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2023-2024 Academic Catalog
English Courses
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English
English
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ENG 120 - Literary Analysis 4 credits (Fall and Spring)
An introduction to the methods and pleasures of literary analysis focusing on skills needed to practice close reading and explication of texts and emphasizing the rich complexities of literary language. Although individual sections vary in genres considered, all prepare students for further work in poetry and prose. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 121 - Introduction to Shakespeare 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
A close study of representative plays from each period of Shakespeare’s career, including comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Simpson, Abdelkarim -
ENG 204 - The Craft of Argument 4 credits (Spring)
Advanced course in argumentative or analytical writing with particular attention to style.
Prerequisite: Second-year standing.
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Arner -
ENG 205 - The Craft of Fiction 4 credits (Fall and Spring)
Instruction in the techniques and process of fiction writing, with emphasis on the short story. Readings may include published short stories and essays on the art of fiction. Students may also be asked to write in forms related to fiction (journal, autobiography, prose poem).
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 ; with grade S, C, or better..
Instructor: Smith, Sanchez -
ENG 206 - The Craft of Poetry 4 credits (Fall and Spring)
Instruction in the techniques and process of verse writing. Readings may include published poems and essays on the art of poetry.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 ; with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Phan, Savarese -
ENG 207 - Craft of Creative Nonfiction 4 credits (Spring)
In this course, we will acquaint ourselves with the genre of creative nonfiction, sampling a range of the myriad possibilities it presents: the personal essay, the political essay, nature writing, memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, biographical profile. We will read exemplary models and try our hands at each.
Prerequisite: ENG 205 or ENG 206 ; with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Savarese -
ENG 210 - Studies in Genre 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Intensive study of a particular genre. May include the study of lyric, epic, or narrative poetry; or novel, graphic novel, short story or drama. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors with grade S, C, or better; or for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Lavan, Smith -
ENG 215 - Reading and Writing Youth and Youth Culture 4 credits (Spring)
See EDU 215 .
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ENG 223 - The Tradition of English Literature I 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of English literature from Old English to the early 17th century; may include such works as Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors. with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Abdelkarim, Arner -
ENG 224 - The Tradition of English Literature II 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of English literature from the Restoration through the Victorians; may include such authors as Behn, Defoe, Swift, Wordsworth, Shelley, Austen, George Eliot, and Dickens. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Simpson -
ENG 225 - Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures 4 credits (Fall)
An introduction to postcolonial literatures and theory from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Kapila -
ENG 226 - The Tradition of English Literature III 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of English literature of the 20th century; may include such authors as Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Orwell, Eliot, Winterson, Kureishi, and Walcott. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Instructor: Kapila, Simpson -
ENG 227 - American Literary Traditions I 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of American literature from Columbus to 1830; may include such authors as Columbus, Harriot, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Franklin, Wheatley, Irving, Bryant, and Cooper. Features works from a variety of genres, including Native American myths, travel and promotional narratives, journals, poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose, and maps. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 228 - American Literary Traditions II 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of American literature from 1830 to 1893; may include such authors as Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, and Zitkala-Sa. Features works from a variety of genres including fiction, poetry, nonfiction prose, and drama. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 229 - The Tradition of African American Literature 4 credits (Fall)
The emergence and growth of African American literature from slavery to the present. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Lavan -
ENG 230 - English Historical Linguistics 4 credits (Spring)
Study of the history of the English language through examination of phonological, grammatical, and semantic changes in the language from Old English to Middle English to Modern English with attention to “external” history.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Arner -
ENG 231 - American Literary Traditions III 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of American literature from 1893 to today; may include such authors as Crane, Eliot, Faulkner, Hurston, Plath, DeLillo, and Morrison. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 232 - Traditions of Ethnic American Literature 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of the major traditions of American ethnic literatures. Features works from a variety of genres including fiction, poetry, nonfiction prose, and drama. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 or third-year standing.
