Faulkner and His Influence (AL) William Faulkner was extreme: the most radical formal innovator among the American Modernist novelists and an outrageous (and subtle) thinker about the complex social and racial history of the American South. He presides over the literature of the southern United States as a towering, Nobel Prize-winning giant. In this course we will read Faulkner’s major novels and short stories, and then look at where his influence shows up in more contemporary writing by American writers, black and white.

The Graphic Novel and the Postmodern City  From dystopian visions of isolation and alienation to utopian illustrations of soaring towers and integrated communities, comics and graphic novels since the 1970s have represented a range of cityscapes and ways of living in them. Our efforts will focus on understanding how comics work as a cultural form distinct from others and how various artists and writers have imagined urban space in relatively recent U.S. cultural history.  Some texts might include: Daniel Clowes, Ghost World; Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta; Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do; and G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphono, Ms. Marvel.

The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (in English) A study of the "perverse" aesthetics of this Russian-American writer. We will expose the hidden plots under the surface of his fiction, follow and arbitrate the ongoing contest between the author and his fictional heroes, and search for the roots of Nabokov's poetics in Western and Russian literary traditions. An attempt will be made to show the continuity between the Russian and English works of this bilingual and bicultural writer.

Writing Place: Sinking Deeper into Landscape Can place be rendered so richly it becomes a character unto itself? In this course, we'll explore the ways writers deepen a reader's sense of place, and showcase the ways setting can pressurize a narrative and a life. This course will be useful to prose writers of all types, as we explore both non-fiction and fiction - like work by Vladimir Nabokov, Jamaica Kincad, Sarah M. Broom, Daphne du Maurier, and Pitchaya Sudbandthad - in order to observe technique, intention, and impact. Students will read critically and also produce place-based work of their own. This course will be of particular interest to environmentally engaged students looking to process loss and degradation of place in their work.

The Short Story (AL) This course approaches the short story as a distinct prose genre, beginning with work by Edgar Allen Poe and Guy de Maupassant and concluding with stories by contemporary authors. We will examine the particularly notable growth of the genre in America and survey various trends in the form, from "local color" sketches and realistic tales to experiments in modernism and postmodernism. Throughout, we will consider issues of structure, characterization, style, and voice. Other authors may include Anderson, Barthelme, Cheever, Chekhov, Hemingway, Joyce, Moore, O'Connor, Twain, and Welty.

ENGL0214: Renaissance Literature and Culture The Renaissance in Europe and England was arguably the moment at which the modern idea of literature was born. How did a developing literary sensibility participate in a historical moment that also saw new ideas about science, social order, history, gender, desire, authorship, race, religion, and humanity?  We will address this question by studying Renaissance literary self-consciousness as it occurred in various cultural locations, from palace to city to church to country to nation to non-European world.  Readings may include "non-literary” texts as well as “literary” works by such authors as Castiglione, More, Wyatt, Sidney, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Cavendish, and Behn.  Student work will include presentations, weekly blog posts or in-class writing, and a final exam.

Senior Thesis: Critical Writing Individual guidance and seminar (discussions, workshops, tutorials) for those undertaking one-term projects in literary criticism or analysis.  All critical thesis writers also take the Senior Thesis Workshop (ENAM 700Z) in either Fall or Spring Term.

Victoria's Secrets Known as the great age of the realist novel and the epitome of staid decorum, the nineteenth century also had its guilty pleasures--mysteries, ghost stories, science fiction, adventure tales, and more--which exposed a radical underside to the Victorian imagination where norms of gendered, racial, and ethnic identity were called into question. In this course we will read both canonical realist novels and their non-traditional counterparts in an attempt to understand the productive interplay between these two seemingly disparate literary traditions. Authors may include: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës, Wilkie Collins, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others.

Science Fiction Time travel, aliens, androids, robots, corporate and political domination, reimaginings of race, gender, sexuality and the human body--these concerns have dominated science fiction over the last 150 years.  But for all of its interest in the future, science fiction tends to focus on technologies and social problems relevant to the period in which it is written. In this course, we'll work to understand both the way that authors imagine technology's role in society and how those imaginings create meanings for science and its objects of study and transformation.  Some likely reading and films include Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, and works by William Gibson, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and other contemporary writers. (Students who have taken FYSE 1162 are not eligible to register for this course).

Multi-Ethnic British Literatures "My name is Karim Amir," announces the protagonist of a Hanif Kureishi novel, "and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost." In this course we will investigate the complex subject of ethnic and national identity in the writing of British authors of Asian, African, and Caribbean descent. We will trace the shifting meanings of "black" and "British" as we move from 1950s migrant fictions to more recent reckonings with British multiculturalism. Topics to be considered will include diaspora and the work of memory; race and religion after 9/11; the representation of urban space; and the experience of asylum-seekers and refugees.

The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Ethics and Empire Coetzee, whose novels engage questions of institutional racism, state-sponsored violence, patriarchal privilege, environmental degradation, animal rights, and how to ethically approach cultural Others, manages to speak of specific historical circumstances—such as South Africa’s apartheid regime—while simultaneously addressing universal dilemmas of our contemporary human condition.  Having received both the Booker (twice) and Nobel Prizes for literature, Coetzee is recognized as the living heir of both Kafka and Beckett, and as a writer whose searing prose and formal experimentation both extend and transform the novel’s traditional role as our culture’s most skeptical self-inquisitor.  Depicting every act of writing as either a confrontation or an evasion, Coetzee both reveres and rebukes the literary traditions he warily embraces.  We will read his strongest and most globally recognized works, from Waiting for the Barbarians through Disgrace.

Multi-Ethnic American Literature This course introduces multi-ethnic literature by studying the relationship between racial formation and literary representation. How is race constituted and what role does literature play in the process? How are cultural representations of racialized difference formed in relation to its historical, material, and social conditions? We will critically analyze the nested issues of labour, law, and migration that have shaped Black, Indigenous, and Asian presence within North America. From there, we explore the themes of assimilation, multiculturalism, diaspora, and American empire in order to track the trajectory of minoritarian literature throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Authors may include: Maxine Hong Kingston, Tomson Highway, Toni Morrison, and Viet Nguyen.

Postcolonial Literature and the City In this course we will examine a number of novels from the 20th and 21st centuries that are about life in the city, taking a global and trans-national approach.  We will explore formations of urban life alongside transformations in the novel as a genre.  We will put these novels of city life in dialogue with critical theory—that is, theories of culture and society that have as their aim human emancipation (for example, Marxism, feminism, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies).  The novels we read will reflect important literary movements such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism.  (Not open to students who have taken ENAM 0447) (Rec)

American Literature Since 1945 (AL) In this course we will trace the development of the postmodern sensibility in American literature since the Second World War.  We will read works in four genres:  short fiction, novels, non-fiction (the "new journalism"), and poetry.  Authors will include Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo.

Reading Race in the 21st Century This course studies multi-ethnic literature by exploring how racial formation is represented through literature produced in the 21st century. We will study both the continuities and divergences in contemporary Black, Indigenous, and Asian American literary productions from their historical iterations. What shifts have taken place in the multi-ethnic literary canon and tradition between the past to current centuries? We will engage with themes such as the rise of genre fiction, changes to the literary marketplace, and the status of “national literature” in the global age. Authors may include: Colson Whitehead, Chang-rae Lee, Louise Erdrich, and Jhumpa Lahiri. (While ENGL 0224 Multi-Ethnic American Literature is not a prerequisite, it is encouraged.) 3hrs. sem. (This is an advanced course, so it is strongly recommended that you have completed previous ENGL coursework.) (Formerly ENGL 0306) 3hrs. sem.

