Fall 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

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...