ENGL-201 Introduction to Creative Writing
This course offers an introduction to the composition of multiple genres and modes of creative writing, which may include poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid forms, graphic novels, and digital texts. Students will learn strategies for generating ideas, drafting, giving and receiving feedback, revising creative work, and building literary community.
ENGL-204 Poetry Writing
In this introductory course, students will read widely in contemporary poetry. Through prompts and project-based inquiry, both within the workshop and in take-home assignments, students will have the opportunity to produce and share writing based on the conceptual frameworks explored in the class.
ENGL-205 Playwriting
This course offers practice in the fundamentals of dramatic structure and technique. Weekly reading assignments will examine the unique nature of writing for the theatre, nuts and bolts of format, tools of the craft, and the playwright's process from formulating a dramatic idea to rewriting. Weekly writing assignments will include scene work, adaptation, and journaling. The course will culminate in a significant writing project. Each class meeting will incorporate reading student work aloud with feedback from the instructor and the class. Students will listen, critique, and develop the vocabulary to discuss plays, structure, story, and content.
ENGL-219 Topics in Creative Writing
ENGL-219AT Topics in Creative Writing: 'Writing Animal Tales'
What do writings about animals reveal about their lives? How do human beings engage with mammals, fish, reptiles, and birds as food, competitors, and companions? We will explore these questions as we read works focusing on the real and imagined lives of animals from ancient fables through twenty-first-century novels, essays, and hybrid-genre works. Reading discussions will be followed by writing experiments designed to spark original thinking and develop facility with writing. You will gain insight into the fine and ferocious literature concerning the great and small beasts, writing creative and analytical pieces toward a final portfolio. Some classes will involve field trips to observe animals.
ENGL-219BC Topics in Creative Writing: 'Building Literary Community'
Writing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of literature. Together, we will study and participate in various literary communities. We will investigate literary ecosystems, looking at how writing is published, circulated, and rewarded; as well as at labor conditions, ongoing inequities, and possibilities for disruption. Our class will serve as an incubator for new and existing student literary production. Students will work individually and collaboratively on projects such as writing reviews, producing broadsides or chapbooks, hosting readings, advocacy, and more. Visitors may include agents, book or journal editors, reviewers, designers, booksellers, and organizers.
ENGL-219BH Topics in Creative Writing: 'Beyond the Hero's Journey: On Indigenous Forms and Reimaginings'
In this class, we will read, discuss, and write into narrative shapes outside Freytag's Pyramid or the Western "hero's journey" with a particular emphasis on the works of Indigenous, historically marginalized, and queer writers. We will look to the traditions, modalities, political movements and artifacts of the natural world that continue to influence contemporary, decolonial, and cross-genre storytelling. Sample authors include: Elissa Washuta, No'u Revilla, Layli Long Soldier, Xavier Navarro Aquino, Kristiana Kahaukawila, Tommy Orange, and others. Throughout the semester, writers will be encouraged to interrogate the objects, animals, climates, and structural systems that inform their own lives. All genres welcome!
ENGL-219CH Topics in Creative Writing: 'Climate Changes Everything: Telling Stories at the End of the World As We Know It'
In this moment of climate emergency, how and why do we make meaning? What possibilities might various textual practices offer for engaging with, and positioning ourselves in relationship to, the unfathomable? If we are telling stories in the face of a radically uncertain future, who is our audience? Together, we will find ways of telling stories that help us relate to this moment, and, crucially, to each other. This is a creative writing course. Expect to encounter and create texts in many possible forms, including climate fiction, agitprop, documentary poetry, lyric essay, interactive narrative, and more.
ENGL-219FM Topics in Creative Writing: 'Four Memoirs: Writing Through Radical Self-Inquiry'
In this class, we will read four full-length memoirs, each representing radically different structures and styles. Students will write four short memoirs mirroring the forms of these books. These "memoirs" will run between 2,000-2,500 words, and they will represent the pillars of the final grade. Memoir projects will receive instructor feedback, and will also be shared in smaller "care groups" to offer and receive feedback. Mary Oliver once wrote that "attention is the beginning of devotion." Together, we will nurture our attention to the world, and, therefore, devote ourselves to bettering it. We will nurture our sensitivities, our wonder, our awe, and identify not only who we are through rigorous self-inquiry, but what conversations we are participating in when we write, what literary traditions we perpetuate, and, perhaps most importantly, what traditions we break. Sample texts (full-length and excerpted) include Carmen Maria Machado, Alexander Chee, Barry Jenkins, Jaquira Díaz, Michelle Zauner, Saeed Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Cyrus Simonoff, Yuko Tsushima, and others.
ENGL-219MA Topics in Creative Writing: 'Everything is Political: Making Art in an Ongoing Catastrophe'
In our current polycrisis -- climate catastrophe, genocide, the rise of fascism, white supremacy --how and why do artists make meaning? What possibilities might various textual practices offer for engaging with, and positioning ourselves in relationship to, the unfathomable? When we tell stories in the face of a radically uncertain future, who is our audience? With collaboration as our orientation, we will find ways of telling stories that help us relate to this moment, and, crucially, to each other. This is a creative writing course. Expect to encounter and create texts in many possible forms, including agitprop, climate fiction, documentary poetry, interactive narrative, lyric essay, and more.
