This course takes a whirlwind world tour through the imaginative literature of writers of color across the globe. Each work will provide a distinct, exhilarating, and sometimes heart-breaking experience of a world culture from the inside. However, a number of overlapping threads will connect the works: generational change and conflict amid cross-cultural globalization; evolving ideas of love, desire and identity amidst cultural traumas; colonialism and its after-effects; the persistence of suffering. The syllabus will include: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things; Wajdi Mouawad’s family drama set in a war-torn Middle East, Scorched; Han Kang's contemporary novel about gender struggle in Korea, The Vegetarian; the Argentinian Mariana Enriquez’s stunning short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire; and Yaa Gyasi’s epic novel that traces a family’s history from West Africa to post-slavery America, Homegoing. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: Especially designed for the non-major and thus not writing-intensive. Not open to students who have taken this course as a topic of CPLT 113.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was an anomaly. Ascending to the throne of a country that for centuries had passed royal power from father to son, she was a woman who remained unmarried and childless. Her reign was long and successful, and her era produced a flowering of literary greatness, by Shakespeare and others, unparalleled in English culture. How did she conquer the political odds against her and create a personal mythology that inspired a generation of poets? This course will explore the world of Elizabeth I and the courtiers and artists who adored her. Special attention will be paid to treasures from Wellesley’s rare books and museum collections that illuminate the life and culture of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen.

Wellesley Online courses are designed to be highly interactive and encourage group discussion; they require participation through live online class meetings throughout the semester, as well as work in a collaborative environment.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Notes:

Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and was immensely successful. Shakespeare is also universally regarded as the greatest playwright in English. In this introduction to his works, we will try to understand both Shakespeare’s popularity and greatness. To help us reach this understanding, we will focus especially on the theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s writing. The syllabus will likely be as follows: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None. Especially designed for the non-major and thus not writing-intensive. It does not fulfill the Shakespeare requirement for English majors.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

At various times over the past century and a half, America has welcomed, expelled, tolerated, interned, ignored, and celebrated immigrants from Asia and their descendants. This course examines the fictions produced in response to these experiences. Irony, humor, history, tragedy and mystery all find a place in Asian American literature. We will see the emergence of a self-conscious Asian American identity, as well as more recent transnational structures of feeling. We will read novels and short stories by writers including Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, Mohsin Hamid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Min Jin Lee. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 116

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course considers racism a hegemonic discourse that permeates many unto all elements of life within our current age. The course considers racism as a discourse that may penetrate to the very spirit of the individual, whether victim or perpetrator, racist or antiracist. Literature that aims to depict elements of real life, capture their spirit, and leave readers feeling fundamentally changed often aims to produce transformation at the level of the reader’s soul. In order to understand the dynamic interactions between literature, racism, and the spirit, this course examines scriptural texts from major religious traditions, philosophical and scholarly traditions germane to racism’s influence on the soul, explicitly white supremacist thought, and critical race theory. Students will focus on meditative practices for reading and analysis. We will use these practices to ask: what happens when literature, racism, and the spirit come together? And how can such knowledge help to fashion a collective life worth living?

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

From the mid-20th century to 2025, women writers have been major players globally in the upsurge of what is now referred to as speculative fiction--a literary supergenre or umbrella term for a spectrum of “what if” fictions: fairy tale, science fiction, horror, dystopian, magic realism, surrealism, fantasy. We will explore together short stories and novels written since 2000. Class discussions will aim at interpretation and appreciation of these peculiar and powerful literary texts as well as reflection on their particular historical and cultural context.

In particular, we will be curious about how these authors play with a spectrum of gender - in their own lives and in their writing. The texts include fiction written in English and fiction translated into English; we will address the issue of reading works in translation. Speakers and students of languages other than English, are encouraged to offer their insights into the necessary friction between an original text and its English translation.

Among the authors to be read: Mansoura Ez Eldin, N.K. Jemisin, Samanta Schweblin, Eden Robinson, Vandana Singh. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 119

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

English 120 introduces students to a level of interpretative sophistication and techniques of analysis essential not just in literary study but in all courses that demand advanced engagement with language. In active discussions, sections perform detailed readings of poetry drawn from a range of historical periods, with the aim of developing an understanding of the richness and complexity of poetic language and of connections between form and content, text and cultural and historical context. The reading varies from section to section, but all sections involve learning to read closely and to write persuasively and elegantly.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None. Required of English majors and minors if you entered the College before Fall 2024. Ordinarily taken in first or sophomore year.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall and Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes:

Students in this course will gain a foundational knowledge of the major texts and developments of English literature from its inception. The course fulfills the 120 requirement for the English major and minor. Starting with Beowulf, we will survey the tradition’s most durably influential figures, including Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. We will also explore works more recently added to the canon, by Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Along the way, we will reflect on theories of the canon and on what a literary period is (for instance, the Middle Ages, the Romantic Era), and how periodization continues to shape the study of literature. Like ENG 120, this course emphasizes the close reading of significant texts, in class discussion and essay writing.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: This course can substitute for ENG 120 as a requirement to the major and minor for students who entered the College before Fall 2024.

This course will focus on four of Austen’s major novels: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion. What kind of narrative voice does Austen create? How does she treat major and minor characters? What is the importance of the courtship plot? How does Austen represent time and change?