Instructor: Phan -
ENG 240 - Lighting the Page: Digital Methods in Literary Studies 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
How do you write an interactive short story? How do machines read and write? And how do humans and machines read and write together? Students in this course learn about electronic literature and digital literary studies, using digital tools to develop skills in creative and scholarly reading and writing. The class begins with electronic literature. After reading works of e-lit such as Szilak and Tsibouski’s Queerskins: A Novel and Ana María Uribe’s Tipoemas y Anipoemas, students use digital tools to create their own works. The class then takes up computer-aided textual analysis. This part of the class combines literary texts, critical readings in the digital humanities, and hands-on programming exercises. Students will also use digital tools to analyze and revise their own writing. Assignments will include individual and group projects using digital tools and methods. No technical skills are required, but willingness to gain them is fundamental to the course.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade, S, C, or better; for non-majors ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade, S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Simpson -
ENG 273 - Transnational and Postcolonial Feminisms 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of critical debates in global, transnational and Postcolonial feminisms. This introductory course will include literary, historical, and theoretical texts which study the progress of feminism in the global south in conjunction with but also often in opposition to the Euro-American world. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade, S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 , ENG 121 , GWS 111 , with grade, S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Kapila -
ENG 274 - Sex, Gender, and Critical Theory 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Study of the critical debates in the construction of gender and sexuality, and how these debates have shaped, and been shaped by contemporary feminist and queer theory. This course will familiarize students with a range of critical theories that have transformed the study of sexuality and gender in recent decades-psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism. We will read key figures in theories of sex and gender, including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Gayle Rubin.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade, S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 , ENG 121 , GWS 111 , with grade, S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 290 - Introduction to Literary Theory 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Survey of Critical debates in history of literary theory and criticism from Plato to Butler. For purposes of practical application, readings may also include selected fiction, poetry, and drama. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade, S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade, S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 303 - Chaucer 4 credits (Spring)
Study of Chaucer’s poetry in Middle English. Option of doing some reading in Latin, Italian, or French. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 with grade, S, C, or better;
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Abdelkarim, Arner -
ENG 310 - Studies in Shakespeare 4 credits (Fall)
An intensive study of three or four plays from various approaches, such as sources, imagery, and critical and theatrical traditions. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 121 with grade, S, C, or better. ENG 223 and ENG 224 , with grade, S, C, or better, strongly recommended.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Abdelkarim -
ENG 314 - Milton 4 credits (Fall)
Intensive study of Milton’s poetry and selected prose with emphasis on Paradise Lost, on Milton’s place in the epic tradition, and on Milton’s reputation in English poetry. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 316 - Studies in English Renaissance Literature 4 credits (Spring)
An intensive study of a group of related authors, a mode, or a genre from the period 1500–1600. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 323 - Studies in English Literature: 1660–1798 4 credits (Spring)
Intensive study of Restoration and 18th-century literature with a focus on specific themes and genres. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 227 , or ENG 228 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Simpson -
ENG 325 - Studies in Ethnic American Literatures 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Intensive study of important authors, movements, or trends in American ethnic literatures. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Phan -
ENG 326 - Studies in American Poetry I 4 credits (Fall)
Intensive study of important poets, movements, or trends in 19th-century American poetry. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Andrews, Savarese -
ENG 327 - The Romantics 4 credits (Fall)
Study of major figures in English literature from 1798 to 1830, with attention to Romantic theories of poetry. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 227 , or ENG 228 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Simpson -
ENG 328 - Studies in American Poetry II 4 credits (Fall)
Intensive study of important poets, movements, or trends in 20th-century American poetry. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 .
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Andrews, Savarese -
ENG 329 - Studies in African American Literature 4 credits
Intensive study of an African American literary genre, movement, author, or a group of related authors. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 225 , ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Lavan -
ENG 330 - Studies in American Prose I 4 credits (Fall)
Intensive study of important writers, movements, or trends in 19th-century American prose. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Andrews, Savarese -
ENG 331 - Studies in American Prose II 4 credits (Spring)
Intensive study of important writers, movements, or trends in 20th-century American prose. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 332 - The Victorians 4 credits (Fall)
Study of major British writers from 1830 to 1900, with emphasis on distinctive approaches to common artistic, intellectual, and social problems. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 227 , or ENG 228 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Jacobson, Simpson -
ENG 337 - The British Novel I 4 credits (Spring)
Historical development of the British novel, formal evolution, methods of publication, and the relation of novels to their cultures. Through the early Dickens (e.g., Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Jane Austen, Thackeray). For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 226 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 338 - The British Novel II 4 credits (Spring)
Historical development of the British novel, formal evolution, methods of publication, and the relation of novels to their cultures. From Dickens to the present (e.g., George Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf). For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 226 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Staff -
ENG 346 - Studies in Modern Prose 4 credits (Fall)
Intensive study of important modern fiction. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 226 , ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Simpson, Smith -
ENG 349 - Medieval Literature 4 credits (Fall)
Cross-listed as: GLS 349 . Study of medieval European literary forms (lyric, epic, romance, allegory, and dream vision) through analysis of major works such as Beowulf, Chretien de Troyes’ poems, Marie de France’s Lais, The Romance of the Rose, The Divine Comedy, The Decameron, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of the City of Ladies, and Malory’s prose. Option of doing some reading in Latin, Italian, or French. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available. Not offered every year.