ENGL-219MT Topics in Creative Writing: 'Retelling Myth and Fairy Tale'
This course explores contemporary fiction that retells old myths and fairy tales to create new writing. We will read short stories and novels from a diversity of cultures that adapt received texts to generate new works, which often implicitly question the original tales' messages, providing feminist, racial, and/or queer correctives. Students will read these retellings as creative writers, gleaning techniques and approaches to write their own contemporary retellings. Everyone will give and receive critique in small groups and workshops throughout the course and revise writing for the final project.
ENGL-219QT Topics in Creative Writing: 'Queer and Trans Writing'
What do we mean when we say "queer writing" or "trans writing"? Are we talking about creative writing by queer and/or trans authors? Writing about queer or trans practices, identities, experience? Writing that subverts conventional forms? All of the above? In this course, we will engage these questions not theoretically but through praxis. We will read fiction, poetry, comics, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. Expect to encounter work that challenges you in terms of form and content. Some writers we may read include Ryka Aoki, James Baldwin, Tom Cho, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Elisha Lim, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Eileen Myles, and David Wojnarowicz.
ENGL-219WK Topics in Creative Writing: 'Who Killed the World?: Fiction on Society and the Environment'
In this creative writing course, we investigate contemporary fictional depictions of society and the environment, from George Miller's Furiosa (2024), ad campaigns like Chobani's "Dear Alice," and written work from Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer, Charlie Jane Anders, and more. Together and through readings, we define what "climate fiction" is, and what it can do to make meaning in a rapidly changing world.
ENGL-265 Children's and Young Adult Literature
ENGL-304 Advanced Poetry Writing
In this workshop students will have the opportunity to generate new poems, with an eye to revision, critical thinking, and longer manuscript projects. We will read and discuss work by contemporary poets and will occasionally incorporate other media -- visual art, music, performance, film, work that defies genre -- to learn about what we might want to do with language and poetry. Together, we will work to build a community through our reading and our work.
ENGL-306 Advanced Projects in Creative Writing
This semester-long course is designed for students already at work on a longer project (a novel or novella, a short story collection, a collection of poems, longform creative nonfiction, a graphic novel, or a hybrid form). Students will build on the skills and insights gained in previous creative writing courses to draft, workshop, and revise a full-length creative manuscript. Workshop and revision will comprise much of our time, along with readings on craft by authors such as Lynda Barry, Italo Calvino, and Samuel R. Delany. Students will also have an opportunity to meet literary publishing professionals.
ENGL-361 Advanced Creative Writing Topics
ENGL-361AR Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Creative Writing from the Archives'
In this creative writing course, we will draw on Mount Holyoke College's archives of the Glascock Poetry Contest, which celebrated its 100th year in 2023. Reading the writings of past contestants and judges including Muriel Rukeyser, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Nelson, Marilyn Chin, and Maggie Nelson, we will gain insights into the evolution of American poetry over the last century and investigate how the evaluation of poems has also changed. We will view and listen to archival materials such as photographs, judges' correspondence, and audiotapes to expand our inquiry and spur new creative writing in any genre inspired by these texts and unique holdings.
ENGL-361CP Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'On the Art of Character, and the Character Profile'
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough," Flaubert once wrote, and to this we might add anyone-as every individual holds a universe of complexity and context. In this class, we will read and discuss texts across genres closely following a single character or individual; writers will take on a semester-long challenge interviewing and profiling people they know, as well as individuals they don't know, investigating and building a portfolio of work about and around them. We will focus on technique and craft: How does one conduct an interview? How does one create a compelling, nuanced profile? How do we identify the extraordinary in the familiar? And we will focus on ethics: Is this story mine to tell? What are my biases as a writer? Whose gaze is present on the page and in media? The art of the profile has political currency, the possibility to shift collective imagination and attention. Mary Oliver wrote, "Attention is the beginning of devotion," and our attention as listeners, as witnesses, is more urgent than ever. All genres welcome.
ENGL-361CV Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Canny Valley: Writing from Art and Archives'
This multi-genre creative writing course focuses on generating writing inspired by the area's art and archives. The class will visit collections including Sylvia Plath's archives at Smith, the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, and Mount Holyoke College's own art museum and archives. Students will learn how to work with archival materials including original manuscripts, correspondence, recordings, and photos and will create writing in any genre spurred by the art and archives they interact with. Readings will include writings on ekphrasis or writing that responds to visual art. The class will also meet with curators and archivists to discuss aspects of working in these fields.
ENGL-361KA Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Korean American Feminist Poetry'
Poetry by Korean American feminist writers has burgeoned in the 21st century with new generations of poets contributing to life of American letters. Reading works by Theresa Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Don Mee Choi, Mary-Kim Arnold, and others, we will discuss how each writer evokes racial and ethnic identity and intersections with gender and other political concerns, as well as the choices each poet makes regarding form and style. Students will gain insight into a great diversity of approaches to writing poetry and will create a portfolio of their own poems based on our discussions. Most classes will involve group critique of writing; several will involve visits with our authors. All are welcome.
