Fall 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

01   MTH2   CAC   12135   EVANS   MU-213 American Literature: The Basics In the aftermath of the summer’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, this course provides students with the opportunity to reflect on how that strange and unruly collection of fictional and poetic works now known as “American literature” helped shape the country’s evolving national identity. How did fiction come to define so many of the self-evident truths the nation tells about itself?  There will be a...

01   TF3   CAC   12136   KING   MU-212 In Introduction to the Novel we will explore the characteristics of the novel form and ask why this genre has dominated our literary culture for over two centuries and how our texts seek to both critique and entertain. The syllabus will include works by Jane Austen, Richard Yates, Tayari Jones, Gillian Flynn, and Taylor Jenkins Reid, and the course requirements will include two papers, an in-class exam, in-class reading responses, and active participation in class...

01   MTH2   CAC   12137   SPELLMEYER   MU-115 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 a single hour can completely change your life. As we’ll see, the...

01  CAC    12138   MTH3     JACKSON  ABE-1180 The Aesthetics and Psychology of Fear We read gothic literature for pleasure, for the thrill it gives us, for the spine-tingling suspense that builds to a sudden—often deeply—unsettling crescendo.  No sooner do we recover from one fright, but we feel the narrative tension mounting again.  Aside from this pleasure, what is gothic literature about?  Why, for instance, the focus on a protagonist’s fear, anxiety, and helplessness?  What draws us to the idea of dark...

01     MTH1    CAC    12139    POWELL    MU-204  

02     MTH2    CAC    12134   JACKSON    MU-212  Welcome to YA fiction. In this course, we will read a range of novels geared to the psychological, emotional, physical, and economic transformation from adolescence to adulthood.  Perhaps more than any other category, YA fiction has colonized all the major genres and themes. Expect to read sci-fi, romance, gothic, realism, dystopian, and fantasy. It offers some of the most exciting and innovative reading, which can make its themes both deeply satisfying and...

01   CAC   TF3   12140   OWENS   MU-111

01    CAC  TTH5    12141   FULTON    MU-111  

04 TF2 CAC  12171 MANGHARAM SC-216 05 MW4  CAC 12172 MCGILL MU-210 06 MTH3 CAC 12173 SPELLMEYER MU-301  07 MTH2  CAC 12174 CLARKE MU-113 08 MW7 CAC 12175 KHAN MU-112  09 W3F4  CAC 12176 NEROES MU-113 10 TTH7 CAC 12177 MCCALLUM MU-208  11 TTH5  CAC 12178 XU SC-205 12 TF3  CAC 12179 PAN SC-220 13 TTH4  CAC 12180 SCHIFMAN SC-214 90 ASYNCHRONOUS 12183 KING ONLINE 91 MW5 12184 BUCKLEY ONLINE Sections 01-90 This course provides an introduction to principal methods and materials in contemporary literary studies. In order to suggest some of the range of the field, ordinarily it includes close attention to works from at least two genres and two historical periods to be selected by the instructor. The course will introduce students to the...

01  TTH4    CAC  12155   SHOCKLEY  MU-111  Black Poetry: Black Women / Radical Writing Poetry is the most capacious genre of literature, some would argue, because there is almost nothing you can’t do under its banner. Poets can tell stories, record experience, recount history, imagine the future, sing, theorize, show us new ways of seeing the world, question the status quo, express emotion, entertain us and make us laugh, offer political critique, and so much more, as poets since Sappho’s day have...

01  CAC   MW5   12156   MATHES  MU-211 This course examines how the literary form of the novel has developed throughout the black world—within the U.S., and across transnational and diasporic contexts. The arc of our survey moves from William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853), the first novel published by a black American through novels focusing on and/or published in Haiti, Nigeria, Jamaica, and the UK. The assignments, lectures, and discussions in the class will focus on...

01  MW5   CAC  12157    KERNAN    SC-207 This course provides students with both exposure to some of the seminal texts of the and with the interpretive tools needed to situate those texts in their respective contemporary contexts: literary, political, and international. We will consider issues like: How did the contemporary politics and material conditions of production that surrounded the creation of Harlem Renaissance texts inform their aesthetics? How did Africa-American authors to the “triple...