Instructor: Abdelkarim, Arner -
ENG 360 - Seminar in Postcolonial Literature 4 credits (Spring)
An intensive study of important writers, movements, or theoretical concepts in postcolonial literature written in English. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 226 , or ENG 229 . with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Kapila -
ENG 385 - Writing Seminar: Fiction 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Advanced workshop for students with a strong background in fiction writing.
Prerequisite: ENG 205 with grade S, C, or better.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Sanchez, Smith -
ENG 386 - Writing Seminar: Poetry 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
Advanced workshop for students with a strong background in verse writing.
Prerequisite: ENG 206 with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Phan, Savarese -
ENG 388 - Writing Seminar: Screenwriting/Television Writing/Variable Genre 4 credits (Fall or Spring)
This course examines creative writing with a focus on digital, emerging, and hybrid genres-namely writing for television and film. In some semesters, the course may focus on other emerging genres depending on the research interests of the instructor. Students will spend much of the semester discussing the craft and construction of existing texts and applying knowledge gained to the completion of significant creative project of their own. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: ENG 205 , ENG 206 , or ENG 207 , with grade S, C, or better..
Instructor: Savarese -
ENG 390 - Literary Theory 4 credits (Spring)
An intensive introduction to the major schools of critical and literary theory. Readings likely to include foundational texts in formalism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, historicism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. For current offerings review the variable topic course listing below or use the course search to filter by variable topic type.
Prerequisite: Any 200-level English course with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Andrews, Kapila
Special Topics-Fall
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ENG 295-01 - Special Topic: Salman Rushdie’s Magical Worlds 2 credits (Fall)
In this course, we will study the novels of Salman Rushdie, a central figure in postcolonial literature, for their magical realism, their reenvisioning the hybrid histories of South Asia and the world, and their uncompromising assertion of the writer’s role in social and political life.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade, S, C, or better; or second-year standing with instructor permission.
Note: Dates: October 23 to December 6. Half-semester deadlines apply.
Instructor: Kapila -
ENG 295-02 - Special Topic: Anthropocene Fictions: How Novels Depict Climate Change 2 credits (Fall)
Beginning with Amitav Ghosh’s declaration in his 2016 book The Great Derangement that fiction has not dealt with climate change, we will study climate change novels by Ghosh and other writers like Ruth Ozeki, Octavia Butler, and Jeanette Winterson.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade, S, C, or better; or second-year standing with instructor permission.
Note: Dates: October 23 to December 4. Half-semester deadlines apply.
Instructor: Kapila -
ENG 395-01 - Advanced Special Topic: The History and Future of the Book 4 credits (Fall)
In this course, you will learn many ways of looking at a book as a material object. Often, you will sit down with your classmates to examine a printed text you haven’t seen before, and you will work together to understand it. How was it printed and distributed? Who made it, for what audience? What impact did they want it to have? We will undertake that kind of hands-on investigation of American and British texts of many kinds: medieval manuscripts, early newspapers and almanacs, hand-pressed art books, cheap paperbacks, activist underground newspapers, and self-published digital works. In every case, we learn about the people who produced the texts-scribes and early booksellers, Black and feminist activist communities in the 1970s, contemporary digital publishers-and learn about the technological and social tools that connect texts to readers. In addition to scholarly readings and essay assignments, the course will involve creative assignments that encourage students to create their own texts with a.range of print and digital technologies.
Prerequisite: One 200-level ENG course with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing for declared Digital Studies concentrator.
Instructor: Simpson -
GWS 295-01 - Special Topic: Autotheory and Autofiction 4 credits (Fall)
A survey of 20th and 21st-century works of autotheory and autofiction through contemporary queer and feminist theory. In addition to reading novels, memoirs, and other genre-bending literary works, we will examine themes of authorship, selfhood, representation and the implications of studying and categorizing literature in relation to the identity of the author. These works model the modes of thinking, being, and problem-solving we will bring to our central inquiry: How should a person be?