ENGL-361LP Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Writing as Performance: Latinx and Latin American Poetry and Narrative'
This creative writing course turns to poetry and narrative that comes alive off the page. Reading work by Raquel Gutiérrez, Clarice Lispector, Jenni(f)fer Tamayo, Ricardo Bracho, and tatiana nascimento, among others, students will write and perform across genres while in dialogue with voices from across the Americas. To place ourselves in our bodies as well as our words, we will explore not just the innovative aesthetics taken up by writers of Latin American descent but also the politics activated in forms as varied as the butch memoir, the sissy play, the travel diary, and the sound poem. Central to our experiments will be the relationship between writing and other artistic mediums as we navigate topics such as race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, class, disability, ecology, and spirituality.
ENGL-361SW Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Screenwriting'
The screenplay is a unique and ephemeral form that exists as a blueprint for something else: a finished film. How do you convey on the page a story that will take shape within an audio-visual medium? The screenwriter must have an understanding of both the language of narrative film as well as the general shape and mechanics of film stories. This advanced course will cover dialogue, characterization, plot, story arc, genre, and cinematic structure. We will analyze scenes from fictional narrative films -- both short and feature length -- and read the scripts that accompany these films. By the end of this course, each student will have written two original short films. In workshop style, the class will serve as practice audience for table readings of drafts and writing exercises.
ENGL-361TR Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Introduction to Literary Translation'
This creative writing course explores literary translation as a transformative and political practice. Throughout short writing experiments, collaborations, workshops, and a final project, we will work with a range of genres and forms in order to grasp the stakes and possibilities of translation across cultures, mediums, historical epochs, and literary styles. Reading texts by Katrina Dodson, John Keene, Don Mee Choi, and Alejandro Zambra, among others, we will build an expansive vocabulary for discussing our translation projects while keeping in mind questions of context and power. Basic skills in any second language are required.
ENGL-211 Shakespeare
A study of some of Shakespeare's plays emphasizing the poetic and dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and close, careful reading of the language. Eight or nine plays.
ENGL-213 The Literature of the Later Middle Ages
This course will examine a variety of English works and genres written in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Our concentration will be principally on the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Langland, Margery Kempe, and Lydgate. Most of our readings are in Middle English.
ENGL-214 Topics in Medieval Studies
ENGL-214BE Topics in Medieval Studies: 'Beowulf, Gawain, Ishiguro: Medieval Mythmaking and the Idea of Britain'
This course explores early-medieval English literature that focuses on migration, cultural and religious inter-mixing, and histories of invasion and conquest. We'll read early-English literature to study its frameworks of historiography and its imperial interests, the mythologies behind early-English identities, the culture of English learning, and the afterlives of invasion. Course readings will include modern English translations of Beowulf, the works of Gildas and Bede, and selections from post-Conquest history and Arthuriana. With the semester's worth of knowledge about early-English history and literary production, we'll spend the final weeks of the course reading Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant.
ENGL-214CT Topics in Medieval Studies: 'The Canterbury Tales'
Amidst the social and political upheavals of the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his well-known work, The Canterbury Tales. This advanced 200-level course will explore Chaucer's social satire, the innovative characterization of his motley pilgrims, and the array of contemporary interpretive approaches this work invites. Guided by literary analysis, our discussions will deepen our understanding of medieval society; its religious and political institutions; its attitudes toward class, gender, and race; its questions about ethical responsibility and individual will; and the functions and impacts of language. Readings will be in the original Middle English.
ENGL-214DM Topics in Medieval Studies: 'Dante's Inferno Between Myth and History'
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is one of world literature's foundational works. In his 700 years old masterpiece, Dante poses and confronts universal questions that are still at the core of our daily existence: God, love, ethics, gender relationships, politics, social harmony, literature, the afterlife, and the relations between human and nonhuman forms of life. In this course, we will read, analyze, discuss, and enjoy Dante's great poem by focusing on the first of its three parts, the Inferno. In particular, we will be covering Dante's take on mythology and history.
ENGL-214LR Topics in Medieval Studies: 'Love and Reason in Medieval Romance'
Arthurian legend conjures enduring stereotypes of chivalry and romantic love, but how do we go about situating medieval romance in literary history? Where does it come from, why was it written, who read it, and how did it change over time? In this course, students will learn about romance's historical and social contexts, its form, tropes, and imagery. We will think about romance's contemplation of justice, loyalty, subjectivity, love, and shame, especially as this body of literature grapples with the conflicts that arise between the mortal and divine. Course readings will include works by Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Spenser. We will read in Middle English where possible.
ENGL-217 Topics in English
ENGL-217GA Topics in English: 'Global Anglophone Literature: Who Writes the World?'
This course introduces the literature of the former British colonies (South Asia, Anglophone Africa, Caribbean, and Canada). Some topics under consideration are colonialism and society, postcolonial disillusionment, neoliberalism, human rights storytelling, and ecocriticism. Readings include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta, Maps by Nuruddin Farah, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, The Cry of Winnie Mandela by Njabulo Ndebele, and Animal's People by Indra Sinha.
ENGL-217GE Topics in English: 'Global English: Its Written and Spoken Forms'
What is the relationship between language and social and political power? This course is an interdisciplinary study of the global role of the English language. Migration, education, and identity are major themes of the course, and we look at how linguists, policy-makers, and individuals grapple with these complex topics. This course also focuses on students' development of their written and spoken communication skills and is open to students in all disciplines. Our approach to writing and speaking may be particularly effective for students who do not identify as native speakers of English.