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Summer

Notes:

This course provides an introduction to poetry by focusing one at a time and in detail on thirty poems, from Sappho to Octavio Gonzalez. Each poem will be considered as a unique arrangement of words, images, and metaphors on the page; as a script for vocal performance; as a word game whose rules must be deduced; as an expression of the full range of private emotions, including joy, anguish, passion, remorse, and boredom; as a reflection of, and a contribution to, the historical and cultural frameworks of its time and place. Authors may include: William Shakespeare; Sir Walter Raleigh; George Herbert; Christopher Smart; John Keats; Marianne Moore; Elizabeth Bishop; Sylvia Plath; Lucille Clifton; Jenny Xie; Tarfiah Faizullah.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

We’ll read a selection of the best and most influential American short stories, and trace their influence on subsequent generations of storytellers, in both literature and film. We’ll consider what makes the stories we read effective, how later writers and filmmakers have revised and transformed these narratives, and how those revisions and transformations illuminate the workings of literary influence. We’ll read classic American short fiction like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” and Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” alongside later works that recall, subvert, and reimagine those narratives, from Alfonson Cuarón’s Gravity to Jennifer Egan’s “Safari” and beyond.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course will explore and enjoy how film makers across the globe have adapted short stories into remarkable and compelling films that stand apart from the sources as works of art in themselves. We will start with the stories but look at how the films go beyond fidelity to the original to create works with their own aesthetics and integrity. Films will include Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami's heart-warming Where is the Friend's House?, the Turkish film Winter Sleep (based on a work by Anton Chekhov), the sci-fi thriller Minority Report, the Indian film Khejdi, and the Korean hit film Burning.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

A survey of American Drama that takes a journey through America’s history from the early 20th century to the present. Issues explored will include: family trauma; the American Dream; evolving ideas of race, class, gender and sexuality; and identity. Works will include: Eugene O'Neill’s classic, Long Day's Journey into Night; Edward Albee’s absurdist satire, The American Dream; Lorraine Hansberry’s story of a Black family’s struggle, A Raisin in the Sun; Sam Shepard’s dark story about secrets, Buried Child; Tony Kushner’s meditation on the AIDS era, Angels in America; Melinda Lopez’s story of Cuban emigrés, Sonia Flew; Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer winner about class, race and social inequality, Sweat; the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton; and the playwright Celine Song’s film about transcultural romance, Past Lives.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 5

Crosslisted Courses: THST 132

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Participants in this seminar will delve into the workings of memory--a term that encompasses several different kinds of remembering and recollecting. What makes something memorable? Can we choose or shape what we remember? Does memory constitute identity? How has technology altered what and how we remember? As we ponder such questions, our primary focus will be on literature (including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Nabokov, and Toni Morrison). We'll also draw on philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science and explore creative arts such as drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, book arts, film, and music. Students will write in several genres--creative, critical, and reflective-and experiment with different ways of collecting, curating, and presenting memories in media of their choice.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None. Open to First-Years only.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Other Categories: FYS - First Year Seminar

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

AIDS changed how we live our lives, and this course looks at writings tracing the complex, sweeping ramifications of the biggest sexual-health crisis in world history. This course looks at diverse genres and depictions of H.I.V./AIDS writing, choosing from prize-winning plays like The Normal Heart and bestselling popular-science "contagion narratives" like And the Band Played On; independent films like Greg Araki's The Living End and Oscar-winning features and documentaries like Philadelphia and How to Survive a Plague. We will read about past controversies and ongoing developments in AIDS history and historiography. These include unyielding stigma and bio-political indifference, met with activism, service, and advocacy; transforming biomedical research to increase access to better treatments, revolutionizing AIDS from death sentence to chronic condition; proliferating "moral panics" about public sex, "barebacking," and "PrEP" (pre-exposure prevention), invoking problematic constructs like "Patient Zero," "being on the Down Low," "party and play" subculture, and the "Truvada whore"; and constructing a global bio-political apparatus ("AIDS Inc.") to surveil, control and protect populations. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Crosslisted Courses: WGST 194

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken the course as ENG 294/WGST 294.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall and Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

We live in an age of autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative. We may find the very concept of speaking for others distasteful or immoral: everyone, we reason, should be trusted to tell their own stories. And yet biography is an art: a great biographer can provide insights and contexts into a life, which elude the memoirist. This workshop on the art of biography will study great examples of biographical writing by Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Ellmann, and others, along with contemporary examples by Robert Caro, Heather Clark, Langdon Hammer, and others. Students will choose their own biographical subjects early in the course and present, in a workshop format, their ongoing research and writing, culminating in a short biography of 15-20 pages.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

Speculative fiction writers enchant audiences with their stories of magic and mayhem. Through strangeness we seek to explain the inexplicable. In this creative writing workshop, we will explore the speculative fiction techniques that will allow us to wield such power for our own stories. We’ll write, discuss and play with a variety of fantasy, Afrofuturism, horror, sci-fi, surrealism, and weird fiction tropes and structures to imagine new and exciting ways of seeing our world. We will pick apart craft essays and interviews from Carmen Maria Machado, George RR Martin, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and others and take a page out of their toolboxes to power our own work. A significant portion of the class will be dedicated to reading and giving feedback to each other’s work. This course welcomes writers of all levels and will culminate with a final portfolio of original work. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

A workshop in the writing of short lyrics and the study of the art and craft of poetry.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. This course may be repeated once for credit.