Creative Derivation: Rewriting, Remaking, and Unmaking Literature The American experimental poet Robert Duncan famously described his work as “derivative.” His  contemporary, Ronald Johnson, once remarked: “I read to steal.” In this course we will take these  articulations of reading-focused poetics as a premise for surveying seventeenth- through twenty-first-century  literature that enacts the reading of other texts; repurposes the narratives and terms of canonical or hegemonic writing; or uses critique as a means of generative engagement. Along the way, we will consider the stakes of  rewriting or reworking texts across cultural, historical, generic, and formal distances. Students will be invited  to pursue creative final projects.

Race, Capitalism, Decolonization What does race have to do with capitalism and profit, exploitation and dispossession?  Drawing on contemporary fiction, poetry, and theory, we will consider the intersections of race and capitalism in shaping contemporary epistemologies, institutional practices, and lived experiences in local and global contexts. We will explore how present-day formations of race and capitalism are related to histories of imperialism and the global extraction of labor and resources.  Decolonization implies a deep, complex, and multi-faceted process by which the discourses, knowledges, and practices at the core of capitalism and imperialism(s) and their mechanisms of oppression are challenged and dismantled. (Formerly ENAM 0313)

Kazuo Ishiguro Winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most influential and celebrated of contemporary writers. In novels like Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro gives shape to today’s most pressing questions: about work and workers, the difficulties of intimacy and caring, the political consequences of historical perspective, and the ethical dilemmas facing scientists and educators. Moving between Europe and Asia, his novels also address the complex negotiation of cultural difference in a globalized world. We will explore his major works in great depth, supplementing our literary investigation with materials from other disciplines. (Diversity)

African Environmental Writing, Photography, and Film Concerned with social implications of environmental change, a burgeoning number of contemporary African photographers, filmmakers, and authors are challenging the public with social documents that protest ecologically destructive forms of neocolonial development. These works actively resist oppression, abuse, and conflagration of both the black body and the environment. Subverting the neocolonialist rhetoric and gaze, these creative practitioners complicate what it means to write about and look at those most affected by environmental injustices perpetrated by international and national actors. In this course we will view relevant photographs and films and read African environmental literature as sources of artistic and activist inspiration. Whilst reading, we will ask ourselves the hard questions of what to do with our own complicity when facing the role that the global north plays in the causation of environmental degradation and human suffering. Students will be expected to reflect upon how best to regard the pain of others in the Anthropocene, as well as upon how culture influences creative depictions of the Anthropocene. Seminar papers will address questions that arise from analyzing particular works. This course counts as a Humanities cognate for environmental studies majors. (Diversity)

Writing: Poetry, Fiction, NonFiction An introduction to the writing of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction through analysis of writings by modern and contemporary poets and prose writers and regular discussion of student writing. Different instructors may choose to emphasize one literary form or another in a given semester. Workshops will focus on composition and revision, with particular attention to the basics of form and craft. This course is a prerequisite to ENAM 0370, ENAM 0375, ENAM 0380, and ENAM 0385.

Foundations of English Literature (Pre-1800) Students will study Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost, as well as other foundational works of English literature that may include Shakespeare, non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama, the poetry of Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poetry.

Tang Poetry / American Poetry Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, rival founders of the Imagist poetry movement a century ago, both published influential translations of Tang-dynasty lyrics, even though neither one knew a word of Chinese. In this course, we will not only study their accomplishments in context, but go a step further to begin learning how to read and write the most commonly used characters in Tang poetry so that we can parse a selection of the best poems in the original as we explore such topics as the differences between Chinese and European poetics, theories of translation and intercultural adaptation, and Orientalist fantasies of the ideogram. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary.

Bestsellers and Prize-Winners: Contemporary Cultures of Reading and Literature Have you noticed how books that win the most literary awards and prizes are often the ones that get read the least? In this course students will study the disconnect between what professionals think we should read versus what people actually read, and how they engage with books, reading, and publishing in our digital age. We will examine canon formation, the process by which books become “classics.” At the same time, we will identify current trends in the literary world, while considering the roles of marketing, advertising, and social media (such as Booktok). This course aims to analyze the social forces that shape literary and reading cultures, so it is well-suited for students interested in studying books from a sociological rather than purely literary perspective.

Workshop: Poetry This course is an advanced workshop for students who have already done some work in poetry and are committed to the challenge of continued artistic development. Students will write a new poem each week, and revise at least eight of these for inclusion in a final chapbook project. Readings will include craft essays as well as several recent poetry collections by writers such as Hanif Abdurraqib and Natalie Diaz. (any 100-level CRWR course and Instructor Approval).

Nature Poetry Can a poem reframe the relationship between humans and nature? Poets have posed this and similar questions for centuries. Scholars of literature and the environment, or “ecocritics,” ask it anew with reference to ongoing disasters such as global climate change, mass extinction, and new pandemics. In this course we will develop our ecocritical skills by exploring how poems about the human relationship to the biophysical environment can inspire us to rethink our place in the universe. We will read works by such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Elisabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Lucia Perillo, and Jorie Graham.

Poetry and Performance Most poems are meant to be performed.  In  this course we will explore many short poems and a few long poems, spanning three-quarters of a millennium, with performance in mind.  We will memorize poems, perform poems out loud for each other, and interpret poems with tone foremost in mind, on the theory that everything about a poem, from its form to its diction to its imagery to its historical or social context, instructs its reader as to its voice.  Texts will include diverse poems in English, from Middle English tales or lyrics to slam poetry, from Renaissance and Romantic lyrics to postcolonial poetry, from modernist experiments to indigenous poetry. Formal assignments will include recitations, presentations, a paper or two, and a poem, to be created, memorized, and performed by the student.

Shakespeare Then and Now (Pre-1800) In the1623 First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, rival playwright and poet Ben Jonson says that the world’s most famous author was “not of an age, but for all time.” Jonson might more accurately have said that Shakespeare was “for all time” because “of an age.” To see how this is so, we will study ten to twelve plays from the following list: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, All’s Well that Ends Well, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. Lectures and discussions will emphasize historical context, staging, structure, character, authorial development, and performance and reception history, as well as social and political concerns important in both Shakespeare’s times and ours: sexuality, gender, race, property, censorship, and autocratic and collective power.

Gender, Power, and Politics on the Early Modern Stage (I) (Pre-1800) In this class we will explore the representation of gendered embodiment on the early modern stage, considering as we do so how theatrical embodiment intersects with other treatments of the body in early modern culture.  We will read both early modern and contemporary theoretical accounts of gender as performance, investigating among other issues the use of boy actors, the representation of specifically “female” disorders (e.g., “suffocation” or hysteria), the performance of maternity, and the treatment of same-sex eroticism. Of particular importance will be the representation of the articulate or angry woman as the “shrew” or “scold,” and we will begin the class with an investigation of so-called “shrew-taming” narratives. Primary readings will include: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter’s Tale, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, and Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure. We will end the semester with a look at how this material plays out in our current political moment, focusing in particular on the representation of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Christine Blasey Ford.