ENGL-217HA Topics in English: 'Hitchcock and After'
This course will examine the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the afterlife of Hitchcock in contemporary U.S. culture. We will analyze Hitchcock films in a variety of interpretive frames, including feminist and queer theories, and in shifting historical contexts including the Cold War. We will also devote substantial attention to the legacy of Hitchcock in remakes, imitations, and parodies. Hitchcock films may include The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Marnie, North by Northwest, Psycho, Rear Window, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, and Vertigo.
ENGL-217LX Topics in English: 'Latinx Literature in the U.S. and Beyond'
This course offers an introduction to 20th- and 21st-century Latinx literature and cultural production ranging from poetry, plays, fiction, and nonfiction to film, murals, installations, and performance art. While centering US Latinx writers and their historical contexts, we will also consider visual media and the work of authors from Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic who illuminate and challenge the idea of latinidad. Topics to be explored include U.S. imperialism, migration, revolutionary social movements, gender and queer sexualities, religion and spirituality, racial and class formations, and aesthetic traditions such as rasquachismo and ritual performance. Authors and artists may include Gloria Anzaldúa, Pedro Pietri, Adão Ventura, the Young Lords, Ana Mendieta, Third World Gay Revolution, and Virginia Grise.
ENGL-217SA Topics in English: 'South African Literature: Postapartheid and Beyond'
This course is a survey of postapartheid South African literature. In the aftermath of apartheid post-1994, South African literature has wrestled with ideas about what kind of future is livable and possible. Labeling itself as the "Rainbow Nation," South African politicians, activists, and artists (literary, visual, musical) have sought to create a democratic vision of South Africa that celebrates differences of race, culture, gender, and sexual orientation. Using 1994 as our moment of departure, this course will examine the "future" of South Africa as told through postapartheid South African fiction. Acknowledging that there are many ways to imagine the future, this course examines how portrayals of race, of gender and sexuality, and of the nation serve to construct and disrupt ideas about the future.
ENGL-217TJ Topics in English: 'Translation Theory and Practice in Jewish Literature'
This course examines translation as a mode of cultural transmission, creativity, and theoretical inquiry for Jewish literature and thought. Topics include: translation as a means of mediating access to the sacred; women's roles as readers and creators of translations; enduring debates about what may be "lost" in translation; and whether translation into "Global English" helps or hurts the survival of literatures in Yiddish, Ladino, and other minoritized languages. Students put theory into practice by reading translations of Jewish literature critically and comparatively and by producing their own translations.
ENGL-217TR Topics in English: 'Transgender Literature'
Transgender literature has had a significant impact on how we talk about transness (and gender) and the kinds of trans stories we are able to tell. Although trans identities may find expression in texts as early as Metamorphoses (Ovid), this course will look at literature from the 20th and 21st centuries. Considering a wide range of genres -- novels, poetry, short stories, memoir, and young adult literature -- we will think about how writers talk about their bodies, their transitions, and their histories. Drawing upon fields such as history, medicine, and social science, this course will look at trans literature as both a product of these histories and as a powerful tool for critical liberation.
ENGL-217WP Topics in English: 'Contemporary Women Playwrights'
While women have written plays since the seventeenth century, the twentieth and twenty-first century has witnessed a boom in women playwrights. This course will familiarize students with some of the major female playwrights of our era, such as Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Nzotke Shange, as well as newer playwrights (Amy Hertzog, Katori Hall, and Young Jean-Lee). Assignments include both practice-oriented (such as developing a screen treatment or production proposal for one of the plays) and research-oriented (such as conducting in-depth research for a grant proposal), three short analytical papers, a script analysis, and in-class presentations.
ENGL-226 Black Before the Law
This course will interrogate the law through its confrontations with racial blackness. Considering a range of literary, historical, and cultural material -- the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision; the series How to Get Away with Murder; the overturn of Roe v. Wade -- we will ask: from what sources does the law derive its authority, and what enables its authority to persist? Attuning to the strategic positioning of black people as often outside of the law's protection, while also central to its operation, we will track the law's inbuilt contradictions. Some texts will include Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property," "The Moynihan Report," and W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America.
ENGL-232 Rovers, Cuckqueens, and Country Wives of All Kinds: The Queer Eighteenth Century
With the rise of the two-sex model, the eighteenth century might be seen to be a bastion of heteronormativity leading directly to Victorian cis-gender binary roles of angel in the house and the bourgeois patriarch. Yet, beginning with the Restoration's reinvention of ribald theater, this period was host to a radical array of experimentation in gender and sexuality, alongside intense play with genre (e.g., the invention of the novel). We will explore queerness in all its forms alongside consideration of how to write queer literary histories.
ENGL-233 Nonbinary Romanticism: Genders, Sexes, and Beings in the Age of Revolution
With the onslaught of American, French, Haitian, and South American revolts and revolutions, the Atlantic world, much of Europe, and its colonial/industrial empire were thrown into a period of refiguring the concept of the raced, national, and gendered subject. This course considers what new forms of gender, sex, sexuality, and being were created, practiced, or thought, however momentarily, in this tumultuous age. Specific attention is given to conceptions of nonbinary being (of all varieties). Authors may include E. Darwin, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Lister, M. Shelley, Byron, Jacobs.
