-
How Poems See
What makes poems and pictures such powerful forms of life? Why do pictures have so much to tell us? How do we see things in words? How do graphic images, optical images, verbal images, and mental images together constitute ways of understanding the world? Looking at poems and images from Giotto and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickinson and Turner through such modern poets and painters as Stevens, Ashberry, Warhol and Heijinian, we will study sensory and symbolic images, the uses and dangers of likeness, and the baffling confluence of concrete and abstract, literal and figurative, body and mind, matter and spirit.
All ENGL 0100s will be temp capped at 100 with reserved seating/registration as follows:
For the SPRING term: semester-level 02/04 = 25 each; and 01/03 = 5 each
Yielding: 60 total (40 remaining spots would be for upper-levels: seniors/juniors since they are first up on the staggered registration system)
- Primary Instructor
- Foley
-
The Simple Art of Murder
A survey of the history of criminal enterprise in American literature. Authors to be considered include Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Chandler, Wright, Petry, Highsmith, Millar, Harris, and Mosley.
All ENGL 0100s will be temp capped at 100 with reserved seating/registration as follows:
For the SPRING term: semester-level 02/04 = 25 each; and 01/03 = 5 each
Yielding: 60 total (40 remaining spots would be for upper-levels: seniors/juniors since they are first up on the staggered registration system)
- Primary Instructor
- Nabers
-
Literature Reformatted
We’ll put literary works produced for digital environments (novels on Twitter, cominatory poetry, collaborative fiction on chat forums) in conversation with works of literature produced in traditional forms. Do these new forms offer empowering extensions of the literary, or do they threaten the very forms of literature from which we can profit the most?
All ENGL 0100s will be temp capped at 100 with reserved seating/registration as follows: For the SPRING term: semester-level 02/04 = 25 each; and 01/03 = 5 each Yielding: 60 total (40 remaining spots would be for upper-levels: seniors/juniors since they are first up on the staggered registration system)
- Primary Instructor
- Egan
-
Literature and the Visual Arts
How do words and images represent? Are the processes by which literature and the visual arts render the world similar or different? Is reading a novel or a poem more like or unlike viewing a painting, a sculpture, or a film? This seminar will analyze important theoretical statements about these questions as well as selected literary and visual examples.
Limited to 19 first-year students.
- Primary Instructor
- Armstrong
-
Visionaries, Dreamers, and Dissidents: Imagining Other Worlds
To change the world, you must first be able to imagine an alternative. This class will explore works by radical thinkers, activists, and artists from the last two centuries who dared to do just that — from communists to (oc)cultists, Soviet sci-fi to the Syrian resistance. Authors/directors include: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Malcom X, Alinsky, Lynch, Gibson, hooks, Vertov, Haraway, Tsutsui. Enrollment limited to 17.
- Primary Instructor
- Ben-Meir
-
Women of Color, Migration and Diaspora in America
What does it mean to be an immigrant to a country founded on settler colonialism and slavery? Starting with indigenous women’s literature and moving on to Black, Asian and Latinx diasporas, this course will tend to the similarities and stark differences of women of color’s lived experiences in American literature. Authors include Louise Erdrich, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Enrollment limited to 17.
- Primary Instructor
- Chowdhury
-
(Victorian) Flesh
From the Victorians we expect genteel courtesies and hushed gestures—but in the raw underbelly of the era lies the image of the grotesque body. This course dissects the flesh found in the Victorian crypts, miry rivers, and sullied sheets that also survives in our modern cultural consciousness. Texts/films include: Dickens, Poe, Wilde; Batman: Gothic; Sweeney Todd, The Fly. Enrollment limited to 17.
-
How We Became Machines
Do we create machines in our image, or are we their mere prototypes? Through a series of encounters with novels, films, poems, and manifestos, this class will examine the ways technology might transform (or destroy) our world, bodies, and thought. Works by: Melville, Shelley, Marx, Kafka, Beckett, Simondon, Deleuze. Films: Ex Machina, Metropolis, Ghost in the Shell. Enrollment limited to 17.