Prerequisite: GWS 111 or ENG 120 , with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Sanchez
Variable Topics - Fall
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ENG 120-01 - Literary Analysis 4 credits (Fall)
Dots, Dashes, and (Other) Asides: Meaning Otherwise. In this course, works of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Conrad, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Laurence Sterne, will be gleaned for the ethical and aesthetic lessons that semantic content and narrative form can offer. Engagement with aspects of formalism, reader response, and historicism will enable us to appreciate the ways in which a particular interpretive framework opens us to possibilities even as it forecloses others. In addition, we will focus very close attention on specific moments in each text when the writer uses ellipses, em dashes, or parentheticals to say something more, or less, than the occasion may require. In doing so, the writer reaches out to us. So, rather than leap over these moments to a foregone conclusion, we will, with Emily Dickinson, view them instead as invitations to “dwell in possibility.” There has been much handwringing recently as to whether our culture needs, or wants, literature. As Gwendolyn Brooks admonishes: “First fight. Then fiddle.” This course is dedicated to two interrelated propositions: that literature exists; and it needs us to fight and fiddle. Grades to be determined by participation in class discussion, successful completion of three short to mid-length essays, and effective group work in various modes. No exams.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 120-02& 03 - Literary Analysis 4 credits (Fall)
“Shape-shifting Stories.” Literary analysis requires attention to not just content but also form. In this course we will read a number of well-known “original” texts and their adaptations side by side to explore the impact of form on story. The “original” texts we will read are the play Antigone, the poem “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and the novel The Great Gatsby.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Kim -
ENG 120-04 - Literary Analysis 4 credits (Fall)
“Magnitude and Form.” A literary work in its entirety may consist of a single sentence fragment or fill a multi-volume book. To gain skill in close reading and explore a variety of critical approaches to literature, we will start small and move toward interpretation of longer texts. Readings will include poetry in traditional and experimental forms, short stories (including flash fiction), Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and two 20th-century novels.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Smith -
ENG 121-01 - Introduction to Shakespeare 4 credits (Fall)
This course introduces students to the worlds of Shakespeare. Students will sample the Bard’s poetic array (his sonnets, narrative poems, and plays); his local and international outlooks (from early modern England to the imagined wider world); his social and political commentaries; and his artistic legacies, especially in theatre and film. Together, we will develop skills in close reading, critical and creative writing, and literary historiography.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Abdelkarim -
ENG 223-01 - The Tradition of English Literature I 4 credits (Fall)
In this discussion-heavy lecture, we sample the “greatest hits” of English literature 700-1700, including the oldest English poems, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and sonnets galore, from Spenser’s to Donne’s to those of Lady Wroth. We’ll treat these timeless texts to close and distant readings both in order to identify and articulate those features that have led to their rude survival over centuries, and to gauge their value in and relevance to our present world.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Instructor: Abdelkarim -
ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I 4 credits (Fall)
American Gothic: from a City on a Hill to the Sunken Place”. In this course, we foreground the rise of American gothic, with particular attention focused on the personifications and demonizations-literary, legal and political-that haunt the clearings in which slave labor and violence against Native Americans were so instrumental. It makes a great deal of sense, then, to read early American literature for the “gothic effects” that occur when the hard facts of slavery, racism, misogyny, and paternalism merge with utopian fantasies of regeneration, renewal, and equal rights for all. In addition to focusing on novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Stephen King, Sherman Alexie, and a graphic memoir, Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, we will also read short works by Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The course concludes with the viewing of two films: Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic version of The Shining (1980), and Jordan Peele’s allegorical exploration of racialized terror lurking within an exurban setting in Get Out (2017). Grades to be determined by participation in class discussion, successful completion of two 6-page papers and a final 8-page paper; and successful group work in various modes. No exams.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 232-01 - Traditions of Ethnic American Literature 4 credits (Fall)
Cosmopolitan Ethnic Literature of the United States. This course will survey how twentieth and twenty-first-century ethnic women writers of the US have expressed and solicited care for our wondrous cosmos. We will read poems, stories, essays, and novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Gloria Anzaldua, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Ruth Ozeki.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing
Instructor: Kim -
ENG 328-01 - Studies in American Poetry II 4 credits (Fall)
