Reading Literature This course seeks to develop skills for the close reading of literature through discussion of and writing about selected poems, plays, and short stories from a wide range of eras and nations. A basic vocabulary of literary terms and an introductory palette of critical methods will also be covered; the course's ultimate goal will be to enable students to attain the literary-critical sensibility vital to further course work in the major. At the instructor's discretion, the texts employed in this class may share a particular thematic concern or historical kinship.”

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.

Animals in Literature and Culture Animals, wrote anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, are good to think with. They are good to write with as well; almost all works of literature include animals, their importance varying from the merely peripheral to the absolutely central.  Among other narrative functions, animals serve as essential metaphors for understanding the human animal. In this course we will read a wide variety of fiction, poetry, children's literature, philosophy, science, history, and cultural theory from Ancient Greek sources (in translation) to the present. We will consider theoretical, ethical, religious, psychological, linguistic, and political issues pertaining to animals and their representation in literary texts. lect./disc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

18th-Century Literature:The Commerce of the World (Pre-1800) British society, politics, and culture shifted dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century in response to the ascendance of an empowered mercantile bourgeoisie, an expanding empire, and the intensification of its investments in the transatlantic slave trade. In this course we will explore how writers and thinkers grappled with these economic, social, and political transformations at the levels of narrative, form, and genre by reading novels, plays, poems, and essays by Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Susanna Centlivre, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, and others.

Global English in the New Media Environment Far from spelling the end of literature, the rise of new technologies of communication has continually energized Anglophone literary production. Reading literature through the lens of media theory (Stuart Hall, Friedrich Kittler, Gilles Deleuze, Rey Chow) , students in this course will explore how the global circulation of information, media, and images has transformed the literary imagination. While we will sample canonical modernist engagements with earlier transformations in print and visual culture, our main goal will be to bridge the gap between media studies and Anglophone postcolonial literature throughout the world. Readings will be selected from Benyamin, Jasmine Days; Chimamanda Ngozie Adihchie, Americanah; NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names; Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest; Zadie Smith, Swing Time; David Mitchell, Ghostwritten; and the poems of Jean Binta Breeze and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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).

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.

American Psycho: Disease, Doctors, and Discontents (Pre-1900 AL) 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.

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)

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.

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.

Reconstructing Literature: Realism, Regionalism, and the American scene, 1870-1919  American literature evolved in the late 1800s as a new generation of writers portrayed a rapidly changing culture, transformed by urbanization, industrial growth, immigration, class tensions, new roles for women, shifting race relations, and demographic transformations that seemed to split the nation into city and country. While realism was an effort to describe “life as it is” and regionalism focused on the distinctive features of specific places, both modes of representation stemmed from historical forces that were reshaping the nation. Works to be covered may include fiction by William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Theodore Dreiser.

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.

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.

Hemingway's Outsized Life In this class, we will explore the work of Ernest Hemingway, a writer whose literary style and heroic self-construction remain a source of fascination and controversy. Through a mostly chronological reading of his writings, we will examine Hemingway’s emergence as a pioneering modernist and member of the 1920s “lost generation,” his portrayal of war and violence, and his representations of gender, race, and “American-ness.” Assigned texts will include short stories, novels, and autobiographical works, as well as critical studies (including Ken Burns’ recent documentary film) that consider the impact of Hemingway’s life and writing on broader US cultural history.

Reading Race in the 21st Century 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. (While ENAM0115 Introduction to Multi-Ethnic American Literature is not a prerequisite, it is encouraged.) 3hrs. sem.

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.

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

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. Please note that, if circumstances require, this course may occasionally be taught remotely.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Weather permitting, some meetings may be held outside in person.

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.

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) (Diversity)

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.  (

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Reading Race in the 21st Century This course surveys multi-ethnic American literature by investigating processes of racial formation through literary representations produced in the 21st-century. We will study 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? How has the 21st century yielded new or alternate ways of telling familiar stories? What are the different forms and genres that BIPOC authors turn to in order to articulate social concerns? 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, or Jhumpa Lahiri. (While ENAM0115 Introduction to Multi-Ethnic American Literature is not a prerequisite, it is encouraged.) 3hrs. sem.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Albert Baldridge

Allison Cardon

Antonia Losano

Benjamin Graves

Brett Millier

Claudia Cooper

Daniel Brayton

Deborah Evans

Douglas Richards

Ellery Foutch

James Berg

Janice Obuchowski

Jay Parini

Jennifer Wang

Marion Wells

Michael Newbury

Robert Cohen

Roberto Lint Sagarena

Ryan Sheldon

Spring Ulmer

Timothy Billings

Timothy Spears

William Nash

Yumna Siddiqi

Marion Wells is an expert in what she does. This was my introductory class to GSFS and I could not recommend her more, especially for the pre-1800s requirement for English majors. Her lectures are always incredibly engaging and inform the readings. The readings she picks out are also incredibly fun in and of themselves. She is also very accommodating to the needs and questions of her students. Discussions are always fun!

I took this class as I was hoping to be able to write more of my own poetry, but was only able to do two readings of a poem. The structure of the class was strange and everybody in the class was not engaged. Professor Berg would require each student to do two readings of a poem and it did not really provide space for students to actually develop a connection with him.

I had the displeasure of having this course as a distribution requirement. It was such a sour, unpleasant, miserable experience that I dropped the course. I tried to give it a fair shot (Late-drop), but her disregard for student well-being, endless (disproportionate) readings, and unfair grading/attendance policies created an uncomfortable, draining, miserable learning environment. If you can avoid it, PLEASE don't take this course.