- Primary Instructor
- Pisanelli
-
Plague Art, from the Black Death to AIDS
Plague art disrupts notions of the self as a contained body. It prompts us to notice our connections with each other and with non-human materials, and asks us to examine how trauma can be inherited and “caught.” We will consider works emerging from contexts of the Black Plague, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and zombie apocalypse. Authors include Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Camus, Lorde, Whitehead. Enrollment limited to 17.
-
The Last Eighteen Years: Literature and Conflict in the 21st Century
This course will examine contemporary fiction alongside research being done in political science and economics, hoping to establish productive points of intersection. Topics like the Iraq War, mass incarceration, and the 2008 financial crisis will be discussed alongside Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, Beatty’s The Sellout, Smith’s Swing Time, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Supplementary reading will likely include writing by Coates, Piketty, and Arendt. Enrollment limited to 17.
- Primary Instructor
- Rutkowska
-
Stuck in the Suburbs: A Poetics of Everyday Life
Suburbia is where nothing happens: a landscape that cultivates boredom and indulges angst. But it is also a site of repressed horrors, where our deepest anxieties come home to roost. This course examines architecture, tone, temporality, race, and gender in the literature and films of the suburbs. Texts include Eugenides, Perrotta, Lahiri; Blue Velvet, The Stepford Wives, American Beauty. Enrollment limited to 17.
-
Beowulf to Aphra Behn: The Earliest British Literatures
Major texts and a few surprises from literatures composed in Old English, Old Irish, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, and Early Modern English. We will read texts in their historical and cultural contexts. Texts include anonymously authored narratives like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and texts by Sir Thomas Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Aphra Behn. Enrollment limited to 30.
-
Shakespeare
We will read a representative selection of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances, considering their historical contexts and their cultural afterlife in terms of belief, doubt, language, feeling, politics, and form. Students should register for ENGL 0310A S01 and may be assigned to conference sections by the instructor during the first week of class.
-
New Worlds, New Subjects: American Fiction at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
In 1900, the historian Henry Adams declared, Americans lived in a world so radically transformed that “the new American … must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature.” This new world had many progenitors: Darwin’s theory of evolution; Nietzsche’s theory of the will; Freud’s theory of the unconscious; the rise of the mass media; the industrial production line; the triumph of consumerism; mass immigration; Jim Crow; the New Woman. This class reads works of fiction from the turn-of-the-century in the context of these transformations. Writers include Freud, Nietzsche, Stephen Crane, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.
- Primary Instructor
- Burrows
-
Late Romantics
An introduction to the varied work of canonical and non-canonical writers often described as British second-generation or late Romantics: Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Clare, de Quincey, Hemans, Austen. We will explore what lateness constitutes for these authors as a political, aesthetic, and ethical category, and consider how it informs the kind of distinctly "Romantic" work that characterizes their writings. Particular emphasis on close readings of poetry and theoretical texts, as well as excursions into late nineteenth-century authors.
-
Modernist Cities
In the early twentieth century, modernist writers headed for New York, Paris, London and other cities, and based their literary experiments on forms of metropolitan life. We will discuss chance encounters, cosmopolitan and underground nightlife, solitary wandering, and bohemian communities. Writers may include Barnes, Dos Passos, Eliot, Hemingway, Hughes, Larsen, Joyce, McKay, Rhys, Woolf. Enrollment limited to 30.
-
Poetry and Science
This course will explore the relationship between the observational procedures and modes of composition employed by twentieth and twenty-first century poets who have worked in more conceptual or avant-garde traditions and the practices of description and experimentation that have emerged out of history of science. Readings will range from Gertrude Stein’s poetic taxonomies to recent work in critical science studies.