A workshop in the writing of the short story; emphasis on class discussion of student writing, with reference to older and contemporary established examples of the genre.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. This course may be repeated once for additional credit.

A creative writing course in a workshop setting for those interested in the theory and practice of writing for film. This course focuses on the full-length feature film, both original screenplays and screen adaptations of literary work.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CAMS 234

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. This course may be repeated once for credit.

What makes for excellence in writing for children? When Margaret Wise Brown repeats the word "moon" in two subsequent pages-"Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon"-is this effective or clunky? What makes rhyme and repetition funny and compelling in one picture book (such as Rosemary Wells's Noisy Nora) but vapid in another? How does E.B. White establish Fern's character in the opening chapter of Charlotte's Web? What makes Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira a a novel for children rather than adults-or is it one? In this course, students will study many examples of children's literature from the point of view of writers and will write their own short children's fiction (picture book texts, middle-reader or young adult short stories) and share them in workshops.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

Topic for Spring 2026: Writing the Travel Essay

Taken a trip lately—junior year abroad, summer vacation, spring break? Looked back fondly or in horror at a family road trip? Turn your experience into a travel essay. We study the genre of the literary and personal travel essay as well as the more journalistic travel writing found in newspaper travel sections and travel magazines. And, of course, write our own travel narratives. The course focuses on the essentials of travel writing: evocation of place, a sophisticated appreciation of cultural differences, a considered use of the first person (travel narratives are closely related to the genre of memoir), and basic strong writing/research skills.  

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: ENG 206 is a changing topics writing workshop that will each year take up a particular nonfiction writing genre. Please note that this course is not intended as a substitute for the First-Year Writing requirement. This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time. Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

What is the relationship between art and activism when we live in a strange reality of worldwide pandemics, AI that can generate paintings in the style of da Vinci, and ongoing climate disaster? When reality is stranger than fiction, how can magical realism help us render this strange reality or Afrofuturism empower us to transform the present and transgress? In this creative writing workshop, we will experiment with unreality by tapping into storytelling with an undercurrent of magic and discovering how our voices can go beyond the page and change the world. We will read & write fiction where strange things happen: people fly, time collapses, the dead rise, & nature eschews the laws of physics etc. From NoViolet Bulawayo to Octavia Butler, the goal is to see how authors weave activism into their work and try it ourselves. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

A workshop course where students will work in teams to write 3-4 episodes of an original show concept or an existing television series. We’ll study 1 hour and 30 minute episode structures as well as different kinds of hallmark episode formats. We’ll also practice the basics of script format, script action. Students will submit a final portfolio that includes their group’s show bible and their respective episode(s) teleplays.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CAMS 20 8

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. This course may be repeated once for credit.

What is a novel but a collection of sentences? This writing workshop approaches the formation of fiction by addressing the magic and science of its smallest units: lines and sentences. By reading flash fiction (very short stories), novels-in-verses, and poetry, we will explore the potency of short work and literary compression. Throughout the semester, you will write your own poems and flash fiction pieces. How deeply and quickly can you affect readers by working at the line level? What happens within a sentence or between lines? What can poetry and flash fiction do that so speaks to our age? For fiction writers intimidated by poetry and poets intimidated by long-form fiction, this writing workshop takes a gentle approach to the close reading and writing of poetry and fiction. From studying the works of Danez Smith, Safia Elhillo, Ocean Vuong, Jamaica Kincaid, Warsan Shire, and more, we will amass a series of questions useful to our own practice as readers and writers.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

In 1774, an anonymous author wrote of "the perfection, the beauty, the grandeur & sublimity" to which Americans would advance the English language. In this course, we will explore the complex history that allows us to conclude that American English is not perfect and is but one English among many. We will study Old English, later medieval English, the early modern English of Shakespeare's day, and the varying Englishes of the modern British isles as well as those of modern America. We will read linguistic and literary histories along with literary passages from multiple times and places. We will ask, how does the history of the language affect our views of the world and our selves? And how are we continually shaping English's future?

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course will select its monsters, villains, and wives from early English, French, and Anglo-Norman literature, ranging from the giant Grendel (and his mother) in Beowulf to the arch-villain Ganelon in The Song of Roland, from the faithless queen Guinevere to the seductive wife of the enigmatic Green Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish by considering the survival of magical monsters in the modern-day fantasy classic The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, and in The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley. We will also trace Tolkien’s career as a medievalist himself and especially as a Beowulf scholar.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: MER 212

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

From the raucous high humor of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale to the mock heroism of the Nun’s Priest and the gentle irony of the Franklin, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provide both a window onto medieval society and a glimpse of the English literary tradition in its beginning moments. We will study a selection of Chaucer’s tales in their various and competing forms—saint’s life, moral fable, romance, dirty joke—paying special attention to his preoccupation with food, sex, consent, identity, and how people know what they know. Although the selected tales will be studied in their original dialect, no previous study of Middle English or medieval literature is assumed. Relevant backgrounds from other contemporary writers will be supplied, and some time will be devoted to learning the sounds of Chaucer's English. In fact, one  of the joys of learning to read a medieval author like Chaucer is coming to appreciate the sounds of his poetry, written in a time when storytelling was still largely oral and communal.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