01 TTH5   CAC   12167   WALLACE    HC-S126 Afro-Ecologies: Nature Writing and the African American Imagination This seminar brings to light a tradition of African American literature that is concerned to explore the relationship of African American cultural life with nature. We shall study prose and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present in order to map the ways African American writers in slavery and freedom voiced black environmental thought creatively. A significant feature of our...

01  CAC    TTH4      12144     FULTON    MU-211

01   By Arrangement   12162   Permission to add by Department Staff

01  TTH5   CAC   12188     MURPHY   MU-212 Why ask if someone (something?) is performing? How might performance show us different ways to understand the world or relate to each other? This class introduces the critical study of performance as an artistic, cultural, and political practice. We will take up theories of performance, as well as individual artists, performances, and performance genres. Students are expected to participate actively in class, respond to journal prompts, and develop two creative...

01   MW5  CAC  11850  SENDUR  ED-025B         W 6,7           FILM SCREENING    MU-301 This course offers an immersive exploration of cinema both as an art form and a cultural/material production by analyzing pivotal moments in transnational and national filmmaking. By focusing on close analysis, we will examine the fundamental components of film, dedicating time to each element to build a comprehensive understanding of cinematic language. For instance, we will delve into the expressive potential of the close-up with Claire...

The English Department Career Advising Initiative The Rutgers Department of English is excited to announce a new Career Advising Initiative to assist and support English undergraduate and graduate students in their career exploration endeavors. If you've ever wondered, or if friends and family have wondered, what you can do with a degree in English, we are here to help you address that question. There are so many possibilities. There are so many ways to apply your valuable research, writing,...

01   CAC   TTH5   12158   CHOI   MU-114  This course examines literature about migration, immigration, and diaspora from the early twentieth century to the present, alongside theoretical and historical works that contextualize these phenomena. It explores how literature produced through cross-border movement—whether voluntary or forced, directly experienced or inherited through memory—gives rise to new formations of community, language, and belonging. Drawing on key concepts from postcolonial and...

01   CAC   TTH4   12160   CHOI   MU-210 How have writers of Asian descent made sense of the vast political transformations—colonialism, nationalism, neoliberal globalization—that have shaped Asia across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? This course brings together authors of diverse racial, gendered, and national backgrounds to examine how literature grapples with these transformations across different cultural and political contexts. While this topic could be approached in many ways, this course...

01   TF3  CAC   12168    MANGHARAM     HC-S120 How does the study of postcolonial literatures help us understand the impact of colonialism on our planetary climate? After all, the extractive and finance capitalism that continues to devastate our planet was forcibly spread all over the world through colonialism, carrying with it hierarchical ideas about the way humans relate to the world, their environments, and to each other. If our planetary climate crisis has its roots in colonialism, how can...

01   CAC   MW4    12142    AIELLO    MU-212 The Norman Conquest! In the year 1066, a fleet of warships from Normandy, led by a duke, crossed the English Channel and forever changed the laws, landscapes, and literatures of England. The Norman victory transformed this duke into a king – William I of England, William the Conqueror – and began more than two centuries of French rule over England: colonial occupation, mass violence, forced transformation, and the suppression and denigration of the English language...

01   TF2    CAC  12143     NOVACICH    MU-204 Dream Visions In Medieval Dream Visions we will read a number of celebrated works – including poetry by Chaucer and the Pearl-poet – to consider what kinds of special knowledge, play, or experimental thinking dreams were understood to enable in the Middle Ages. Most of these works will be in Middle English, and so we will move slowly in order to read them in the original and to become more familiar with the poetic sensibilities of a different age. Assignments will...

01   CAC  MW4  12163      KLEIN    ABW-2100    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   MW5   12164    AIELLO  HC-S120  Reading Medieval Manuscripts What if your textbook was over 750 years old? What would happen if you read a piece of early literature not as an isolated text printed in a modern paperback, but as it originally existed: hand-written (“manu”-“script”), artistically constructed, and sharing the page with other supposedly random texts? This seminar introduces students to the vibrant world of medieval manuscripts through one remarkable thirteenth-century manuscript,...

01  MW5   CAC  12150   SIEGEL  SC-102 This course studies literature and culture at the point of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It considers how the concerns of late Victorian culture came to result in the movements known as Modernism, but it is also interested in studying in depth some characteristic late nineteenth-century phenomena, such as Aestheticism and Decadence. Topics addressed will include the relations among the natural, the artificial, and the supernatural,...