- Primary Instructor
- Smailbegovic
-
Readings in Black and Queer
This course will survey works that engage the intersection of black and queer, especially from 1970 onward. We will use the central idioms of queer of color critique to think about performativity, homophobia, the erotic, and gender normativity; and will use this thinking to read literary representations in various novels, poems, nonfiction essays, plays, and films.
- Primary Instructor
- Quashie
-
Critical Reading and Writing I: The Academic Essay
An introduction to university-level writing. Students produce and revise multiple drafts of essays, practice essential skills of paragraph organization, and develop techniques of critical analysis and research. Readings from a wide range of texts in literature, the media, and academic disciplines. Assignments move from personal response papers to formal academic essays. Enrollment limited to 17. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
Spring section 01 is reserved for first-year students.
- Primary Instructor
- Ward
Spring section 01 is reserved for first-year students.
- Primary Instructor
- Jackson
Spring section 01 is reserved for first-year students.
- Primary Instructor
- Marsh
Spring section 01 is reserved for first-year students.
- Primary Instructor
- Golaski
-
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction
Designed to familiarize students with the techniques and narrative structures of creative nonfiction. Reading and writing focus on personal essays, memoir, science writing, travel writing, and other related subgenres. May serve as preparation for any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. Writing sample may be required. Enrollment limited. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
Spring 2019 sections 01 and 03 are reserved for first-year and sophomore students.
- Primary Instructor
- Golaski
Spring 2019 sections 01 and 03 are reserved for first-year and sophomore students.
- Primary Instructor
- Ward
Spring 2019 sections 01 and 03 are reserved for first-year and sophomore students.
- Primary Instructor
- Arnold
Spring 2019 sections 01 and 03 are reserved for first-year and sophomore students.
- Primary Instructor
- Jackson
-
Writing Science
This course explores how science, as an academic way of thinking and a method, affects our critical thinking and expression of culture. Readings examine the various dialects of scientific discourse. Students write three major research essays on self-selected scientific topics from both within and outside their fields of study. Enrollment limited to 17. Writing sample may be required. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
- Primary Instructor
- DeBoer-Langworthy
-
Backstory
Everything has a backstory—every event, every object, every idea. In this workshop-based course we will explore the archives at Brown and RISD to write three research essays for general audiences. You can expect readings, looking at how authors like David Foster Wallace, John McPhee and Eula Biss structure their pieces, workshops and in-class writing prompts to get you going. Enrollment limited to 17. Writing sample may be required. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
-
Narrative
This course offers a broad exploration of the many kinds of essays you can write in creative nonfiction. We will be looking at how authors structure their pieces and the range of narrative techniques they often use. You can expect workshops, in-class prompts and readings by Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, David Foster Wallace, Annie Dillard, David Sedaris and others. Enrollment limited to 17. Writing sample required. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
-
Sportswriting
This course introduces students to the practice of sportswriting, including writing sports news, features, and columns. Readings will include works by Rick Reilly, Bill Simmons, Frank Deford, Karen Russell, Allison Glock, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, W.C. Heinz, and others. Students will develop skills in analyzing, researching, writing, revising, and workshopping in the genre. Enrollment limited to 17. Writing sample required. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
-
Journalistic Writing
This course teaches students how to report and write hard news and feature stories for newspapers and online. Students learn to gather and organize material, develop interviewing techniques, and hone their writing skills – all while facing the deadlines of journalism. The first half of the semester focuses on “hard" news: issues, crime, government, and courts. The second half is devoted to features, profiles, and narrative story telling. Writing sample required. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed in first week of classes. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
Spring: 1050H section 01 is reserved for first-year and sophomore students.
- Primary Instructor
- Mooney
-
Intellectual Pleasures: Reading/Writing the Literary Text
Riffing on the generative tensions between intellectual rigor and aesthetic pleasure, this seminar will examine (through the theoretical framework of cognitive poetics) a richly diverse range of literary texts, from Susan Howe to Beowulf. Our objective: to develop an awareness of language that will reshape how we read and how we write literary texts in various genres. Writing centered. Enrollment limited to 12. Prerequisite: ENGL 0930 or any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. S/NC.