Why Read Old Poems - and How? In this course we will focus on the question: “Why read old poems and tales—and how?”  We will read and discuss selected works in English composed between ~650-1660 C.E, focusing on lyric poetry along with selections from narrative and dramatic works.  We will explore how these works are designed to be spoken and heard, and examine questions they invite about gender, exclusion, immigration, plague, and environmental loss.  We will also examine how they might point us toward possibility, empathy, and resilience.  Readings include selections from works and authors such as Beowulf, The Green Knight, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton and also works by traditionally marginalized writers such as Marie de France, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth. Pre-1800.

Poetry Games: Experimental Poetics and Avant-Garde Aesthetics Not all poetry is, as William Wordsworth put it, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Some poetry challenges the very nature of language, art, and subjectivity through various self-decentering forms of writing. In this course, we will study a century’s worth of avant-garde experimental poetry, from the Dadaists and Surrealists to the Oulipo group, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and the conceptual and post-conceptual poetry movements of the 21st century, then create our own poetry using the same techniques and principles. The course is thus part survey and part writing workshop, with an emphasis on artistic process, linguistic theory, and the liberating power of constraints. Topics include: aleatory poetry, algorithmic poetry, blackout poetry, concrete poetry, erasure poetry, exquisite corpse, found poetry, homophonic translation, sound poetry, lipograms, S+7, etc.

Critical Conditions: Gender, Literature, and Illness (Pre-1800) In this course we will explore the literary representation of illness and pain in a range of texts from the classical period to the present day, focusing in particular on the intersection of illness with questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Beginning with Sophocles’s tragedy Women of Trachis, we will explore the classical representation of acute pain in the context of early Greek medicine, before examining medieval and early modern literary works inspired by the Black Death, including selections from Boccaccio’s Decameron. The second half of the class will focus on modernist and contemporary accounts of illness, including Virginia Woolf’s treatment of both the 1918 influenza epidemic and so-called “shell-shock” in her novel Mrs Dalloway. We will intersperse our literary readings with theoretical explorations of cure, disability, and ableism by writers such as Eli Clare, as well as work from the emerging field of narrative medicine.

Slam Poetry: Artistry and Politics In this course, we will examine the artistry, politics, and history of slam poetry through a wide range of spoken word performances on video. In addition to writing short critiques, students will develop drafts for two new (3-minute) spoken word poems for performance, working in small groups and also individually with the professor over Zoom. Poets include the likes of Denice Frohman, Danez Smith, Portia O., Andrea Gibson, Rudy Francisco, Emi Mahmoud, Safia Elhillo, G. Yamazawa, Amir Safi, Rachel Rostad, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Yesika Salgado, Glori B., and Samantha Peterson, among others. Warning: some of the material in this course is explicit, emotionally intense, and disturbing. Weather permitting, some meetings may take place outside in person.

Revolt and Rebellion in Long Eighteenth Century Literature The long eighteenth century is replete with uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions. In this course we will think  about why the event of the revolt, especially in colonial contexts, proved intriguing for British writers and  thinkers throughout the period. How did representing historical and imagined uprisings alike enable Britons  to diagnose social and political problems? When and why does it become permissible to revolt? What makes  a revolutionary subject? Authors include: John Milton, John Locke, Aphra Behn, Ottobah Cugoano, Helen  Maria Williams, and Mary Shelley. Critical/theoretical interlocutors might include Laura Brown, Susan  Buck-Morss, C.L.R. James, and Anthony Paul Farley. Pre-1800.

Shakespeare’s Career (Pre-1800) In this course we will study the whole arc of William Shakespeare's literary career from the earliest histories, comedies, and non-dramatic poetry to the more mature tragedies and romances, with an eye to understanding Shakespeare’s development as a writer in his own time. How might the plays have resonated for his first audiences on stage, and how have subsequent readers drawn their own meanings from the published texts? Reading one play a week, we will pay close attention to such dramaturgical issues as Shakespeare’s construction of character and of plot, his adaptation of sources, and his modes of versification, as well as the ethical, political, and commercial implications of Shakespeare’s works during his lifetime, some of which stand in contrast with what we learn from them today.

Fictional Fictions In this course we will engage with novels whose primary focus is the novel itself—how the genre is imagined, structured, written, sold, read, celebrated, and denounced. Our chosen meta-fictions will variously focus on the psychology of artistic production, on the philosophical issues surrounding the telling of “true lies,” on the social function of novels in our culture, and on what is at stake in the supposedly private act of reading. Our texts will include works such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, McEwan’s Atonement, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Cunningham’s The Hours, and DeLillo’s Mao II. This course counts as an ENGL elective.

Postcolonial Literature, Migrants and the City In this course, we will analyze postcolonial literature that portrays the lives of migrants in cities. Postcolonial novels such as Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Love Enough by Dionne Brand, Brother by David Chariandi, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, Carnival by Rawi Hage, The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon and A Free Man by Aman Sethi present counter-hegemonic narratives and visions of the city. They show that the city, indelibly marked by relations of Empire and the product of racial capitalism, is also a battleground for decoloniality: a delinking from colonial knowledge practices. To map this insurgent knowledge in postcolonial novels of the city, we will focus on four prominent themes that also serve as analytical categories: mobility, labor, conviviality, and protest.

Literature of Displacement: Forced Migration, Diaspora, Exile We will study contemporary postcolonial literature and theory about migration, displacement, exile, and diaspora.  Spurred variously by force, necessity and desire, migrants leave their homes and homelands with regret and with hope.  Writers address the historical forces that shape these migrations: decolonization and neo-colonialism, globalization, warfare, dispossession, political violence, religious conflict, and environmental catastrophe.  These writers experiment with narrative form and poetic language to explore the experiences of undocumented immigrant workers, exiles, refugees and well-to-do migrants.  We will examine constructions of identity, history, community and place in texts by Anzaldua, Ali, Darwish, Diome, Patel, Gomez Pena, Said, Rushdie, Spivak, and others. (Diversity)

Human Rights and World Literature In this course we will explore the idiom of human rights in law, literature, and political culture. We will place literary representations of human rights violations (genocide, torture, detention and forced labor, environmental devastation, police violence) in dialogue with official human rights treaties and declarations in order to historicize and critique the assumptions of human rights discourse. Who qualifies as a “human” deserving of humanitarian intervention? How do human rights rehearse a colonial dynamic based on racial and geo-political privilege? To answer these questions we will turn to some of the most controversial voices in global fiction and poetry.

Posthuman Medicine: Morals, Machines, and Bodies Medical treatments and technologies now keep people alive when they once surely would have died. But the increasing power of medicine has also raised nightmarish possibilities of lives controlled, squandered, or sacrificed to a system that often alienates patients, is centered on profit, and has a long history of treating marginal populations recklessly. How do science fiction writers, doctors, film makers, memoirists, and healthcare corporations portray an ever more medicalized vision of human experience and human bodies? Texts and films for the course will include HG Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atul Gawande, Complications; Octavia Butler, Clay’s Ark; Michael Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Karen Russell, Sleep Donation, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.