Beat, Black, and (Sometimes) Blue: Poetry of the 50s and 60s from San Francisco to Black Mountain to the Black Arts Movement. In this course we will explore poetry that breaks out of what Robert Bly called “the new critical jail,” as well as poetry that resists what Haki Madhubuti called the “protective custody” of cultural institutions dominated by white wardens and masters. Some members of this generation went from “liking Ike” to hiking out, as far out as words and rucksacks could take them, while others, such as Amiri Baraka, hoped to “clean out the world for virtue and love” by writing “poems that kill.” Our discussions of such raptures and ruptures will begin with an analysis of two seminal anthologies, both published in 1960-the 3rd edition of Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; and The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. Many of the poets listed in Allen’s anthology-Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, Levertov, Olson, Creeley, Jones (Baraka), O’Hara, and Ashbery, to name a few-are now safely ensconced in the American literary canon; none were included in Understanding Poetry. To better understand this segregation, we will apply a historicist approach to New Critical assumptions about the writer, the reader, and the “public” nature of poetry and compare those with the theory and practice propounded by the writers in New American Poetry. By the ‘60s, many of these poets were actively engaged in merging poetics with politics, as they acted out the affirmations of language, place, and civil rights within an often-bewildering juxtaposition of “American” spaces stretching from Piute Creek to the moon and back, and from Newark to Viet Nam. Readings will also include excerpts from memoirs by Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones, and poetry by Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, nikki giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez. These latter writers will help us reassess the patriarchal assumptions driving these movements. Grades to be determined by participation in class discussion, effective participation in various modes of group activities, several short responses, and a scaffolded 15-page research paper.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232-01 , or ENG 273 , with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 332-01 - The Victorians 4 credits (Fall(
Going to Town: Urbanization and Victorian Literature. Massive and rapid migration to still-developing urban centers during the Victorian period led to decaying rural areas and catastrophically congested cities. Industrialization affected all facets of the nineteenth-century life, and we’ll explore a number of them, focusing on class and gender dynamics during this period. We will read a variety of works of fiction and nonfiction including Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Students will submit two papers over the course of the semester, along with an annotated bibliography and regular short written responses.
Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224 , ENG 225 , ENG 227 , or ENG 228 , with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: C. Jacobson
Variable Topics- Spring
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ENG 120-01 - English 4 credits (Spring)
This course introduces students to analytical reading, thinking, and writing. We will begin by looking at critical and theoretical approaches to a single novel (E. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights) and then turn to short fiction, poetry, and drama (Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), building on what we have learned while focusing on genre-specific vocabulary and strategies of interpretation. Graded assignments will include short writing assignments and three papers.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: C. Jacobson -
ENG 120-02 & 03 - Literary Analysis 4 credits (Spring)
The course will examine literature that embodies traditionally formal as well as experimental strategies in poetry, fiction, and film. We will discuss the ways authors craft their works, and we will develop strategies for analyzing those choices in academic papers. After studying a wide range poetry, fiction, and film, we will close the semester with an extended exploration of three fictional cities built from series of linked stories: the Dublin of James Joyce’s Dubliners, the Washington, D.C. of Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City, and the London of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe. Graded assignments will include frequent short writing assignments and longer papers, leading to a final portfolio.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Simpson -
ENG 120-04 - Literary Analysis 4 credits (Spring)
In this course, we will closely read ‘coming-of-age’ poems, stories, a novel, and a film, paying particular attention to the literary strategies and genres writers have adopted, invented, and deployed to confront the experience of moving from childhood to adulthood. We will use a range of critical and theoretical approaches to tell stories about the structural and stylistic choices that constitute these texts, the characters who inhabit them, and the pleasures that arise from their transition into adulthood. This course will provide an introduction to the concepts and methods of literary theory.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Sanchez -
ENG 121-01 - Introduction to Shakespeare 4 credits (Spring)
This course introduces students to the worlds of Shakespeare. Students will sample the Bard’s poetic array (his sonnets, narrative poems, and plays); his local and international outlooks (from early modern England to the imagined wider world); his social and political commentaries; and his artistic legacies, especially in theatre and film. Together, we will develop skills in close reading, critical and creative writing, and literary historiography.
Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Abdelkarim -
ENG 210-01 - Studies in Genre 4 credits (Spring)
“Diaries and Journals.” Kept through the ages by a wide diversity of famous and ordinary people, this resilient form of writing resides somewhere between literary creation and primary historical source, between unspoken thought and public record, poised in the “now” between past and future. Is the diarist a disembodied self, or does the experience lived out in one’s body matter on the page? Has a conventional style of diary-writing developed and if so, what are its features? What makes a diary so different from a memoir? Do people keep diaries now for the same reasons as other diarists did in the past? With a focus on British and American traditions-including the tradition of African American diaries-we will study theories of the genre, examine formal conventions in published and unpublished diaries, and conduct a few experiments with diaries of our own.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing
Instructor: P. Smith -
ENG 223-01 - The Tradition of English Literature I 4 credits (Spring)
In this discussion-heavy lecture, we sample the “greatest hits” of English literature, 700-1700, including the oldest English poems, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and sonnets galore, from Spenser’s to Donne’s to those of Lady Wroth. We’ll treat these timeless texts to close and distant readings to identify and articulate those features that have led to their rude survival across centuries, and to gauge their value in and relevance to our present world.
Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade of S, C, or better for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Instructor: Abdelkarim -
ENG 224-01 - The Tradition of English Literature II 4 credits (Spring)
This course will offer a grounding in both major and representative British works of literature from the Restoration through the nineteenth century and may include the works of Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Christa Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde, among others. We will discuss the texts in the context of social changes occurring during this period, paying particular attention to gender and sexuality, the rise of the British Empire, the writers’ relationship to the natural world, and changes in literary style. Students will write two papers, complete several short assignments, and offer regular written responses that will inform class discussions.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Instructor: C. Jacobson -
ENG 229-01 - The Tradition of African American Literature 4 credits (Spring)
Republics, Reconstructions, Renaissances: Tradition and Change in African American literature. This course explores the interconnections and (dis)continuities in the works of Black authors over the span of 250 years. During the first third, works by Wheatley, Douglass, and Jacobs will help us focus on the contradictions between republican ideals and the hard facts of slavery. During the middle third, works by Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois, will be read against a post-Reconstruction backdrop in which public acts of terror, legislative enactments, and judicial decisions mandated and reinforced an ideology of “separate but equal.” During the last six weeks we will use the Black Arts Movement of the 60s (what Haki Madhubuti [Don L. Lee] called “Renaissance II”) as a mirror for reassessing certain writers of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, and then conclude with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors, with grade S, C, or better; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 , with grade S, C, or better, or third-year standing.
Instructor: Andrews -
ENG 310-01 - Studies in Shakespeare 4 credits (Spring)
This upper-level research seminar studies Shakespeare in his capacity as a historiographer – especially as a documentarian of England’s premodern past. Together, we will tour the ancient and medieval worlds through Shakespeare’s visionary and revisionist lenses, paying homage to King John (d.1216), Edward III (d.1377), Richard II (d.1399), and Henry IV (d.1413), among others. How does Shakespeare, his collaborators, and their audiences define, construct, or engage their histories? Whether implicitly or explicitly, does he claim any responsibilities when it comes to reviving the past for public consumption? Should he? As historiographers, visionaries, and revisionists ourselves, should we? Let’s find out!
Prerequisite: ENG 121 with grade S, C, or better. ENG 223 and ENG 224 , with grades S, C, or better, strongly recommended.
Instructor: Abdelkarim -
ENG 331-01 - Studies in American Prose II 4 credits (Spring)
“Experimental memoirs.” The last thirty years of the 20th Century have been called “the age of memoir.” Since then, the narrativization of self and identity under the rubric of “truth” has continued unabated. In this seminar, we will read memoirs that conspicuously interrogate the conventions of the form. How might the genre be manipulated to reveal new insights about memory and the meaning that is created while looking back? The notion of a literary experiment-“to make a discovery or to test a hypothesis”-can help us to move beyond memoir’s clichés, chief among them a simple effort to recapture the past. Possible authors include Alison Bechdel, Sarah Broom, Eli Clare, Roxanne Gay, Stephen Kuusisto, Margo Jefferson, Tito Mukhopadhyay, Maggie Nelson, Esmee Wang, Joan Wickersham.
Prerequisite: ENG 227 , ENG 228 , ENG 229 , ENG 231 , ENG 232 , or ENG 273 .
Instructor: Savarese -
ENG 388-01 - Writing Seminar: Screenwriting/Television Writing/Variable Genre 4 credits (Spring)
This version of ENG 388 will give students a chance to write experimental memoirs-or at least get started on two or three. We will read a range of contemporary works that purposefully scramble the genre’s conventions. Assignments will be model driven. In other words, students will redeploy the techniques they have observed in the course readings-redeploy them for their own purposes. We will learn about technique through its imaginative subversion. We will discover the close relationship between form and content.
Prerequisite: ENG 205 , ENG 206 , or ENG 207 , with grade S, C, or better.
Instructor: Savarese
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