Is constructing a short story collection like making an album or assembling a puzzle? In this creative writing workshop, we’ll explore the process of building a cohesive collection, examining how individual stories can stand alone while contributing to a greater whole. We will consider which story should open the collection, which should be the send off, and what type of stories should occupy the middle by drawing inspiration from excerpts of collections from writers like Pemi Aguda and Carmen Maria Machado. Through discussions on links like character, setting, and theme, we’ll analyze what makes collections feel satisfyingly unified. You’ll develop a plan for your collection, identifying thematic connections, story order, and published works to use as models. You will complete five stories over the semester and workshop two of them with peers. At the end of the semester, you will submit an excerpt of your collection-in-progress. Whether starting fresh or you have a couple of existing stories from previous workshops languishing in a drawer, join this workshop to transform them into a cohesive, memorable collection.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

How does literature help us understand what it means to be happy? What kinds of happiness do the “happy endings” of fiction propose (and why is happiness associated with endings, not middles or beginnings)? In this course, we’ll survey various ways literature has presented happiness: sometimes as a feeling, either vividly immediate (joy, pleasure, elation) or longer term (contentment, fulfillment); at others, as an objective condition, such as prosperity or flourishing. We’ll start with some ancient Greek-Roman philosophy, then focus on novels and poetry of the Enlightenment, when the pursuit of happiness (with life and liberty) became a political imperative. Readings will include works by Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, and Olaudah Equiano. We’ll conclude with recent texts that consider how happiness may thrive and fail under current class, family, labor, and other social conditions.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

This interdisciplinary survey of Europe between 1300 and 1600 focuses on aspects of politics, literature, philosophy, religion, economics, and the arts that have prompted scholars for the past seven hundred years to regard it as an age of cultural rebirth.  These include the revival of classical learning; new fashions in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and prose; the politics of the Italian city-states and Europe’s “new monarchies”; religious reform; literacy and printing; the emerging public theater; new modes of representing selfhood; and the contentious history of Renaissance as a concept.  Authors include Petrarch, Vasari, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Castiglione, Rabelais, Montaigne, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.  Lectures and discussions will be enriched by guest speakers and visits to Wellesley’s art and rare book collections.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 221

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This changing-topics course encourages students and faculty to pursue special interests in the study of major writers and ideas during the Renaissance, the period of European history between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

In our course we will focus on Shakespeare’s plays as words on the pages of books and as dramatic scripts that directors, actors, and others bring to life in theaters and on TV and film screens. We will study Richard II, a history play; two comedies, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It; and Hamlet, a tragedy. All four were written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. We’ll conclude with Measure for Measure, a comedy, dark comedy, or problem play. It was written early in the reign of King James I, who came to the throne in 1603. We’ll think about the continuities and changes in Shakespeare’s powerful and passionate writing as the nation moved from Elizabeth to James.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

The great tragedies and the redemptive romances from the second half of Shakespeare's career, during the reign of James I, such as Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. These plays portray humans pushed to the limit of endurance and raised to the heights of blessedness, and also find Shakespeare challenging the limits of genre. Study of the plays’ language and poetry will be complemented by a survey of their stage histories and an immersion in their present incarnations in performance and in adaptations across the world.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None. This course is open to all students except first-semester First-Years.

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Milton helped set the standard of literary power for generations of writers after him. His epic Paradise Lost exemplifies poetic inspiration, sublimity, creativity, originality, and unconventionality, offering a richness of meaning and emotion that seems to provoke violently incompatible interpretations, even radical uncertainty about whether his work is good or bad. This course will focus on how this poem challenges and expands our views of God, evil, heroism, Hell, good, Heaven, pain, bliss, sex, sin, and failure in startling ways. We will consider Milton as the prototype of a new kind of poet who pushes meaning to its limit, from his early writings, to Paradise Lost, to Paradise Regain'd at his career's end, and sample the range of critical responses his poetry has elicited.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

A survey of American Drama that takes a journey through America’s history from the early 20th century to the present. Issues explored will include: family trauma; the American Dream; evolving ideas of race, class, gender and sexuality; and identity. Works will include: Thornton Wilder’s classic about small-town America, Our Town; Lorraine Hansberry’s story of a Black family’s struggle, A Raisin in the Sun; Tony Kushner’s meditation on the AIDS era, Angels in America; Melinda Lopez’s story of Cuban emigrés, Sonia Flew; Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer winner about class, race and social inequality, Sweat; the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton; and the playwright Celine Song’s film about transcultural romance, Past Lives.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: THST 232