Maritime Literature and Culture Writers have long found the sea to be a cause of wonder and reflection.  A mirror for some and a desert for others, the sea has influenced the imaginations of writers throughout history in vastly different ways.  In this course we will read a variety of literary works, both fiction and non-fiction, in which the sea acts as the setting, a body of symbolism, an epistemological challenge, and a reason to reflect on the human relationship to nature.  Readings will be drawn from the Bible, Homer's Odyssey, Old English Poetry, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Kipling, Conrad, Melville, Hemingway, Walcott, O'Brian, and others.

Black Aesthetics in the Wake of Slavery One of the most powerful ways in which contemporary Black writers and visual artists have examined the afterlives of slavery has been to question the authority of official documents such as ships’ ledgers, legal manuscripts, newspaper photographs, and auction catalogues. While showing how dominant archives negate black personhood, cultural producers such as Saidiya Hartman, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Arthur Jafa, Christina Sharpe, and Kara Walker have explored the possibilities of alternative archival sources such as music, dance, personal correspondences, oral histories, tattoos, diary entries, and cleaning manuals. Students will explore how such sources (and their exciting aesthetic and scholarly treatment) disrupt the racial violence perpetuated by dominant archives.

Reading Women's Writing: Living a Feminist Life from Mary Wollstonecraft to Sara Ahmed In this course we will investigate the tradition of women's writing in English from the sixteenth century to the present day, focusing on the complex relationships among writing, sexuality, race, and gender.  We will consider the ways in which writers identifying as female respond to--and often subvert--traditional literary themes and conventions. An organizing focus of our reading will be the articulation or suppression of female anger and other related emotions in a variety of repressive contexts. Though our focus will be primarily on the interpretation of literary works, we will also develop an awareness of relevant debates in feminist theory, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary contribution to notions of female education to Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist “killjoy.”  Other texts may include: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure; Grace Cho, Tastes Like War; Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage; Harriet Jacobs, The Life of a Slave Girl; Toni Morrison, Sula; Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties; Meredith Talusan, Fairest; and Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, and Mrs Dalloway.

Great Moments in American Fiction In this course we will look at major moments in the development of a distinctly American tradition in fiction. Focusing on short, intense novels by major authors from the mid-19th to the late 20th centuries, we will see how these writers grapple with and illuminate the central questions of the American experience of democracy, race, gender, and social class.

Forms of Enlightenment: Long Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Pre-1800)  In this course, we will explore the development of literary genres, forms, and institutions in long eighteenth-century (1660-1830) Britain and its empire. We will track how writers in the period reimagined knowledge production, social organization, and politics in print. As we consider the key questions of the moment—the relationships between sensations, ideas, and truth; between reason, sympathy, and self-interest—we will attend carefully to the contradictions, exclusions, and omissions that structure Enlightenment thought, particularly with respect to questions of race and colonialism. Authors might include Aphra Behn, Henry Neville, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Sarah Scott, Adam Smith, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Edmund Burke, and Phillis Wheatley Peters.

Introduction to Contemporary Literary Theory In this course we will introduce several major schools of contemporary literary theory. By reading theoretical texts in close conjunction with works of literature, we will illuminate the ways in which these theoretical stances can produce multiple interpretations of a given literary work. The approaches covered may include New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism and Cultural Criticism, Race Theory and Multicultural Criticism, Feminism, Post-Colonial Criticism, Queer Studies, Eco-Criticism, Post-Structuralism, and others. These theories will be applied to various works of fiction, poetry, and drama. The goal will be to make students critically aware of the fundamental literary, cultural, political, and moral assumptions underlying every act of interpretation they perform.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature This course will examine major developments in the literary world of 19th century America.  Specific topics to be addressed might include the transition from Romanticism to Regionalism and Realism, the origins and evolution of the novel in the United States, and the tensions arising from the emergence of a commercial marketplace for literature.  Attention will also be paid to the rise of women as literary professionals in America and the persistent problematizing of race and slavery.  Among others, authors may include J. F. Cooper, Emerson, Melville, Douglass, Chopin, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, Wharton, and James. .

Poems, Poets, Poetry Emily Dickinson declared, “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”  In this introductory class we will encounter hair-raising poems from a wide variety of genres and historical eras in order to examine their structural forms, linguistic audacities, ideological captivities, and personal revelations.  We will also read various poets’ meditations on their own craft, from which we will draw our own conclusions about what poems do, should, or might accomplish in the world.  Our goal will always be to render poetry accessible, relevant, and enjoyable—to become confident readers of, and informed writers about, the diverse poetic utterance.

Asian American Indie Cinema From The Joy Luck Club (1993) to Crazy Rich Asians (2018), we have seen Asian American films sporadically achieve mainstream and commercial success in the last few decades. In these discussions, however, less attention is often paid to the rich and storied tradition of Asian American independent cinema. From its inception, Asian American cinema has necessarily had to be “independently” produced and distributed due to the historical, political, and material circumstances of Asian American racial formation. In this course we will survey, view, and analyze selections from the canon of Asian American indie cinema. What social themes do Asian American filmmakers engage with in their works? Which cinematic traditions do they borrow from or re-envision? Films studied may include: Chan Is Missing (1982), Double Happiness (1994), Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), Saving Face (2004), and Minari (2020).

Literature and Class Struggle In this course, we’ll investigate the representation of class struggle in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, ranging from eighteenth-century agrarian poetry to twentieth-century experimental film and the contemporary novel of climate crisis. Under what conditions, we’ll ask, do working-class projects of social transformation take shape? How can literature and film stimulate social consciousness or propel movements? How does cultural work reveal the interplay between class, gender, and race in liberation struggles? With the assistance of Marxist and feminist theory, we’ll offer answers to these questions by studying the work of authors and filmmakers including Muriel Rukeyser, Sembène Ousmane, Leslie Kaplan, Lana and Lily Wachowski, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Afro-Asian Encounters Scholars have recently uncovered a rich history of black and Asian solidarity against racism. Yet the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992 provided a painful reminder of the antagonisms between black and Asian diasporic groups. This course will explore how Asian American and African American identities have historically been constructed in relation to one another. We will foreground key sites in the making and undermining of Afro-Asian intimacies, from the racial formation of coolie laborers to the cross-racial imagination of Kung-Fu and Hip Hop. Authors will include Richard Wright, Chang-Rae Lee, Vijay Prashad, Frank Chin, Das Racist, Mira Nair, and W.E.B. Dubois.

Imagining Rural America Although many Americans equate “rural” with whiteness, political conservatism, and poverty, the realities and representations of rural life have always been complicated those notions. Using methodologies from geography, cultural history, folklore, and literary criticism, and privileging lenses of race, class, and gender, we will explore these complexities by analyzing novels, paintings, photographs, moving images, and music against the histories of Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Dust Bowl, and New England. Texts may include Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, The Grapes of Wrath (novel and film), paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper, Winter’s Bone, O Brother Where Art Thou?/, and the music of John Prine and Steve Earle.

American Women Poets We will examine the rich tradition of lyric poetry by women in the U.S. Beginning with the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, one of the New World's earliest published poets, we continue to the 19th century and Emily Dickinson, along with the formidable line of "poetesses" who dominated the popular poetry press in that era. We examine the female contribution to the Modernist aesthetic in figures like Millay, Moore, H.D. and Gertrude Stein; the transformation of modernist ideals by Bishop, Plath, Sexton, and Rich; and, among the postmodernists, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe.

