best-known, controversial, and fascinating works in English literature:  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night,...

01 CAC   MW4    08176   COIRO    CA-A3                   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 will...

01   CAC    MTH2    08193    COIRO   HH-B3 Renaissance Women Writers: Reshaping the Literary Canon Many women writers suddenly “emerged” in the 1980's (many more have emerged since). Our seminar will question why and how these major writers were erased for so long. Our answers will illuminate and be illuminated by other long-marginalized authors’ belated inclusion in the current canon, including Indigenous, Black, Asian and Latinx authors. We will focus particularly on women writing in the 17C after...

01  CAC        TF3    08178        ZITIN    CA-A2        Landscape, Labor, and Loss This course tracks the transformation of three classical poetic genres—elegy, georgic, and pastoral—in Britain's long eighteenth century, which is to say, from Milton to the early romantic poets. Roughly defined, elegy refers to mourning poems, georgic to poems about the cycles of agricultural labor, and pastoral to fantasies of rural simplicity. The eighteenth century proved a rich period for the interrelated development of these genres,...

01   CAC   MW4   18680   DIEHL   CI-101 Enlightenment and DisabilityThis course approaches later eighteenth-century British literature through the lens of disability studies. When writers and thinkers in the eighteenth-century sought out what exactly defined personhood, they usually considered an individual’s physical and mental wellbeing in the process. Figures that fell outside of the “norm” sometimes became the subject of jokes, puns, and stories in the literary marketplace. In assessing the role of...

01   CAC     MW4        07031    FRESKO     AB-4140                    M 6,7          FILM SCREENING      AB-4140                

01   CAC    MTH2    08193    COIRO   HH-B3 Renaissance Women Writers: Reshaping the Literary Canon Many women writers suddenly “emerged” in the 1980's (many more have emerged since). Our seminar will question why and how these major writers were erased for so long. Our answers will illuminate and be illuminated by other long-marginalized authors’ belated inclusion in the current canon, including Indigenous, Black, Asian and Latinx authors. We will focus particularly on women writing in the 17C after...

01   CAC   MW7   08194  LAWRENCE   HH-B4 In the 1960s and early 1970s, science fiction in the United States and Britain became more formally experimental and increasingly engaged with the ideas of political and social movements. The term that many writers and critics of the time used to designate this literary trend was “New Wave,” by analogy with the roughly contemporaneous “French New Wave” in film. In this course, we will read a variety of authors associated with the New Wave in SF, as well as a few later...

01  MW4   CAC   08194   OWENS   HH-B4

01   TTH5   CAC   08196   MILLER   MU-113 The two writers we will read this semester, Carson McCullers and Richard Wright, rose to prominence in the late 1930s to the early 1940s: both wrote novels and short stories where the central characters outsiders; both wrote about life in a nation where racism was assumed to be a constant. But their frames of reference were radically different: McCullers writes about misfits in the South, adolescents coming of age, and Southerners reacting to the possibility of...

02   CAC   MTH1   08216    POWELL   MU-111   Children's Literature and Literary Theory This course will examine classic texts in children’s literature through modern and contemporary literary and cultural theory. What can queer, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, poststructuralist, and / or postcolonial approaches reveal about fairy tales by the Grimms brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, or Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, and Wind in the Willows? What do those novels, and  recent adaptations and revisions of...

01  MW6  CAC   08213  JURECIC  HH-A1 In the 21st century, disease appears 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...

01   CAC   W 3,4    08214    YOUSEF   ED-025B Topics in Literature and Philosophy An introduction to the some of the most intriguing points of intersection between philosophy and literature. The course will address the following questions: What can literary forms of writing achieve that non-literary forms cannot? What is (or can be, or should be) the effect of imaginative literature? Should we think of it as conveying (special kinds of) truth, or does the value of literature depend on a refusal to offer...

01  TF2   CAC    08217  GLISERMAN   MU-115 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  TF2   CAC   08218   EVANS    SC-216 Writing Forests What stories do forests tell? What stories do we tell about forests? Science and literature might seem to exist only in opposition, as when we find ourselves drawing lines between truth and fiction, or nature and culture. But intuitively, we likely know that it is something more like a creative tension. This class aims to consider that tension by considering how environmental science has given life to new modes of literary and artistic narration, as...

01   MTH2   CAC  08182    GROGAN    FH-B6 Modernist Poetry  This course takes as its subject the revolutions and renovations in poetry of the first half of the twentieth century that we now know as modernism. What was modern about modernism? How did poetry evolve and change—in form, subject, and politics—in this period? Can we read modernism as a global movement? What do we mean when we call modernist poetry ‘experimental’? We will begin the course with a refresher in the techniques and vocabulary...

01   CAC     MTH1   08183      JOHNSON     SC-202 This course explores just some of the richly varied and experimental innovations of the stage in the early twentieth century. We will examine how dramatists responded to the radical historical shifts of the period, including global wars, economic depression and labor unrest, the development of new media and technology, as well as the shifting social and cultural status of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Additionally, we will ask questions like:...

01   CAC   MTH3   08184   GOLDSTONE    HH-B3 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   TTH7  08185   IBIRONKE     MU-111

01  CAC   MW4   08185   JACKSON   FH-B5

02    TTH5  CAC  07097  KHAZANOV  MU-204

01   CAC   TTH6   08187     ROBOLIN      HH-A2 Very Contemporary African Literature This upper-level course will examine 21st-century African literature across a wide generic, stylistic, linguistic, and geographic range.  The works published in the last fifteen years include novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and memoirs in conventional and experimental forms.  While we will predominantly study texts written in English, we will take up several in translation.  This very contemporary African literature...

01   CAC   MW7   08194  LAWRENCE   HH-B4 In the 1960s and early 1970s, science fiction in the United States and Britain became more formally experimental and increasingly engaged with the ideas of political and social movements. The term that many writers and critics of the time used to designate this literary trend was “New Wave,” by analogy with the roughly contemporaneous “French New Wave” in film. In this course, we will read a variety of authors associated with the New Wave in SF, as well as a few later...