- Primary Instructor
- Stanley
-
The Public Intellectual
This course offers advanced writers an opportunity to practice sophisticated, engaged critical writing in academic, personal, and civic modes. Emphasis will be on writing "public" essays (general audience essays that do intellectual work or academic essays that address public topics), ideally in fluid, "hybrid," audience-appropriate forms. Areas of investigation will include (but are not limited to) the review essay, the cultural analysis essay, literary documentary, and the extended persuasive/analytic essay. It will include some brief "touchstone" investigations into rhetorical theory, with the aim of helping to broaden our concepts of audience, analyze the constitutive and imaginative effects of language, increase the real-world effectiveness of our own language practices, and situate our writing within current political, cultural, aesthetic and intellectual debates. Students must have sophomore standing or higher in order to be admitted to the class. A writing sample will be administered on the first day of class. Prerequisite: ENGL 0930, 1030, or 1050. Class list will be reduced to 12 after writing samples are reviewed during the first week of classes. Preference will be given to English concentrators. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
- Primary Instructor
- Imbriglio
-
Advanced Feature Writing
For the advanced writer. Nothing provides people with more pleasure than a “good read.” This journalism seminar helps students develop the skills to spin feature stories that newspaper and magazine readers will stay with from beginning to end, both for print and on-line publications. Students will spend substantial time off-campus conducting in-depth interviews and sharpening their investigative reporting skills. The art of narrative storytelling will be emphasized. Prerequisite: ENGL1050G or 1050H, or published clips submitted before the first week of classes. Class list reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
-
Social Justice Journalism in the Digital Age
This writing class will teach you how to report and craft socially-conscious journalism that is neither dull nor righteous. You will learn about news hooks and angles, compelling central characters, and clever story structures, and how to attract audiences in a distracted visual digital age. Along with long-form narrative we will work multimedia forms: audio, photography, Twitter journalism, and comics. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed during the first week of classes. Preference will be given to English concentrators. Prerequisite: ENGL 1050G or ENGL 1050H. Instructor permission required. S/NC.
-
Advanced Creative Nonfiction: Writing with Food
This course examines writing about food and how writing affects food and food culture. We shall explore the relationship of food to the pen through reading classic texts, writing in and out of class, guest lectures, and touring culinary archives. The goal is to polish personal voice in menus, recipes, memoir, history, reportage, and the lyric essay. Prerequisite: ENGL 0930 or any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed during the first week of classes. Preference will be given to English concentrators. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
- Primary Instructor
- DeBoer-Langworthy
-
Travel Writing: Personal and Cultural Narratives
For the advanced writer. Helps students build skills in the growing genre of travel writing, including techniques for reading, composing, and revising travel pieces. Students will read the best contemporary travel writing in order to develop their own writing in areas like narrative, setting, characters, and voice. The course will feature interactive discussions, instructor conferences, and workshops. Prerequisite: ENGL 0930 or any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed during the first week of classes. Preference will be given to English concentrators. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.
-
Asian American Narrative
This course considers themes, forms, and contexts of Asian American narratives. We will examine diverse representations of Asian American experience and explore the questions these texts raise about race and ethnicity; self-invention and identity; and visibility and representation. We’ll consider how Asian American authors have used writing to reclaim agency, preserve cultural memory, and redress past and present injustice. Prerequisite: ENGL0930 or any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. Writing sample required. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writings samples are reviewed during the first week of classes. Preference given to English concentrators. Instructor permission required. S/NC.
-
Poetics of Narrative
Narratives are everywhere, simply there, like life itself, Roland Barthes says; we structure our experiences with narratives that we either infer or create. We will read different literary genres to see how narratives work and what makes them poetic and read theoretical texts to understand narrative function and performance. We will write experimentally to experience how stories are constructed. Pre-requisites: ENGL 0900, 0930, or any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. S/NC.