The Graphic Novel In this course we will study some of the most widely respected graphic novels produced in the last thirty years. Our purpose will be to understand how the form works and is structured by its dual, but sometimes competing, interests in the verbal and the visual, and to think about distinct styles of illustration.  We will also think about how landmark examples have shaped the form.  Working with software designed for the purpose, students will use photographs to produce short comics of their own.  Possible texts include: Alan Moore, Watchmen; Art Spiegelman, Maus; Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.

African American Literature (AL) This course surveys developments in African American fiction, drama, poetry, and essays during the 20th century.  Reading texts in their social, historical, and cultural contexts—and often in conjunction with other African American art forms like music and visual art—we will explore the evolution and deployment of various visions of black being and black artistry, from the Harlem Renaissance through social realism and the Black Arts Movement, to the contemporary post-soul aesthetic.  Authors may include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Octavia Butler. 3 hrs lect./disc. (Diversity) (Rec)

Literary “Character” In this course we will investigate literary character—what it is; what makes it “round,” “flat,” “deep,” “shallow”; its history.  In seeking to understand “character,” we will create our own stories, using characters from our readings, or introducing characters we create into plots or settings from those readings.  In expository essays and class discussions, we will also consider the following questions: how and why did “fictional person” acquire the name “character” (literally “engraved mark”)?  How does “character” relate to representations of body, property, authorship, gender, race? How does theatrical character relate to novelistic and short-story character? Possible authors: Aristotle, Theophrastus, Terence, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Richard Wright, Julia Alvarez.

Pulling Reality’s Hair: Truth and Other Fictions We will, in this seminar, occupy ourselves with works that straddle or blur or occasionally just flat out ignore the aesthetic divide between fiction and non-fiction, in the hopes of getting a better grip on the relation between self and other, word and world, narrative strategy and fidelity to truths both large and small.  Hence readings will include biographical and autobiographical novels, novelistic treatments of biography and autobiography, and a number of hybrid composites that cannot be classified, though we will surely try.  Readings will include Nabokov, Proust, Henry Adams, J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Gregoire Bouillier, Art Spiegelman, and Spalding Gray. In addition we will view films by Ross McElwee, Andre Gregory, and Charlie Kaufman. This course is not open to students who have taken ENAM 0307.  (

Reading Postcolonial and Indigenous Literature European colonialism and racial capitalism have radically and violently transformed people’s lives across the globe. The effects of racial capitalism continue to be felt, and arguably imperialism continues but in other forms. How have writers responded to the experiences of colonization, racial capitalism, nationalism, development, globalization and migration? In this course, we will discuss writing by indigenous and postcolonial writers such as Chinua Achebe, Chimanda Ngozie Adichie, Mourid Barghouti, J. M. Coetzee, Tstitsi Dangarembga, Frantz Fanon, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Shailja Patel, Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Leanne Betasomosake Simpson, and Wole Soyinka (readings will vary), focusing on colonization, anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, representation, agency and power. The class will include lectures, in-class discussions, writing exercises, and group work. (formerly ENAM 0270)

Race and the Contemporary Novel This course surveys multi-ethnic American literature by exploring processes of racial formation through literature and literary representations produced in the 21st century. We will study both the continuities and divergences in contemporary Black, Indigenous, and Asian American literary productions from their historical iterations. What shifts have taken place in the multi-ethnic literary canon and tradition between the past to current centuries? We will engage with themes such as the rise of genre fiction, changes to the literary marketplace, and the status of “national literature” in the global age. Authors include: Colson Whitehead, Chang-rae Lee, Louise Erdrich, and Jhumpa Lahiri.  3hrs. sem.

American Psycho: Disease, Doctors, and Discontents What constitutes a pathological response to the pressures of modernity?  How do pathological protagonists drive readers toward the precariousness of their own physical and mental health?  The readings for this class center on the provisional nature of sanity and the challenges to bodily health in a world of modern commerce, media, and medical diagnoses.  We will begin with 19th century texts and their engagement with seemingly "diseased" responses to urbanization, new forms of work, and new structures of the family and end with contemporary fictional psychopaths engaged in attacks on the world of images we inhabit in the present.  Nineteenth century texts will likely include stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Later  20th-century works will likely include Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, and Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho.

Adventures in Literary Romance (Pre-1800) In this course we will explore the literary genre of romance.  Today, “romance” often refers to courtship—only one aspect of this ancient genre.  Other aspects include adventure, magic, wonder, multiple plots, multiple authors, an affinity for sequels.  Romance’s associations with every genre—tragedy, comedy, epic, novel, lyric poetry—and its reputation for escapism have made it an epitome of the very idea of literature, as conceived by attackers and defenders.  Its welcoming of female readers and protagonists and its marketing of the exotic have raised issues of gender and ethnicity.  We will discuss all such aspects and implications of romance, and we may also explore how romance has shaped modern television and film. No papers or exams; there will be quizzes daily on the reading, and students will be expected to participate thoughtfully in class discussions.  Readings from texts such as: Daphnis and Chloe, Ethiopian Romance, The Gospel of Luke, The Golden Ass, Arthurian romances by various authors, Orlando Inamorato, Orlando Furioso, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, Don Quixote,/ Waverly/, Madame Bovary, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Time Quintet.

Literary Remakes Literature creates new worlds — and it recreates old ones. From Dante to Steinbeck, The Lord of the Rings to Clueless, writers are constantly rewriting stories. In this class, we will read some literary remakes and discuss what is at stake, and what is opened up, through adaptation and renewal. We will watch film adaptations and listen to song covers. Often, literary remakes give voice to characters from underrepresented demographics; we will discuss the pros and cons of these attempts, and we will attempt to create some of our own remakes. Texts will include selected poems written "after" other poems, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (King Lear)/, /Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Jane Eyre)/, /James by Percival Everett (Huckleberry Finn)/.   /Claire Hodgdon is a Brooklyn-based nonfiction writer with a BA from Middlebury and an MFA from Columbia. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, Electric Literature, Longreads, and elsewhere.

Modern Poetry This course will examine the nature and achievement of the major modern poets of Britain and America during the modern period, beginning with the origins of poetic modernism in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. The central figures to be studied are William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and W.H. Auden. The course will conclude with a look at some after-echoes of modernism in the work of Elizabeth Bishop and others. Two papers, one exam, with occasional oral presentations in class

Indigenous and Settler Colonial Fictions The term “settler colonialism” has gained currency recently as a way of describing the unjust displacement of indigenous peoples, the theft of their lands and resources, and the negation of native epistemologies, cultures, and histories. This course foregrounds indigenous literary voices that challenge and present alternatives to settler colonial narratives. Students will adopt a comparative approach that identifies continuities and disparities between Native American/First Nations, Mexican, Pacific Islander, South African, Palestinian, Maori, and Hawaiian depictions of indigeneity. Authors will include Haunani-Kay Trask, Leslie Marmon Silko, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Craig Santos Perez, Joy Harjo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rigoberta Menchu, Keri Hulme, Joe Sacco, and J.M Coetzee.