ENGL-240 Early American Narratives and Counternarratives
This course frames early American literary and cultural history as a series of hegemonic narratives and counternarratives. Starting with the violence of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, this course considers how US literary and national traditions have always been contested by oppressed and dispossessed peoples, who have offered alternatives to predominant American mythologies such as individualism and freedom. We will also track how African American antislavery writers established rhetorical and literary forms in opposition to slavery that influenced the protest and reform ethos of the first half of the nineteenth century. By focusing on the development of various literary forms such as the essay, oratory, the slave narrative, and poetry, this course will consider how Black writers, Indigenous figures, women, and social reform movements reconsidered questions surrounding race, gender, and class from sixteenth-century contact and colonization up until the end of the Civil War.
ENGL-243 American Gothic
An examination of the gothic -- a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity -- in U.S. literature and visual culture. Topics include race, slavery, and the gothic; gender, sexuality, and the gothic; regional gothic; the uncanny; cinematic and pictorial gothic; pandemic gothic. Authors, artists, and filmmakers may include Dunbar, Elmer, Faulkner, Gilman, Hitchcock, Jackson, Kubrick, LaValle, Lovecraft, McCullers, Morrison, O'Connor, Parks, Peele, Poe, Polanski, Romero, and Wood.
ENGL-244 Self, World, Other: Reading the Global Anglophone
This course will introduce you to the study of literature in English across connected pasts and global circulations. We will focus on works from the former British Empire-mainly Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean-though our inquiry extends to the shared and ongoing conditions of colonialism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through novels, poetry, and cinema, we will explore questions of citizenship and exile, racialization and identity, language and politics, and collective life under globalized capitalism. We will ask: what constitutes the world of literature? Who inhabits its centers and margins? We will explore works by Walcott, Roy, Ngugi, Ghosh, Dangaremba, and Coetzee, amongst others.
ENGL-246 The Graphic Novel
Graphic narratives have come to occupy a significant (if contentious) place in literary discourse. From its origins in underground comics culture to the recognition of global awards, the graphic form continues to transform and surprise. In this course, we will study several graphic narratives together with film, media theory, and criticism. With special attention to its most popular incarnation -- the autobiographical novel -- we will ask: What does graphic representation make possible for literature? How do images work with (or against) text? What kinds of political and aesthetic expression does the graphic novel afford? Works by Sacco, Bechdel, Satrapi, Nakazawa, Sajad, amongst others.
ENGL-254 Topics in African American Literature
ENGL-254EN Topics in African American Literature: 'The Theory of the Early African American Novel'
This course examines the beginning of the African American novelistic tradition in the nineteenth century alongside a range of literary and cultural theory drawn from Marxism, cultural studies, and novel theory to consider how early African American writers produced strange, unique, and new experimental forms of literature that both responded to the political economy of racial capitalism while also redefining literary history. We will explore how the novel-a fictional form -- imagines abolitionist futures, while also tracking the role it played within nineteenth -- century abolitionist politics. Writers may include Hannah Crafts, William Wells Brown, Harriet Wilson, Stuart Hall, and Georg Lukacs.
ENGL-254TR Topics in African American Literature: 'Tragicomedy in Black: Humor and Horror in Black Critical Expression'
The course examines horror and comedy as genre conventions that become strained and distorted when bent to the demands of black critical expression. This course will center on themes of life and death as they are framed in black film and literature through idioms of the absurd and the ghastly. We will encounter film and writing by Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Toni Morrison, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Bill Gunn, and Donald Glover. Students will learn how to close-read our media-saturated environment, thinking through the ways in which representation functions to condition our perception of enjoyment and terror.
ENGL-255 Writing the Black Self
This course explores the idea of "the self" and "the subject" by reading autobiographical and memoir writing by Black authors. Through an engagement with some criticism on the role of slavery in staffing the sense of self-possession accorded to the individual subject, we will think together about how autobiographical forms of writing function in the tradition of black thought and letters. From slave narratives, to the essays of the Harlem Renaissance, to the preponderance of Black Power-era memoirs, we will consider whether these texts accomplish a Black self in writing, and if indeed that is their ambition.
ENGL-257 Survey of African American Literature
This course surveys Black literary production with special attention to the idea of genre as a choice of form made by Black writers from the antebellum era through the present to communicate critique, effect political change, and render new worlds. Structured around debates about the genre status of Black writing, this course introduces students to slave era texts by Harriet E. Wilson, David Walker, and Phillis Wheatley; twentieth-century works by Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Amos Tutuola, Chester Himes, Bill Gunn, James Baldwin, and Toni Cade Bambara; and contemporary work by Saidiya Hartman, Octavia Butler, Jeremy O. Harris, and Rita Dove. Reading, writing, and critical viewership will be central to the course.