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

The period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1660-1789) promoted individual rights, attacked superstition and advanced science, dramatically expanded literacy and publishing, brought women as readers and writers into a burgeoning literary marketplace, and created the public sphere. Yet the era also massively increased the trans-Atlantic slave trade, devised new forms of racism and anti-feminism, and established European colonialism as a world system. This course will examine British literature that confronts these complexities. We’ll read novels like Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that portray encounters between Europeans and the non-European “Other”; poems by Alexander Pope and Mary Wortley Montagu that explore the nature of women and femininity; and texts that find the limits of Enlightenment reason in uncertainty, strong passions, and madness.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Essential works of a group of poets unsurpassed in poetic achievement and influence: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats. Selected writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans. We’ll explore and interrogate prominent themes of Romanticism, including imagination, memory, creation; childhood, nature, the self; sympathy, empathy; questions of representation (for example, what issues arise when white, European, and for the most part male writers attempt to represent or “give voice” to “others”?); envisioning social justice; the lure of the unknown or unknowable; inspiration as "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; dejection and writer's block, bipolar poetry; influence (from opium to "the viewless wings of Poesy"); beauty, truth, fancy, illusion; rebellion, revolution, transgression, exile; the Byronic hero, the femme fatale, the muse; complexity, ambiguity, mystery, doubt; mortality, immortality. Open to majors and non-majors. No poetry background required.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

From ancient pastoral to contemporary ecopoetry, how have literary texts made nature their subject? What can literature tell us about the diverse and changing ways in which humans perceive, construct, interact with, inhabit, and alter our environments? How do historical and cultural differences inflect writing about nature? Does the prospect of climate catastrophe impel writers to reimagine traditional genres? We’ll explore such questions through a broad selection of poetry and lyrical prose, countering circumscribed notions of environmental writing as a predominantly white or cis straight male realm and seeking to illuminate the vital connections between environmentalism and social and racial justice.

Readings from the English pastoral tradition and its classical roots; Shakespeare, the Romantics, Gerard Manley Hopkins; foundational American poets Dickinson and Whitman; and a broad selection of 20th- and 21st-century poets such as Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, Audre Lorde, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Ed Roberson, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Pattian Rogers, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Forrest Gander, Claudia Rankine, Annie Finch, dg nanouk okpik, Camille T. Dungy, Jennifer Chang, Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith, Jericho Brown, and Tommy Pico. Prose by Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauret Savoy, and Helen Macdonald.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: ES 242

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

The Victorian period, spanning roughly eight decades of literary tradition and innovation between Romanticism and Modernism, gave rise to some of the most memorable and best-loved works of literature in the English language: The texts for this course--mostly poems, some essays and short fiction, one play--include writings of Tennyson, Browning, Emily Brontë, the Rossettis and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Arnold, Hopkins, Wilde, Hardy, fin-de-siècle Aesthetes and Decadents, early Yeats, and World War I poet Wilfred Owen. They are evocative, emotionally powerful, idiosyncratic, psychologically loaded, intellectually engaged, sensual, daring, inspiring, harrowing, and bizarre. We'll trace thematic and stylistic connections, analyzing diverse representations of love, longing, loss, the power and limits of words, Medievalism, marriage and its discontents, gender dynamics, the Woman Question, women's authorship, queer eroticism, beauty, art, artifice, aesthetic and sensual pleasures, pain, suffering, sacrifice, the pity of war, repression, depravity, "madness," spiritual crisis, the horrors of war, and fears for the future of civilization. A Book Arts workshop and readings from Pater, Ruskin, Mill, Arnold, and William Morris will further illuminate the role of artists, artisans, and consumers of art.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

The legends of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, with their themes of chivalry, magic, friendship, war, adventure, corruption, and nostalgia, as well as romantic love and betrayal, make up one of the most influential and enduring mythologies in our culture. This course will examine literary interpretations of the Arthurian legend, in history, epic, romance, and fiction, from the sixth century through the sixteenth, following the characters and motifs through their evolution. We will also consider some later examples of Arthuriana, in novels, comics, TV and movies, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: MER 247,CPLT 247

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Sensual and emotionally powerful, American poetry of the body explores living and knowing through physical, bodily experience. From Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” to contemporary spoken word performances, body poems move us through the strangeness and familiarity of embodiment, voicing the manifold discomforts, pains, pleasures, and ecstasies of living in and through bodies. We’ll trace a number of recurring themes: the relationship between body and mind, female embodiment, queer bodies, race, sexuality, disability, illness and medicine, mortality, appetite, and the poem itself as a body.  Poets include Whitman, Ama Codjoe, Rita Dove, Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Tyehimba Jess,  Ina Cariño, Max Ritvo, Laurie Lambeth, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 248

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

Working mainly in her bedroom and around her family's home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson composed nearly 1800 poems in her lifetime. This body of work, composed by hand on stationery or scrap paper, was not widely known in her lifetime; Dickinson circulated it among friends, or kept it in the bottom drawer of her bureau, for her own enjoyment and for the readers of the future to discover. We will consider Emily Dickinson's poems as brilliantly shaped and executed performances of extreme emotions, from elation to despair; as the creation of a richly elaborated personal religion and homemade philosophy; as the decanting of an individual nineteenth-century woman's ordinary life and experiences, within the patriarchal structures and strictures of the day; as marks on paper, made within a material and household culture; as pathways in a distribution network invented by Dickinson, in opposition to conventional publishing.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

From medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary graphic novels, genres that combine words and pictures invite us to consider the relationship between what were once called the "Sister Arts" of literature and the visual arts. This course will explore the various, complex, and fascinating interactions between texts and images in "blended" genres: children's picture books, ekphrastic poetry (poetry that describes and responds to visual artwork), concrete poetry (poetry in the shape of images), graphic novels, comics, and illustrated novels. We'll also look at works of visual art that include text. We’ll consider the different qualities of visual and verbal representation, and the tension between temporal and spatial orders when these two modes of representation directly engage each other.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present.  We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Andre D. Wagner, and others. We’ll close the semester with films set in New York.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 258

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

This course explores the role of written and cinematic narratives along with photography in response to traumatic historic events, focusing on select regions of Africa and on African Diaspora societies in the U.S. and Caribbean. We’ll explore the roles of (and relationships between) narrator, witness, audience and victim, both historically and in light of new social media, and discuss how these relationships give rise to particular representations of perpetrators, victims and saviors. Topics to be considered in relation to such narratives might include: colonization, genocide, apartheid, the  continuing impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and systemic racism on African-American and Caribbean societies. Works might include Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart or No Longer at Ease; Chimamanda Adiche, Half of a Yellow Sun; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; short fiction of the Apartheid Era; short fiction/essays by James Baldwin; Films: Fruitvale Station, 13th, Kinyarwanda, Lumumba.  Students will be introduced to postcolonial literary theory and trauma narrative theory.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 259

Prerequisites: Not open to student who have taken ENG 388/PEAC 388.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

A survey of the Afro-American experience as depicted in literature from the eighteenth century through the present. Study of various forms of literary expression including the short story, autobiography, literary criticism, poetry, drama, and essays as they have been used as vehicles of expression for Black writers during and since the slave experience.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 260

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Topic for Fall 2025: Writing Massachusetts: Four Authors

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 262

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course traces the life stories of prominent African Americans, which, in their telling, have led to dramatic changes in the lives of African American people. Some were slaves; some were investigative journalists; some were novelists; and one is the president of the United States. We will examine the complex relationship between the community and the individual, the personal and the political and how these elements interact to form a unique African American person. The course also draws on related video presentations to dramatize these life stories. Authors include Linda Brent, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 265

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This changing-topics course provides students with an opportunity to pursue special interests in the study of major American writers and ideas from the Civil War to the 1930s.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 266

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

Why are some genres of fiction much more prestigious than others? How do works of fiction get categorized and valued? What accounts for the difference between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction”? This class will read literary-critical debates about genre alongside a survey of 21st century U.S. fiction. We will explore genres ranging from sci-fi to historical fiction to so-called autofiction, and consider how they can help us think about contemporary issues including climate change and the politics of race and gender. Authors may include George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Jeff Vandermeer, Torrey Peters, Elif Batuman, Jonathan Franzen. Theorists and critics may include Pierre Bourdieu, Seo Young Chu, Theodore Martin, Mark McGurl, and others.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 268

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

An interdisciplinary exploration of the so-called Gilded Age and the Progressive era in the United States between the Civil War and World War I, emphasizing both the conflicts and achievements of the period. Topics will include Reconstruction and African American experience in the South; technological development and industrial expansion; the exploitation of the West and resistance by Native Americans and Latinos; feminism, "New Women," and divorce; tycoons, workers, and the rich-poor divide; immigration from Europe, Asia, and new American overseas possessions; as well as a vibrant period of American art, architecture, literature, music, and material culture, to be studied by means of the rich cultural resources of the Boston area.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 269

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

The roles played by Jews in the development of modern American literature are complex and contradictory. Influential American authors expressed anti-Semitic views in their correspondence and work, and prejudice excluded Jews from many literary and cultural opportunities well into the 20th century. Nonetheless Jewish publishers, editors, critics, and writers were extraordinarily influential in the development of the field, founding leading publishing houses, supporting freedom of expression and movements like modernism and postmodernism, and writing some of the most influential and lasting works in the tradition. In this course, we will explore the ways Jews have been represented in American literature and their roles in modernizing and expanding the field. Fulfills the English Department’s Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 270

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Fantasy, romance, “true” crime, experimental absurdity, Gothic-early English fiction originates narrative types that energize the novel throughout its history as literature's most popular form. This course begins with Aphra Behn's romance, Oroonoko, set in a South American slavery colony, and Daniel Defoe's tale of a pickpocket and sex worker, Moll Flanders. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift has captivated a world readership with its vertiginous mix of fantasy and satire. Henry Fielding laughs at his readers' class and gender anxieties in Joseph Andrews, while Horace Walpole invents a whole new fictional sensibility with the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. The course concludes with a parody of storytelling itself, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Frances Burney's Evelina, which anticipates the courtship comedy of Austen and the humorous characterization of Dickens.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

In this course, we will explore the changing relationships of persons to social worlds in selected English novels of the nineteenth century. The English novel’s representation of imperialism and industrialization, its engagement with debates about women's roles, social mobility, class conflict, and its assertion of itself as a moral guide for its readers will be among the themes we will discuss. The assigned novels will probably include Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

This changing-topics course provides students with an opportunity to pursue special interests in the study of major writers and ideas in the Modern Era of British Literature, spanning from 1901-1945, which saw a country affected by two world wars, the end of the Victorian Era, the end of Britain as an empire, and a rapidly diversifying population.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