- Primary Instructor
- Stanley
-
Independent Study in Nonfiction Writing
Tutorial instruction oriented toward some work in progress by the student. Requires submission of a written proposal to a faculty supervisor. Section numbers vary by instructor. Instructor permission required. S/NC.
- Primary Instructor
- Butterfield
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Breton
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- DeBoer-Langworthy
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Foley
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Imbriglio
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Readey
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Stanley
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Taylor
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Stewart
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Schapira
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Ward
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Golaski
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
History of the English Language
Provides an introduction to the study of the English language from a historical, linguistic, and philological perspective, and an overview of the study of the "Englishes" that populate our globe. While providing students with the ability to identify and explain language change through historical periods, also examines language as a social and political phenomenon.
-
Seminar in Old Norse-Icelandic Language and Literature
This course offers a thorough introduction to a language both closely related to Old English and in which survives one of the richest medieval literatures. We will start with an extensive coverage of grammar and syntax before reading short excerpts from sagas including Egil’s Saga and Grettir’s Saga. Enrollment limited to 20; knowledge of Old English, Latin, or German advised.
-
Undergraduate Independent Study in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures
Tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic. Section numbers vary by instructor. Instructor permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Bryan
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Foley
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rabb
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Redfield
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rambuss
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Newman
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Kuzner
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Jacobs
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
American Literature and the Corporation
A study of the development of the American novel from the Civil War to the present in light of the emergence of the corporation as the principal unit of economic enterprise in the United States. We will survey corporate theory from Lippmann to Collins, and use it to frame the novel's development from realism through modernism into postmodernism. Corporate theorists to be considered: Lippmann, Dewey, Berle, Drucker, Mayo, Demming, Friedman, Coase. Novelists to be considered: Twain, Dreiser, Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wright, Ellison, McCullers, Reed, Gaddis, Morrison. Enrollment limited to 20.
-
In Excess: Rossetti, Hopkins, Wilde
This seminar will be a focused close reading of three late Victorian writers whose works might be described as radically excessive insofar as they transgress and push beyond the limits of social, ethical, aesthetic, sexual, and political conventions. What does it mean to describe a text as excessive, and how can excess be considered as a constitutive part of its form? We will concentrate on poetry, plays, and theoretical texts, putting our authors into conversation with contemporary thinkers of excess. Enrollment limited to 20.
-
Undergraduate Independent Study in the Enlightenment and the Rise of National Literatures
Tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic. Section numbers vary by instructor. Instructor's permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Burrows
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Egan
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Khalip
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Gould
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Keach
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Nabers
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rabb
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rooney
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Redfield
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Anderson
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Parker
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
Modern African Literature
This course considers themes, antecedents, and contexts of modern African literature and related forms. Our readings will include fiction in English or in translation, traditional oral forms like panegyric and festival poetry, and some films. We will examine how these diverse materials explore the interplay of ethnicity, nationality, and race. We will also address the issue of "tradition" in contexts where nationalisms of various stripes are becoming stronger, even as the world becomes more interconnected through trade, immigration, and digital technology. Authors will include Achebe, Adichie, Dangarembga, Kourouma, Ngugi, Salih, Soyinka, Wicomb. Films by Kouyaté, Loreau, Sembène.
-
Reading Gravity's Rainbow
An in-depth study of perhaps the most important American novel of the twentieth century. Reading will include Pynchon's early novel The Crying of Lot 49, stories by Borges, Kafka, and Nabokov, and a range of historical, texts and films alluded to in Gravity’s Rainbow, from the sermons of Jonathan Edwards to the poetry of Rilke to The Wizard of Oz. Enrollment limited to 20 seniors.