ENGL-274 Introduction to Asian American Literature
This course introduces students to Asian American literature, considering its historical origins and evolution. Throughout the course we explore questions of identity, immigration and citizenship, generational conflict, war and migration, and mixed and cross-racial politics. Readings of primary texts will be supplemented by historical and critical source materials. Authors may include Nina Revoyr, Ruth Ozeki, Nam Le, Chang-rae Lee, Aimee Phan, Susan Choi, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
ENGL-279 Sherlock Holmes and Interpretation
This course will explore the Sherlock Holmes stories and their various afterlives as a case study to explore the problematics of interpretation, especially literary interpretation. Some of the questions raised will concern evidence, inductive and deductive thought, applying theoretical paradigms, historical and material contexts, character and narrative, form and genre, popular culture, ideology, and the aesthetic.
ENGL-280 Literary and Cultural Theory
How and why do we read literature and cultural expression? What kinds of knowledge can different cultural media offer us about ourselves and the world? This introduction to literary and cultural theory will survey later twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, including theorists asking questions about labor, power, ideology, subjectivity, identity, race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, empire, colonialism, language's figurality, affect, technology, and the nonhuman. We will think about these theories as their own forms of cultural expression and as methodologies that can help us discuss and make meaning of textual, visual, and digital culture.
ENGL-281 Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory
Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory courses aim to take several fields of literary and cultural theory and focus reading and discussion on their singular and intertwined projects.
ENGL-281AD Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: 'Queer and Disability Mindbodies, Affects, and Times'
This course will read queer and disability theory both as separate histories and as interlaced projects that resist normative life chronologies, genders, sexualities, productivities, and bodily shapes. Particular attention will be given to questions of embodiment, race, political activism, and relationality. This last category -- how we relate to ourselves and to others -- will be explored through queer and disability theory's understanding of neurodivergent mindbodies and their nonconforming sorts of feelings and times. How might we think about, for example, "feeling backwards" or "flexible time" as both scholarly ideas and experiences that might help us change our lives and the structures we live within? We will also discuss how theory might be written, and might ask us to read, in queer and neurodivergent ways.
ENGL-282 Writing London: The Modern City Novel
This course will chart London's progress from the center of an empire to a node in the global world's economy, and the novel's movement from realism to postmodernism and beyond. Beginning by contrasting the London of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with that of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, we will then trace the development of a multiethnic city in which according to a recent report there are more than 300 languages spoken in London schools. By so doing we will also examine the history and tradition of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel and investigate its various theories, genres, and styles.
The stated prerequisites for 300-level courses are junior and senior standing and 8 credits of work in English beyond a first-year seminar, often including a specified course such as ENGL-199 or ENGL-240. A sophomore who has completed the specified 8 credits may enroll with prior permission of the instructor. Any student without the prerequisites should consult the instructor.
These courses offer advanced study of literature in English. Reading texts from different periods and genres, seminars aim for depth and specific focus and require of every student both original work and partial responsibility for leading class discussions.
Each year the department offers various upper-level seminars and special topics courses. Enrollment in these seminars and courses is restricted (15 to 20 in seminars; 30 or fewer in courses). Interested students should pay particular attention to the prerequisites; preference for admission is usually given to seniors.
ENGL-311 Chaucer: Stories & Storytellers
ENGL-311CT Chaucer: 'The Canterbury Tales'
Known as a storyteller par excellence, Chaucer was also a famous reader of classical epic, romance, and philosophy. This research seminar will give students the opportunity to read the Canterbury Tales in light of the work's cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Throughout the semester, students will engage with Chaucer's tales and his favorite sources to examine and discuss his representations of gender and class, his perspectives on religious authority, his use of the English vernacular, and his commitment to poetry.
ENGL-312SF Shakespeare: 'Shakespeare and Film'
We will read plays by Shakespeare, watch films based on those plays, and study the plays, the films, and the plays-as-films. 'Shakespeare' comes first, of course, both historically and as the source/inspiration for the films. Yet each film has its own existence, to be understood not just as an 'adaptation,' but also as the product of linked artistic, technical, and economic choices. Considering Shakespeare's plays as pre-texts (rather than pre-scriptions), we will look at early and recent films, both those that follow closely conventionalized conceptualizations of 'Shakespeare,' and those that tend to erase or emend their Shakespearean sources.
ENGL-321 Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
ENGL-321WD Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: 'William Wordsworth and George Eliot'
William Wordsworth and George Eliot grew up in a revolutionary age: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, wars of independence and of imperial conquest, and, behind it all, the social transformations arising from the industrial revolution. Both Wordsworth and Eliot wrestled with how to adapt their art to these new realities: he introduced dramatically new content into poetry and experimented with a startling variety of poetic forms; she transformed the various prose genres to construct a novelistic form able to represent the totality of British society. By so doing, they forged a revolution in literary forms with the emergence of the modern lyric and the realist novel.
ENGL-323 Gender and Class in the Victorian Novel
This course will investigate how gender and class serve as structuring principles in the development of the Victorian novel in Britain, paying attention to the ways in which the form also develops in relation to emerging ideas about sexuality, race, nation, and religion. Novelists include Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell and we will read examples of domestic fiction, detective fiction, social realist novels, and the Victorian gothic.