What was at stake in the production and consumption of literature in the age of television and nuclear proliferation? We will read and analyze U.S. fiction, drama, and poetry produced after 1945, a period during which minority voices, particularly (but not only) those of American Jews, became central in U.S. literary culture. We will explore the tension between literature as just another form of entertainment (or even a pretentious instrument of exclusion) and literature as a privileged site of social analysis, critique, and minority self-expression. Authors considered may include Chester Himes, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Lorraine Hansberry, Tillie Olsen, Fran Ross, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Susan Sontag, Alejandro Morales, Kathy Acker, Shelley Jackson, Tony Kushner, and Lan Samantha Chang. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: JWST 274

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

What stories do U.S. video games tell us, and whose stories are they to tell? In this course, we will survey the history of narrative video games in the U.S., from the 1980s to the present, paying particular attention to how games represent gender, ethnicity, religion, and class. We will explore the way that games allow for identification across difference; the significant contributions of American Jewish game developers; and the prevalence of exoticism, cultural appropriation, and misogyny in the history of the medium. Games we will consider, in whole or in part, include Silas Warner’s Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and its many sequels, Jordan Mechner’s Karateka (1984) and The Prince of Persia (1989), Freedom! (1993), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin’s The Walking Dead (2013), David Cage's Detroit: Become Human (2018); Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross’ The Last of Us, Part 2 (2020), Zak Garriss’ Life Is Strange: True Colors (2021), and Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides (2022). We will consider game studies scholarship and criticism by Akil Fletcher, Jacob Geller, Cameron Kunzelman, Julian Lucas, Soraya Murray, Gene Park, Amanda Phillips, and Anita Sarkeesian, among others, and students will be expected to write several analytical or research essays. Fulfills the English Department’s Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 275

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

As author Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” The ways armed conflicts are represented play a determining factor not only our collective memory of them, but also in the way we conduct ourselves. This course will explore a range of approaches to representing war in the twentieth century. Among the questions we will ask are: When does war begin, and when does it end? At what distance do we sense war, and at what scale does it become legible? What are the stakes of writing, filming, or recording war, or for that matter, studying its representations? We will address these issues through units on violence, trauma, apocalypse, mourning, repair, visuality, and speed. Texts will include novels, short stories, poetry, graphic novels, films, journalism, and theory.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 277

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

In this course, you will enhance your creative writing and critical analysis skills by exploring how video games use narrative to captivate and motivate their players. You will uncover the unique aspects that set games apart from other storytelling media and learn how games manipulate narrative elements such as plot, setting, character, and conflict. Through evaluating the logical consistency and emotional complexity of story-driven games, you will produce writing samples showcasing your ability to craft an engaging narrative, whether in collaboration or independently. Apart from analyzing titles like The Last of Us, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Firewatch, you are required to complete one game of your choice by the end of the semester and participate in the class discussion on various game studies and reviews. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

The Black woman writer's efforts to shape images of herself as Black, as women, and as an artist. The problem of literary authority for the Black woman writer, criteria for a Black woman's literary tradition, and the relation of Black feminism or "womanism" to the articulation of a distinctively Black and female literary aesthetic.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 279

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

This course will explore the work and influence of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest directors of the classic Hollywood era. We’ll watch an extensive selection of Hitchcock’s most significant films, alongside films that show his influence. Readings will place Hitchcock within the context of his time and of the Hollywood studio system, and trace Hitchcock’s crucial importance to the development of the discipline of film studies.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: CAMS 282

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

Christopher Isherwood’s autofictional Berlin Stories (1945)—featuring Sally Bowles, immortalized by Liza Minelli—inspired John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera and, later, the film adaptation (1951, 1952). These, in turn, inspired the musical Cabaret (1966). The legendary Bob Fosse directed and choreographed Cabaret for the screen (1972); the rest is cinematic history. On stage or screen, Cabaret departs from novel and play. The famed musical transforms the ‘original,’ taking the Cabaret as motif and theme, a seedy nightclub run by a sinister Master of Ceremonies. Joel Grey was the original Emcee, while Alan Cumming reinterpreted the role in Sam Mendes’ West End and Broadway productions (1998, 2014). Amid these adaptations and revivals, Isherwood published Christopher and His Kind, shedding further light on his nocturnal Berlin years (1976). This memoir was dramatized for the screen, which at last reveals the ‘real’ Sally Bowles, Jean Ross (2011). An intertextual mesh of media, stories, genres, authors, characters, and agendas, the history of Cabaret is an exciting story in itself. In this course, we will analyze most of the works mentioned, while tracing the intertextuality and history of Cabaret. That history includes the ‘divine decadence’ of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, and the beginnings of the Second World War. But the lives and afterlives of Cabaret also trace a complex queer genealogy, before and after Stonewall, which continues to this day. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 283

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Everyone loves ghost stories, but why? Do we believe in their truth? Do we see ghosts as something that people from other cultures or other times believe? How might the presence of ghosts be linked to historical developments, including European colonialism? In this course, we will read stories featuring ghosts from across the world and through modern history. We’ll also explore various kinds of literary criticism to see how they can help us become more aware of what we’re doing when we read ghost stories. Stories and novels will include well-known works such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Leslie Maron Silko’s Ceremony, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest. The goal is to become more aware of the assumptions behind how we read and interpret these stories. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 285