Portraits of the Lady: The New Woman in American Literature & Culture At the end of the 19th century, women fought against restrictions limiting their sphere of influence. As they sought to exercise more control over their lives personally, socially, and economically, this “New Woman,”  and the way she was changing the face of society, became a popular subject in literature and art.  In this course we will consider portraits of women by well-known American authors (such as James, Chopin, Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Cather, Larsen, Hurston) alongside those by prominent painters, sculptors, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers.  We will consider how representations of women through the early twentieth century embodied the values of the nation and codified both the fears and aspirations of its citizens.

Global Perspectives on Literature for Youth Literature in translation, post-colonial English literature, and the literature of immigrants are a growing part of literature available to American children. We will examine literature from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia originally written in English or in translation. What makes international literature distinct from multicultural literature? Do these literary traditions bridge cultural gaps? What issues arise in translating for children? What is the phenomenon of "Americanization?" What are the implicit and explicit cultural and/or ethnic expectations regarding authorship and criticism in international literature? In this class we will examine these questions through the lens of literature for children.

Literature of Displacement: Forced Migration, Diaspora, Exile In this course we will study postcolonial literature about migration, displacement, exile, and diaspora.  Spurred variously by force, necessity and desire, migrants leave their homes and homelands with regret and with hope.  Writers address the historical forces that propel these migrations: decolonization and neo-colonialism, globalization, warfare, dispossession, political violence, religious conflict, and environmental catastrophe.  They experiment with narrative form and poetic language to explore the experiences of undocumented immigrant workers, exiles, refugees and well-to-do migrants.  We will examine how displacement shapes constructions of identity, history, community and place in texts by writers such as Anzaldua, Ali, Darwish, Diome, Patel, Gomez Pena, Said, Rushdie, and others.

Reading Literature: Fantastic This course seeks to develop skills for the close reading of literature through discussion of and writing about selected poems, plays, and short stories. A basic vocabulary of literary terms and an introductory palette of critical methods will also be covered, and the course's ultimate goal will be to enable students to attain the skills and tools vital to further course work in the major.

The Haunted: Ghost Stories in Literature Ghosts are all around us. They exist in folkloric depictions, in popular entertainment, and in literature.  Why are ghosts so omnipresent in our storytelling? What do ghost stories reveal about us—our preoccupations, our fears, our desires?  In this class, we’ll examine some ghosts in fiction, looking to discover what they illuminate about the human psyche, whether it be fear of mortality or needing to keep the past alive.  We’ll discuss texts that reveal the various ways the spectral holds sway over our imaginations, including Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot, Jessamyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and selections from The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce. Janice Obuchowski’s debut story collection, THE WOODS, is the 2022 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her fiction has twice received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthologies and has appeared in Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Story, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions online, LitHub, and elsewhere. She served as a fiction editor for the New England Review./

Literature and Economy: Credit, Speculation, Fiction Beyond its engagements with the political economy of its day, Karl Marx’s Capital is rich with allusions to literary texts—among them Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In this course we will explore the imaginative aspects of classical economic thought and the economically descriptive capacities of literature. We will track their common interests in concepts of belief, credibility, and abstraction by looking (primarily) at a period that witnessed the emergence of political economy and modern literary forms like the novel—the eighteenth century. Along the way, we will hazard answers to the following question: in an age of rampant inequality and financialization, what can we learn from representations of historical crises, bubbles, and class struggles? 3 hrs. sem

The Life of Romeo and Juliet It is hard to imagine life today without Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, embedded as it is in every aspect of modern “romantic” love and—by extension—gender relations, sexuality, friendship, identity, aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and psychology. It is a favorite text in early high-school classrooms, on the theory that it speaks to students who are close in age to the star-crossed lovers. Since its first performances in the 1590s, it has resonated endlessly in novels, operas, musicals, and film. How would this massively influential play have come across on the stage, with an all-male cast, in an open-air theatre, when actors had access only to their parts, and not the entire text? What secrets do its earliest printed editions reveal? How has the interpretation of it changed? We will address these questions and more as we study the play, its sources, its performance history, and its legacy in literature, music, art, and film, from post-Restoration adaptations to eighteenth-century editions and performances to modern and postmodern filmic and literary exploitations, such as the South African Gugu and Andile and the American West Side Story and Shakespeare in Love. Pre-1800

Contested Grounds:  U.S. Cultures and Environments Throughout the history of the United States, Americans have created a complex set of meanings pertaining to the environments (wild, pastoral, urban, marine) in which they live.  From European-Native contact to the present, Americans’ various identities, cultures, and beliefs about the bio-physical world have shaped the stories they tell about “nature,” stories that sometimes share common ground, but often create conflicting and contested understandings of human-environment relationships.  In this course we will investigate these varied and contested stories from multi-disciplinary perspectives in the humanities—history, literature, and religion--and will include attention to race, class, gender, and environmental justice.

The Caribbean Novel: Constructing a  Diasporic Identity In this course, we will examine essays, novels, and artworks of Caribbean-heritage creatives to explore the vital role that artistic production has played in creating different worldviews. These novels and artwork explore issues such as decolonization; migration; racial, class, and gender identities; language; diaspora; and notions of “home” and belonging. Through these investigations, students will comprehend how the legacies of colonialism and the social constructions of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender are necessary points of analysis to understanding intersectional oppressions and narratives of resistance throughout the Caribbean and its diaspora.Writers may include Barbadian-American Paule Marshall, Dominican-American Julia Alvarez & Junot Díaz, Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaican-American Jonathan Escoffery. Visual and performance artists may include Myrlande Constant, Louisiane Saint Fleurant, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Scherezade García, Belkis Ramirez, Lucía Méndez Rivas, Tania Bruguera, Coc Fusco, Jose Bedia, and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.

Shakespeare’s Rivals (I) In this course we will read a selection of the best plays by Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights who helped define the “Golden Age” of English dramatic literature. Variously heroic and comic, eloquent and grandiloquent, witty and outrageous, dignified and obscene, and sometimes tragically bloody, these plays at their best are every bit as good as Shakespeare’s, and they give us a much better picture of the full theatrical and cultural contexts of Shakespeare’s plays than his alone can do. We will use all the tools of literary analysis to appreciate the problematics of these texts in terms of social politics, historical determinants, theatrical practice, and canon formation. Authors include Thomas Middleton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Elizabeth Carey, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, and Thomas Kyd.

The Experience of Tragedy For over two millennia tragedy has raised ethical questions and represented conflicts between the divine and the mortal, nature and culture, household and polity, individual and society. What is tragedy? What led to its production and what impact did it have, in ancient times? Why was it reborn in Shakespeare's time? How has tragedy shaped, and been shaped by, gender, class, religion, and nationality? We will address these questions and explore how tragedy continues to influence our literary expectations and experience, as well as our political, social, and familial environment. We will study texts by such authors as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, Aristotle, Seneca, Shakespeare, Webster, Chikamatsu, Goethe, Nietzsche, O'Neill, Beckett, and Soyinka.

Merchants of Venice In this class we will read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice from different perspectives, including those of race, religion, gender, staging, and form, engaging the play at the level of rhetorical analysis, textual history, character analysis, source analysis, stage and film history, and current performance.  We will study contemporaneous dramas resembling The Merchant of Venice (e.g., Three Ladies of London, Jew of Malta, Othello). Throughout, we will consider the multiple attitudes towards Jewishness and Judaism implicit in the play, its performance history and its literary and cultural influence. Finally, we will study the literary legacy of The Merchant of Venice, from the early modern period up to our own times. The class should also give us an opportunity to enhance our skills in rhetorical analysis, writing, speaking, and research.