ENGL-325 Victorian Literature and Visual Culture
This course will examine literary texts that represent new forms of visuality in nineteenth-century Britain as well as examples of visual culture that provide a framework for reading Victorian culture in innovative ways. We will study nineteenth-century photography -- portraiture, prison photography, imperial photographs, and private and popular erotic images -- as well as novels and autobiographical writing that engage with new photographic technology and its transformation of the ways in which Victorians understood identity, politics, aesthetics, and representation. The course will take a similar approach to painting, literary illustration, political cartoons and caricature, and advertising.
ENGL-334 Asian American Film and Visual Culture
ENGL-334BG Asian American Film and Visual Culture: 'Beyond Geishas and Kung Fu Masters'
This course examines contemporary Asian American film and visual culture through the lens of cultural recovery, self-invention, and experimentation. Focusing primarily on film and photography, we will explore issues of race and visuality, Hollywood orientalism, memory and postmemory, and racial impersonation and parody. Students will engage with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. Artists may include Nikki S. Lee, Margaret Cho, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jin-me Yoon, Justin Lin, Binh Dahn, Richard Fung, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Alice Wu.
ENGL-338 Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism
Race is the modality in which class is lived," wrote the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall. This course takes Hall's axiom as a starting point for considering the racial, gendered, and sexualized character of capitalist domination. Throughout the course students will explore both the political economy and the cultural imagery of racial capitalism. One question we will grapple with is the following: if capital itself is as imperceptible and objectively real as gravity, what are the common tropes we use to apprehend its circulation? Is it the stock market ticker tape, the shipping container, or the industrial wasteland? Drawing on writers and artists of color from around the world, we will consider ways they offer cognitive maps of the gendered and sexualized contours of racial capitalism. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Chang-rae Lee, Leslie Marmon Silko, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Ruth Ozeki. Visual artists may include Xu Bing, Otobong Nkanga, Allan deSouza, Rodney McMillian, Mark Bradford, Takahiro Iwasaki, Anicka Yi, and Candace Lin.
ENGL-349 Cosmopolitanism
Nothing that is human can be alien to me." This is the motto of cosmopolitanism, a way of thinking that stretches back to the Greeks, and which emphasizes our common status as citizens of the world, urging us to value the universal as highly as the local. How are we to balance our duty to humankind broadly in relation to those nearby? How are the stories that we tell about immigration, asylum, global capital, tourism, and environmentalism involved in this conversation? This course explores the premises of cosmopolitanism in conjunction with contemporary transnational literature; authors may include Rushdie, Naipaul, Coetzee, Adichie, Hemon, and Bulawayo.
ENGL-350 Studies in African American Literature
ENGL-350AB Topics in African American Literature: 'Abolition and Climate Change'
What makes change so difficult? Why do people always seem to be so apathetic to the most pressing political and social issues? In the face of climate change and racial injustice, why do so many people remain absolutely unmoved? Questions like these were central problems for the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century, and they remain crucial issues for people today who similarly believe that another world is possible. This class will consider how the abolitionist movement was intertwined with the birth of environmentalism to understand the nature of struggle today. We will read a range of antislavery writing, nineteenth-century Black radical figures, and various critical theorists of capitalism and climate change.
ENGL-350AT Topics in African American Literature: 'Race and the Aesthetics of Taste'
This 300-level seminar will examine race and taste in the literatures of slavery and colonialism. We will analyze taste as a mode of racial perception and a practice of racial discrimination. To do this, taste will be interpreted as a metaphor for aesthetic discernment ('you have great taste!') and at the register of gustatory perception ('what does it taste like?') to reveal that taste does not name a neutral operation of judgment; rather it names a field of interaction with the world that produces and extends social values, cultural commonsense, and racial categories. Together we will trace how subjectively experienced affects associated with the consumption of food and drink recapitulate arrangements of racial and epistemic power.
ENGL-357 Blackness and the Literatures of Law
This course submits the language of law and legality to consideration as a literary genre. We will endeavor to treat the production of legal literature as a choice of form and part of a broad cultural apparatus that legitimizes hierarchical forms of social organization. In particular, we will track the manner in which the law assembles its legitimacy alongside the strategic positioning of blackness and Black people as oftentimes beyond its boundaries, while at other times central to its ethical operation. The conventional moral and sacred regard for the law as an arbiter of truth will be scrutinized for how it enables structural contradictions to be sutured. Texts will include Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights; Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property"; the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford; Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog; and Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means.
ENGL-362 Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
This seminar will examine the Bloomsbury Group, the most important British cultural formation in the first half of the twentieth-century. The group included artists, art critics, biographers, economists, literary critics, novelists, philosophers and translators such as Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, George Moore, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf. We will emphasize the ways in which they sought to dismantle the artistic, political, and sexual repressions of the Victorian period and to replace them with new forms of art, community, and society.
ENGL-367 Topics in Film Studies
ENGL-367AD Topics in Film Studies: 'Adaptation: A Study in Form'
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "adaptation" as "the bringing of two things together so as to effect a change in the nature of the objects." Rather than studying adaptation as a project that attempts to reproduce an original work in another medium, our course considers the complex relationship between narratives and their retellings and revisions. In particular, we will focus on how such retellings permanently alter their so-called "source" material and how each incarnation of a given narrative offers us insight into and commentary upon a particular historical moment and its unique political and ideological challenges. We will also consider the ways in which literary and visual representations differ in their communicative and affective mechanisms, and challenge where we draw the line between "art," "history," and "entertainment.