- Primary Instructor
- Burrows
-
James Joyce and the Modern Novel
One measure of James Joyce's achievement as a writer is his influence (as an inspiration, an antagonist, or a competitor) on novelists who came after him. Our primary concern will be with Joyce's formal innovations: How did his audacious narrative experiments transform the novel as a genre? Do his stylistic games break with the realistic tradition or expose its linguistic and epistemological workings? In addition to Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses, we will read novels by Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett, and Nabokov. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first-year students. Instructor permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Armstrong
-
Narratives of Blackness in Latinx and Latin America
We analyze literary, visual, and performative narratives of blackness in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas in relation to whiteness, indigeneity, class, and gender. Primary texts include Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz, Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home, and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. Films include Xica (dir. Carlos Diegues) and Bad Hair (dir. Mariana Rondón). Enrollment limited to 20. Instructor permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Ramirez
-
W. G. Sebald and Some Interlocutors
The works of W. G. Sebald have received a huge amount of critical attention since his death in 2001, particularly from critics interested in the question of the ethics of literature after Auschwitz. But what is Sebald’s literary heritage, and who are his interlocutors? What internal and external connections do his works establish? Besides Sebald’s works, readings will include Stendhal, Kafka, Walser, Borges, Bergson, Resnais, Lanzmann. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first-year students.
-
"The Wire"
Over sixty episodes, David Simon's acclaimed television series explores a range of social and political issues, but it does so with unusual literary ambition and success. In this course we'll ask how "The Wire" generates interest, engagement, and debate in part by appropriating and adapting generic strategies and aesthetic devices deployed by such "classic" authors as Shakespeare and Dickens. Enrollment limited to 20.
-
Undergraduate Independent Study in Modern and Contemporary Literatures
Tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic. Section numbers vary by instructor. Instructor's permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Armstrong
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Bewes
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Burrows
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Egan
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Foley
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- George
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Katz
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Kim
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Murray
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Nabers
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Reichman
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rooney
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rambuss
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Gandhi
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Smailbegovic
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Quashie
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
Medieval Manuscript Studies: Paleography, Codicology, and Interpretation
How do you read a medieval manuscript? This course teaches hands-on methodologies for deciphering the material text, including palaeography (history of scripts) and codicology (archeology of the book); contemporary models of interpreting scribal texts, including editorial theory and analysis of readers' reception; and medieval concepts of textuality and interpretation, including medieval theories of authorship and the arts of memory. Prior course work in Middle English or Latin or other medieval language recommended. Not open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 20. Instructor permission required.
-
The 60s: Film Countercultures
On representative late-60s counterculture movies concerned with antiauthoritarianism; hippy Bohemianism; social and sexual experimentation; dropping out; and psychedelia. Bookended by rock music festival documentaries (Monterey Pop; Gimme Shelter), the seminar is mostly concerned with feature films (The Graduate; Bonnie and Clyde; 2001; Midnight Cowboy; Easy Rider; Carnal Knowledge). It will also consider some underground art cinema (Kenneth Anger; Andy Warhol). Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors. Instructor permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Rambuss
-
Reading Literature in a Digital World
We will explore the implications of using digital technologies to read, study, and write literature. Does the digital pose a threat and/or an opportunity to the literary? Has the literary become obsolete in a video-driven media environment? And what place does the literary occupy in a digital world? Enrollment limited to 20 senior English concentrators.