Batter My Heart: Religious Poetry from the Psalms to Mary Oliver In this seminar we will look closely at some of the major religious poets (broadly defined to include a variety of traditions) in the course of English and American poetry from the 17th century writers John Donne and George Herbert to the contemporary American poet Mary Oliver. Major figures will look at include Donne, Herbert, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Charles Wright, and Mary Oliver.   There will be prose selections from various poets and spiritual writers, including Emerson.

Contemporary Literature In this course we will explore seminal works of the post-World War II literature written in English. In the course of our readings we will move through the cultural and social transformations beginning with the paranoia and alienation of the Cold War, and continuing with the Civil Rights era, the national crisis of Vietnam, the rise of multiculturalism and the culture wars in the 1980s, the wide ranging effects of the information revolution, the profits and perils of globalization, and the profound anxiety of the war on terror. Writers studied will include Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, William S. Burroughs, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Ana Castillo, and Art Spiegelman.

English Literature Survey: 1800-Present This course is designed as an introductory survey of English poetry, fiction, plays, and non-fiction prose from the late 18th century to the present. We will look at literary innovations and trends as we read a broad range of texts from the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary eras in their social, historical, and cultural contexts.

Nineteenth Century British Literature (II) The 19th century is the era of “peak novel,” for never before or since has the genre exhibited such confidence in its ability to tell the truth about both the teeming world and the private life.  But far from merely reflecting social reality, the novelists and poets of the period played an active part in constructing their readers' ideas about gender and sexuality, imperialism and colonialism, class, religion, and technology, insisting that literature be relevant and revelatory in a time of swift and sometimes frightening cultural and intellectual innovation.  Works to be covered will include novels by Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy, and the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti.

When Truth Meets Craft: Practicing the Art of Literary Journalism For a while, journalism has been trending away from "just the facts" to a more overtly crafted, subjective form. First-person journalism both reflects an awareness of the impossibility of objectivity and acknowledges the power of story to enliven data. When does the reporter's experience illuminate our reading of nonfiction, and when does it detract? Conversely, how does a writer infuse a personal narrative with relevant facts, signaling to the reader the contextual dance between the two? In this course students will learn and practice essential elements of powerful first-person journalism. Readings to inform discussions on craft, voice, stance and method include Ted Conover's, "The First Person in Journalism Must be Earned," as well as essays by Sy Montgomery, Drew Lanham, Kathryn Schulz, Hanif Abdurraqib, Leslie Jamison and David Foster Wallace.  Helen Whybrow has a master's in journalism from Harvard and studied literature at Amherst College. She has been an editor for W.W. Norton and at Orion Magazine, and is currently editor-at-large for Milkweed Editions. She's working on her third book..

Documentary Poetics In this course we will examine how poetry intervenes in the world. What kinds of history can poetry document, capture, or reflect? What can we learn from poetic documentation that we might not otherwise? We will read texts that incorporate archival materials and ephemera as well as works tracing limitations of the archive. Readings will include Charles Reznikoff, Dionne Brand, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Layli Long Soldier, Theresa Ha Kyung Cha, Caroline Bergvall, and M. Nourbese Philip, among others. Students will create their own poetic work throughout this class. Their fina

Kafka and his Influence This course is an intensive inquiry into the work and reach of Franz Kafka.  In addition to reading his novels, his stories, his letters and diaries, and his aphorisms, we will take up some of the voluminous and often highly imaginative writings on Kafka, with an eye towards fashioning some ideas, and some writings, of our own. (This course is a junior/senior seminar for ENGL majors; others by instructor approval).

Poetry Games: Experimental Poetics and Avant-Garde Aesthetics Not all poetry is, as William Wordsworth put it, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Some poetry challenges the very nature of language, art, and subjectivity through various self-decentering forms of writing. In this course, we will study a century’s worth of avant-garde experimental poetry, from the Dadaists and Surrealists to the Oulipo group, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and the conceptual and post-conceptual poetry movements of the 21st century, then create our own poetry using the same techniques and principles. The course is thus part survey and part writing workshop, with an emphasis on artistic process, linguistic theory, and the liberating power of constraints. Topics include: aleatory poetry, algorithmic poetry, blackout poetry, erasure poetry, concrete poetry, exquisite corpse, found poetry, homophonic translation, sound poetry, lipograms, S+7, etc.

The Modern Moment This course will explore the development of the modernist novel – and modernism in general-- in the first half of the 20th century. We will examine issues of formal experimentation, new conceptions of character, and an ever-dawning consciousness of the catastrophic as seen in personal, cultural, and political venues.  Readings will include Conrad, Joyce, Forster, Kafka, Woolf, Lawrence, Mansfield, Waugh, and others.

Literature and the Visual Arts In this course we will explore the intersections of literary texts with the visual arts. What happens when literature tries to capture in words a visual image? What happens when a picture tries to tell a story? We will examine literary texts which respond directly to specific paintings as well as texts which are more broadly visual in their impact on readers; we will also look at hybrid texts like the graphic novel which include both words and images. Course readings will include poems, short stories, short novels, illustrated books, and graphic novels. We will also look at a wide range of paintings, sculptures, and other visual artifacts.

Poetry and the Spiritual Tradition In this course we will examine the long and intimate connection between poetry and spirituality, looking especially at the influence of Christian thinking on such English and American poets as John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. The course will begin with a study of the King James Version of the Book of Psalms, which deeply affected later British and American poetry. We will also read early Taoist and Islamic poets, including Lao Tse and Rumi. The course will conclude with a look at the work of several contemporary poets: Charles Wright, Louis Glück, and Mary Oliver. While this course is primarily online, on-campus students will have opportunities to meet in person with fellow students and the professor in small groups and during office hours, if circumstances allow. Off-campus students will be accommodated with additional optional online opportunities to connect. 3 hrs. lct.

Contemporary African Environmental Works (Writing, Photography and Film) Concerned with social implications of environmental change, many contemporary African photographers, filmmakers, and authors are challenging the public with social documents that protest ecologically destructive forms of neocolonial development. These works actively complicate what it means to write about and look at those most affected by environmental injustices perpetrated by international and national actors. In this course we will read and view relevant works of African environmental literature and art. Whilst reading, we will ask ourselves the hard questions of what to do with our own complicity when facing the role that the global north plays in the causation of environmental degradation and human suffering./(REC)/

Reading, Slavery, and Abolition In this course we will study both black and white writers' psychological responses to, and their verbal onslaughts on, the "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery.  We will work chronologically and across genres to understand how and by whom the written word was deployed in pursuit of physical and mental freedom and racial and socioeconomic justice. As the course progresses, we will deepen our study of historical context drawing on the substantial resources of Middlebury's special collections, students will have the opportunity to engage in archival work if they wish.  Authors will include Emerson, Douglass, Jacobs, Thoreau, Stowe, Walker, and Garrison.