01   CAC   TF2    12151    KING   MU-210 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    CAC    MW4   12152    BUCKLEY   ONLINE  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   TTH4     12166     IANNINI    ABE-2250  This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The bulk of the semester will be devoted to a patient and careful reading of the novel itself, tracing some of the key philosophical, aesthetic, and political questions that animate the book, including the relationship between fate, chance and free-will as forces governing the shape and pattern of individual lives, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as impulses...

01  CAC    TTH4     12144   FULTON    MU-211

01   CAC   MW5   12145   COIRO   MU-213 The Imitation of the Past and the Invention of Modernity Seventeenth-century poetry is formally innovative and politically and intellectually daring. It is often funny and sexy; politically radical and (by our lights) politically inappropriate; part of the past and deeply relevant to the current moment. And sometimes it is all these things at the same time. This class will read poems closely and in context. You will get a deep immersion into the craft of making...

01    CAC   TTH7    12146    TOMCO   MU-211 From 1300 to 1800, the North Atlantic region experienced a period of intense cooling, leading to colder winters, crop failures, weather fluctuations, droughts, and even the freezing of the River Thames on a few occasions. We now call this the Little Ice Age. But what were the cultural responses to this climatological moment? This course will ask us to begin thinking about the relationship between literature and the environment. With our texts rooted in the...

01   CAC   MW4   12147   FESTA    MU-208 This course offers a survey of later eighteenth-century British literature, with special attention to the ways literature and art shaped forms of collective and individual identity in what is sometimes called the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Revolutions.  Focusing on the cultural and historical transformations that (re)shaped categories of gender, sexuality, social rank or class, nation, and race, the course will address the role played by literary form and...

01  CAC    MTH2       ZITIN         MU-301        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, calling out an adversary or...

02    CAC    TTH6    12149     LUPTON     MU-208 Building a (Fictional) World in the Eighteenth Century When we think of world building today, we imagine the construction of fictional and fantasy worlds adjacent to our own – perhaps in fiction, perhaps in games or media environments.  In the 1700s, writers were just beginning to imagine what it might be to create a believable, lived-in fictional world that would mirror their own.  They were developing techniques of description, visualization, mapping, and...

01   CAC   MW5    12165     FESTA    AB-2250 Why are there so many soldiers stationed in the seemingly sleepy provincial towns where the novels of Jane Austen are so often set?  Jane Austen may conjure up images of a circumscribed world of country towns, flowing dresses and decorous manners, but she lived at a moment of immense historical turmoil, marked by famine, political repression, civil tumult at home, and slavery, revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars abroad.  This course will explore the novels of Jane...

01   CAC   MW5   12164    AIELLO  HC-S120  Reading Medieval Manuscripts What if your textbook was over 750 years old? What would happen if you read a piece of early literature not as an isolated text printed in a modern paperback, but as it originally existed: hand-written (“manu”-“script”), artistically constructed, and sharing the page with other supposedly random texts? This seminar introduces students to the vibrant world of medieval manuscripts through one remarkable thirteenth-century manuscript,...

01   CAC   TTH4     12166     IANNINI    ABE-2250  This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The bulk of the semester will be devoted to a patient and careful reading of the novel itself, tracing some of the key philosophical, aesthetic, and political questions that animate the book, including the relationship between fate, chance and free-will as forces governing the shape and pattern of individual lives, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as impulses...

01 TTH5   CAC   12167   WALLACE    HC-S126 Afro-Ecologies: Nature Writing and the African American Imagination This seminar brings to light a tradition of African American literature that is concerned to explore the relationship of African American cultural life with nature. We shall study prose and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present in order to map the ways African American writers in slavery and freedom voiced black environmental thought creatively. A significant feature of our...

01   TF3  CAC   12168    MANGHARAM     HC-S120 How does the study of postcolonial literatures help us understand the impact of colonialism on our planetary climate? After all, the extractive and finance capitalism that continues to devastate our planet was forcibly spread all over the world through colonialism, carrying with it hierarchical ideas about the way humans relate to the world, their environments, and to each other. If our planetary climate crisis has its roots in colonialism, how can...