-
Senior Honors Thesis in English
Independent research and writing under the direction of a faculty member. Permission should be obtained from the Honors Advisor in English. Open to senior English concentrators pursuing Honors in English. Instructor permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Armstrong
-
Senior Honors Thesis in Nonfiction Writing
Independent research and writing under the direction of the student’s Nonfiction Writing honors supervisor. Permission should be obtained from the Honors Advisor for Nonfiction Writing. Open to senior English concentrators pursuing Honors in Nonfiction Writing. Instructor permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Imbriglio
-
Graduate Independent Study in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures
Section numbers vary by instructor. May be repeated for credit. Instructor's permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Bryan
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Egan
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Foley
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rabb
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Redfield
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rambuss
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Kuzner
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
American Literature Without Borders
Recent theoretical and critical approaches to colonial and 19th-c. American literature: transatlantic, Caribbean, hemispheric; borderlands; imperial, colonial and postcolonial cultural formations; the Black Atlantic; diasporic and migration studies. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
-
Graduate Independent Study in the Enlightenment and the Rise of National Literatures
Section numbers vary by instructor. May be repeated for credit. Instructor's permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Burrows
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Egan
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Khalip
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Gould
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Keach
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- McLaughlin
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Nabers
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rabb
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rooney
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Redfield
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Anderson
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Parker
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
Theories of Affect: Poetics of Expression Through and Beyond Identity
Drawing on the tools of affect theory and critical race studies this collaborative seminar examines how poetic works can simultaneously be engaged in audacious formal and conceptual experimentation while remaining committed to imagining how subjectivity might be experienced both through and beyond structures of gender, race and sexuality. Readings include: Theresa Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, Sara Ahmed, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
-
Postcolonial Theory
In this introduction to postcolonial theory we will consider key Western sources (Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Levi Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas); anticolonial manifestos (Gandhi, Fanon, Césaire, Memmi); political and ethical practices (civil disobedience, armed struggle, friendship). In addition to canonical critics (Said, Bhabha, Spivak), the course will review new interests in the field (transnationalism, non-western imperialisms, the environmental turn). Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
-
Modernism and Theories of Space
This course analyzes literary modernism as it intersects with theories of space both historical and formal. Topics include: colonialism and global spaces, Fordist production, gendered public/private divides, as well as networks, underworlds, spatial form, and models of wandering. Readings include work by Lefebvre, Harvey, Latour, Frank, Larsen, Joyce, McKay, Woolf. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
-
Blackness and Being: Studies in Black Literary and Cultural Criticism
Through some recent critical readings, we will think about the enduring “problem” of blackness—its representational, aesthetic, and/or philosophical (ontological, epistemological, ethical) challenges. Our study will think through feminist and queer studies, as well as through diaspora and American and ethnic studies. We will also think historically about what motivates various turns to thinking about blackness and being. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
- Primary Instructor
- Quashie
-
Graduate Independent Study in Modern and Contemporary Literatures
Section numbers vary by instructor. May be repeated for credit. Instructor's permission required.
- Primary Instructor
- Armstrong
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Bewes
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Burrows
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- George
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Katz
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Kim
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Murray
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Nabers
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Reichman
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rooney
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Stanley
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Rambuss
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Gandhi
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Smailbegovic
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
- Primary Instructor
- Quashie
- Schedule Code
- I: Independent Study/Research
-
Ethical Turns in Psychoanalysis and Literature
This course examines ethics, broadly conceived, as the place where literature and psychoanalysis intersect or coexist in tense or collaborative relation. We will consider ethics at sites or moments of transition—as turns, upheavals, or ordinary acts that bring into view notions of responsibility, conviction, obligation, knowledge, ignorance, and complicity. Readings by Barthes, Benjamin, Fanon, Arendt, Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Klein, Butler. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
- Primary Instructor
- Reichman
-
Preliminary Examination Preparation
For graduate students who have met the tuition requirement and are paying the registration fee to continue active enrollment while preparing for a preliminary examination.
- Schedule Code
- E: Grad Enrollment Fee/Dist Prep
-
Thesis Preparation
For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are continuing research on a full time basis.
- Schedule Code
- E: Grad Enrollment Fee/Dist Prep
-
Courses of Interest to Students Concentrating in English
These courses, offered in other departments, are cross listed with the English Department and do not require advisor approval to count toward the concentration for English concentrators. Please refer to the primary department for registration details.
American Studies
AMST 2220N Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Futures
Cogut Institute for Humanities
HMAN 1973R Is That A Fact? On the Function of Interpretation at the Present Time