The Millennial Novel In describing the essential features of the “millennial novel,” author Brandon Taylor insists, “What matters are the vibes.” Historically, the millennial novel is produced by authors born between 1981 and 1996. Thematically, it is distinguished by how “more female, queer, and BIPOC characters get to confront the impending collapse of society.” In this course, we will study the new genre of the millennial novel by reading its exemplary texts such as Private Citizens, Luster, Such a Fun Age, and Severance. Along the way, we will supplement the novel form with other millennial aesthetics, such as the music of Taylor Swift, the cinema of Emerald Fennell, and television shows by Issa Rae and Michaela Coel. This is an advanced course, so it is strongly recommended that you have completed previous ENGL coursework. Sem.

American Literature and Culture: Origins-1830 A study of literary and other cultural forms in early America, including gravestones, architecture, furniture and visual art.  We will consider how writing and these other forms gave life to ideas about religion, diversity, civic obligation and individual rights that dominated not only colonial life but that continue to influence notions of "Americanness" into the present day. Required for all majors and minors.

England’s Ovid: Grabbing Back the Myth (I) (Pre-1800) In this course we will read Ovid’s Latin compendium of foundational mythical stories, the Metamorphoses, in two important early modern English translations: 1) the 16th-century version by Arthur Golding (the very one that Shakespeare read), which Ezra Pound called “the most beautiful book in the English language”; and 2) the 17th-century version by George Sandys, which contains allegorical commentaries and elaborate synoptic engravings. We will discuss these myths with an emphasis on gender politics and oral storytelling, and sometimes discuss how they reemerge in English literature. We will also examine a rare first edition of the Sandys edition (1623) which is owned by Middlebury College’s Special Collections, in addition to a modern annotated edition. The material for the course contains literary and graphic depictions of sexual violence, which will be critiqued from an unapologetically feminist perspective.

Dickinson and Bishop In this course we will study, in significant depth, the lives and work of poets Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. These authors are important and widely discussed; thus our topics will include a range of aesthetic, literary-historical, biographical, and political perspectives.  And we will make use of a range of archival materials—journal entries, letters, drafts of poems—both published and unpublished.  At the heart of our discussions, however, will be the poems these great writers produced. We will learn about ways to read and explicate poems, and about the use of archival materials in literary research and analysis.

The Romantic Revolution he generation of British poets and novelists known collectively as the Romantics decisively rebelled against earlier conceptions of what literature could speak about, how it could best describe a rapidly changing world, and who was fit to be its reader.  Arguably the first environmentalists, the Romantics also initiated our modern discussions of gender, class, race, and nationalism.  To encounter the Romantics is to witness intellectual courage taking up arms against habit, prejudice, and tyranny.  We will trace their genius and daring (and follow their personal attachments for, and rivalries with, each other) through the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the novels of Mary Shelley and Emily Brönte.

The American Modernists (AL)  American writers at the turn of the 20th century faced social, intellectual, and technological change on an unprecedented scale.  Individually and collectively they worked to answer William Carlos Williams’s pressing question: “How can I be a mirror to this modernity?” In this course we will read, discuss, and write about poetry by writers such as Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens; and prose by Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, and others.

Documenting the Migrant Journey In this course we will interrogate how migrants and immigration has been represented in the media, including the news, social media, books and film. As it will be part of the Mellon Migration program, we will invite Vermont-based stakeholders to class to talk about their experience, including Migrant Justice activists, local employers, immigration lawyers and others. This will provide the foundation necessary to conceive how we will portray the migrant experience in Vermont. Ultimately,students will produce their own multi-part audio documentary. To do this, they will learn interviewing skills, how to structure a narrative, write and edit a script, and use digital editing and sound design software. Instructor Approval  This course is part of the Axinn Center for the Humanities’ Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Initiative.

The Structure of Poetry  This course is a workshop for beginning students in the field of creative writing. Students will read a selection of poems each week and write their own poems, producing a portfolio of their work at the end of the term. There will be an emphasis on revision. Students will be introduced to a range of forms as well, including prose poems, epistles, the tanka, the long poem, and the sonnet.

Lost and Found in Translation In this course we will explore the philosophical and linguistic questions raised by translingual discourse through a survey of the most important theoretical writings on translation as we compare multiple translations of the same originals, including some recent experimental writing as well as selections from such classics as the Psalms, the Illiad, the Tao Te Ching, Catullus, Li Bo, Rumi, Clément Marot, Eugene Onegin, and the One Thousand and One Nights. We will discuss such questions as: How does language shape thought? How does culture shape language? Is there anything unique about translating sacred texts, poetry, dead languages, or non-alphabetic languages?

Asian American Pop! From boba to K-pop, Asian diasporic culture is undeniably the shared lexicon of a global mainstream. In this course, we will engage with recent literary, televisual, and cinematic works to discern what they express about Asian American history, identity, and cultural politics. What is the difference between appropriation and authenticity? What can “popular” representations tell us about “serious” topics such as capitalism, citizenship, and empire? How does Asian American popular culture enact collective desires for belonging and memory? In particular, we will attend to the gendered and sexual circuits of cultural formation, with units on Asian American girlhood and queer diasporas. Texts include: Flower Drum Song, Crazy Rich Asians, and Master of None. Authors may include: Ocean Vuong and Lysley Tenorio.

Shakespeare on Tyranny Shakespeare wrote a great deal about tyrants and tyranny throughout his career, from the early comedies and history plays to the great tragedies and late romances. Characters whose abuse of power for personal gain wreaks havoc and ultimately leads to their own demise are illustrative and instructive today. In this class we will read and discuss a selection of Shakespeare plays, including Richard III, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Tempest, as well as a selection of historical materials on politics and statecraft. These readings will be supplemented by two modern scholarly books, Tyrant, by the literature scholar Stephen Greenblatt, and On Tyranny, by historian Timothy Snyder. Our main goals will be to hone our critical inquiry skills by close-reading and intensive discussion as well as to strengthen our research and writing skills. Prerequisite: at least one ENGL class. Pre-1800 tag.

Roberto Lint Sagarena

Jerry Philogene

Allison Cardon

Helen Whybrow

Deb Evans

Spring Ulmer

Timothy Billings

Marion Wells

William Nash

Douglas Richards

Benjamin Graves

Ellery Foutch

Ryan Sheldon

Daniel Brayton

Claudia Cooper

Cates Baldridge

Jennifer Wang

Janice Obuchowski

Sue Halpern

Callie Kimball

Jay Parini

Matthew Walker

Antonia Losano

Michael Newbury

Brett Millier

Yumna Siddiqi

Claire Hodgdon

Tim Spears

James Berg

Robert Cohen

Karin Gottshall

Read 425 reviews for English courses at Middlebury College. Find the best English professors and courses.  Discover your new major today!

Professor Cohen is a great professor and look very deep into the readings. Discussion is very relaxing and free. We read about 3 to 4 papers before each class and they are all interesting. In this class, I really experienced the joy of reading and writing. 

Marion Wells is a great professor. I really appreciated her teaching style, and it is clear she is very passionate about the material. This is a great class to take to satisfy the pre-1800 req for the English major. The material is actually interesting and is not Shakespeare based. Wells is an easy grader and really wants her students to succeed.

This class gave me a fresh and eye-opening look at British literature beyond the traditional canon, and the discussions on identity, migration, and empire made the readings feel relevant today. Professor graves was welcoming and clear, explaining historical context well and encouraging us to share different perspectives.