01   MW5    CAC   12193   MCGILL   AB-2200   Since its importation into England in the mid-16th century, the sonnet has become the preeminent poetic genre for exploring the conjunction of love and power.  In this class, we will study the history of the sonnet and bring our growing understanding of this compact poetic form to bear on a number of large questions in poetic theory. Our sustained study of the sonnet will give us a testing ground for a number of theories about the nature of lyric poetry: do short...

01   MW4   CAC   12194     MATHES    SC-215   How have our encounters with and perceptions of sound changed throughout history and (particularly) in our rapidly evolving present--as we have moved, for instance, from the drum to electronic music, and from the phonograph to the mp3 (and back)? How have ecological, political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we (choose to) listen to, how we listen, and how we imagine and write about the sounds around us? Engaging with these questions and more, this...

01  CAC  TTH5    12185   GOODLAD   ABE-4450    

01  TTH5   CAC   12186  JAFFE   MU-211  Narrative medicine, a discipline largely built upon literary studies in confluence with healthcare, bridges cultural divides between sufferers and healers and offers a framework for reading and writing illness, person to person and person to text.  Rita Charon, in Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, writes that “A scientifically competent medicine alone cannot help a patient grapple with the loss of health and find meaning in illness and dying.” In this...

01  MW4   CAC   12187   SCANLON  MU-301 Sport is one of the most visible and influential aspects of modern popular culture. This course will explore the cultural aspects of sport both in the US and internationally. It will focus on basketball, cricket, track and field, and soccer and American football, using literature, film, journalism, and a selection of accessible scholarly material.

01  TTH5   CAC   18760     MURPHY   MU-212 Why ask if someone (something?) is performing? How might performance show us different ways to understand the world or relate to each other? This class introduces the critical study of performance as an artistic, cultural, and political practice. We will take up theories of performance, as well as individual artists, performances, and performance genres. Students are expected to participate actively in class, respond to journal prompts, and develop two creative...

01    MW5   CAC   12189    SCANLON  MU-212 This course will combine in-depth analysis of three key texts by Marx, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Capital, with a survey of Marxism’s major contributions to literary theory from the 1950’s to the present. This survey will take up most of the course and will itself be split in two. The first part will introduce three of the most important figures in Western Marxism in the twentieth century: Georg Lükacs, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis...

01   TTH4  CAC   12190   EXTRA   MU-114

01  TTH4   CAC  12191   WALLACE   MU-301 After Illustration: Race, Nation, and Photography Beyond Print For a very long time now, perhaps since the beginning of fiction and photography, practitioners of the literary and photographic arts alike have held closely to a show-and-not-tell ethic of representation. In this course we will learn to see, by way of some of photography’s most important theorists, what photographs don’t explicitly show or reveal to the naked eye: the cultural logics of historical and...

01   MW5    CAC   12193   MCGILL   AB-2200   Since its importation into England in the mid-16th century, the sonnet has become the preeminent poetic genre for exploring the conjunction of love and power.  In this class, we will study the history of the sonnet and bring our growing understanding of this compact poetic form to bear on a number of large questions in poetic theory. Our sustained study of the sonnet will give us a testing ground for a number of theories about the nature of lyric poetry: do short...

01   MW4   CAC   12194     MATHES    SC-215   How have our encounters with and perceptions of sound changed throughout history and (particularly) in our rapidly evolving present--as we have moved, for instance, from the drum to electronic music, and from the phonograph to the mp3 (and back)? How have ecological, political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we (choose to) listen to, how we listen, and how we imagine and write about the sounds around us? Engaging with these questions and more, this...

01  CAC  TTH6   12153   LOVE  MU-210 Love and Work: Race, Sex, and Class in Early 20th c. American Literature  In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby describes Daisy Buchanan’s voice as “full of money”; Daisy herself describes her “white girlhood” growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. In this novel, as in so many others in American literature, desire, race, and class cannot be disentangled. In this class we will explore the knotted history of work and love, desire and money, in American life in a range of early...

01   CAC   TTH5   12154   LAWRENCE   SC-214 The Sixties The 1960s were a decade of major upheaval in the United States.  A series of liberation movements challenged many of the U.S.’s core political institutions, at the same time that the nation entered into a prolonged and divisive war in Vietnam.  In the cultural realm, a generation of young writers and filmmakers sought to engage the urgent social issues of the period, inventing new aesthetic forms and techniques to address them.  In this course, we will...