ENGL-367RE Topics in Film Studies: 'Revenge on Stage and Screen'
Revenge plots display an enduring popularity. We will examine plays and films that show the range of possibilities, exploring: narratives focused on gender, race, and class; the place of family in revenge plots; the "underdog" tale; the importance of religion to ideas of justice; and the way in which genre influences notions of vengeance. Films and plays include the following: Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ji Junxiang's The Orphan of Zhao, Suzan-Lori Parks's Fucking A, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, Damián Szifron's Wild Tales, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman. Students will design their own final research projects.
ENGL-368 Shapeshifting Through the Nineteenth Century and Beyond
How can we change our ideas and enactments of white, Western subjectivity and being? This course contends that one transhistorical figure for such revolution is shapeshifting, and we will read examples in novels, poetry, memoir, and other nineteenth-century and contemporary media. Special attention will be paid to texts, then and now, that speak to queer/trans, disability, and critical race discourses as significant sites of resistance to Western being through bodily transformation. A substantial amount of time will be spent on individual research and methodologies.
ENGL-382 Advanced Topics in English
ENGL-382AN Advanced Topics in English: 'American Animality'
This course investigates the representation of nonhuman animals in US literature and culture over the last 200 years. Topics include: literary animals and racism; reimaginations of animals by writers of color; animals, gender, and sexuality; taxidermy and extinction; and experiments in representing animal perspectives. Readings in Animal Studies, Black Studies, feminist and queer theory, environmental humanities, and other fields. Authors, artists, and filmmakers may include Octavia Butler, Karen Joy Fowler, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack London, Eadweard Muybridge, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jordan Peele, Edgar Allan Poe, Kelly Reichardt, Mark Twain, and Jesmyn Ward.
ENGL-382EQ Advanced Topics in English: 'Equiano's Worlds: Global Abolition, Alt Humanisms, and Experimental Prose'
Olaudah Equiano is now famous for having penned the first slave narrative the same year as the French Revolution, a narrative that documented life in Africa, the horrors of Atlantic enslavement, as well as his voyages to South America, the Caribbean, and the Arctic. We will read and reread this narrative as a work of experimental prose and as a call to study of the following literary-cultural topics: the discourse of global abolition, alternatives to the Enlightenment Human in the context of enslavement, oceanic movement and global migrations, and the surfeit of experimental prose writing that sought to understand the concomitant changes in economic systems and the politics of living.
ENGL-382MX Advanced Topics in English: 'I Would Prefer Not To: Marxism and Early American Literature'
This course considers how early American and African American writers have critiqued labor under capital: from the plantation, to the factory, and to the office. At its core, this course considers how slavery functions as the political unconscious of early American literary critiques of labor. Throughout the semester, we will put a range of early American literary texts in conversation with the Marxist tradition and anti-capitalist theory in order to uncover a latent leftist politics of possibility in the early American period while also exploring how early American authors were anti-capitalist theorists in their own right. Literary authors may include: Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Herman Melville, and more. Marxist theoretical thinkers may include Karl Marx, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, and Gyorgy Lukács.
ENGL-382QM Advanced Topics in English: 'The Queer Early Modern'
This course combines Renaissance literary texts with various related secondary readings that will enable students to better understand the way that sexuality -- both normative and nonnormative -- was portrayed and interpreted in early modern literature. As we progress through the course, we will discuss what defines queer history and histories of sexuality, how the history of sexuality in the past informs the present, and, ultimately, the ways in which we can use early modern literature to better understand ourselves today. Course texts will include Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, John Lyly's Galatea, Shakespeare's sonnets, and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, Aphra Behn, and Katherine Philips.
ENGL-389 Revolution and Change in the Age of Necropolitics
The "age of revolution" saw revolts in the Black Atlantic world: Americans rebelled against the British; Native Americans opposed white colonists; bourgeoisie vied for power against the aristocracy; women decried patriarchal imprisonment; Latin American creoles resisted Spanish imperialists; and slaves threw off their masters. This course considers these diverse narratives of revolution as a series of social, political, and philosophical movements to change "biopolitics" (control of life) and "necropolitics" (control via death). We will read revolutionary tracts, slave narratives, and abolitionary literature alongside critical theory to consider how these authors offer ways of living and surviving Western, racial imperialisms.
Students with special interests, adequate preparation, and a capacity to work well on their own may apply for independent study, either ENGL-295 or ENGL-395. An application for independent study must be submitted the semester prior to which the work will be completed. Note: ENGL-295 and ENGL-395 do not count toward the completion of the English major or minor.
Juniors and seniors who have devised projects in literary criticism and scholarship, or in writing prose and poetry, and demonstrate strong preparation, are encouraged to take ENGL-395 for 4 credits. They should discuss their ideas for projects with their academic advisor and others in the department who might serve to direct the project. In most cases, students should seek out department members with whom they have already studied; but if this is not possible, their advisors or the department chair will help find someone to supervise the project. (Students studying off campus may pursue such arrangements by email.) The department will try to find such advisors for students, but cannot guarantee a student will be allowed to undertake independent study. Planning ahead increases the probability of success. Again, preference is given to students who can demonstrate thorough preparation, normally through appropriate course work at the 300 level.