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course serves as an introduction to contemporary Global Anglophone literatures, as well as a survey of postcolonial and transnational approaches to the field. It asks: What stories do we tell to make sense of our world, and how are these narratives shaped by histories of imperialism and independence? What kinds of critique of empire do these fictions sustain, and what role do they play in establishing a sense of community, language, and place in empire’s wake? The course studies writerly engagements with residual and emergent imperial forms, bringing together key works of postcolonial and U.S. multiethnic literatures. Issues to be discussed include migration and diaspora, cosmopolitanism and globalization, human rights, racial and sexual politics, and transnational kinship.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

Given their slow integration into the social mainstream, queer people have often made do with self-fashioning, a sensibility that identity is a work in progress. Literature and other artistic forms have been integral in sustaining and protecting the stories of queer lives and times. In this course, we will encounter various forms and transformations of queer expression, while focusing on a recent era that saw the dramatic visibility of LGBT folk: the 1990s. But we will not read this period in history in isolation. Instead, we will look backward too, considering early accounts of same-sex longing alongside contemporary representations. The Nineties zeitgeist was self-conscious about the previous “Gay Nineties” (the 1890s) and other queer eras like the Harlem Renaissance. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

How is literature related to capitalism? How can one help us to understand the power of the other? This course examines their shared forms and overlapping histories. We will read literary works, accounts of capitalism as a social system and historical epoch, and criticism focused on the material basis of literature. Fiction will range from Balzac to Ling Ma. That trajectory shows the development of capitalism from the period of the industrial revolution in England to the complex supply chains of global capitalism in the present. Theorists will include Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Eric Williams, and Althusser. Issues will include the commodity form, the role of slavery and empire in the development of capitalism, class consciousness, structuralism, and neo-liberalism.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 287

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels have throughout their history in the United States had a complex relationship with members of minority groups, who have often been represented in racist and dehumanizing ways. Meanwhile, though, American Jews played influential roles in the development of the medium, and African-American, Latinx, Asian-American, and LGBTQ artists have more recently found innovative ways to use this medium to tell their stories. In this course, we will survey the history of comics in the U.S., focusing on the problems and opportunities they present for the representation of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. Comics we may read include Abie the Agent, Krazy Kat, Torchy Brown, Superman, and Love & Rockets, as well as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Mira Jacob’s Good Talk.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 290,ENG 290

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

Through literary and interdisciplinary methods, this course examines the nature of race. While current debates about race often assume it to be an exclusively modern problem, this course uses classical, medieval, early modern, and modern materials to investigate the long history of race and the means by which thinkers have categorized groups of people and investigated the differences between them through the ages. The course examines the development of race through discourses of linguistic, physical, geographic, and religious difference--from the Tower of Babel to Aristotle, from the Crusades to nineteenth-century racial taxonomies, from Chaucer to Toni Morrison. Considering the roles physical appearance has played in each of these arenas, we will thoughtfully consider the question: What Is Racial Difference? Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken ENG 391.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300 level as ENG 391.

A journey through the dark side of the American imagination. Where classic Hollywood filmmaking trades in uplift and happy endings, Film Noir inhabits a pessimistic, morally compromised universe, populated by femmes fatales, hard-boiled detectives, criminals and deviants. This course will explore the development of this alternative vision of the American experience, from its origins in the 1940s, through the revival of the genre in the 1970s, to its ongoing influence on contemporary cinema. We’ll pay particular attention to noir’s redefinition of American cinematic style, and to its representations of masculinity and femininity. Films we are likely to watch include Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. We’ll also read a number of the gritty detective novels from which several of these films were adapted.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 292

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This is an exploration of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American literature and culture of the early twentieth century, which encompassed all major art forms, including poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as music, the visual arts, cabaret, and political commentary. This movement corresponds with the publication of The New Negro anthology (1925). Literary authors we will study may include Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent. We will also enter into contemporary debates about “the color line” in this period of American history, reading some earlier work by W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, or James Weldon Johnson, in the context of early Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Jazz Age, and transatlantic Modernism. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: AFR 295

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

This course explores the exciting new literature produced by writers transplanted to the United States or by children of recent immigrants. We’ll consider how the perspectives of immigrants redefine what is American by sustaining linkages across national borders, and we’ll examine issues of hybrid identity and multiple allegiances, collective memory, traumatic history, nation, home and homeland, and globalization. Our course materials include novels, essays, memoirs, short fiction, and visual art. We’ll be looking at writers in the United States with cultural connections to India, Pakistan, Viet Nam, Bosnia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Korea, Japan, and Mexico. Some authors to be included: André Aciman, Catherine Chung, Sandra Cisneros, Mohsin Hamid, Aleksandar Hemon, Jumpa Lahiri, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, and Dinaw Mengestu. Artists include Surendra Lawoti, Priya Kambli, Asma Ahmed Shikoh, and the African American mixed-media artist Radcliffe Bailey. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 296

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Transgender rights, gay marriage, and Hollywood and sports figures' media advocacy are only the latest manifestations of the rich queer history of the United States. This course will explore American LGBTQ history and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on consequential developments in society, politics, and consciousness since Stonewall in 1969. The course will introduce some elements of gender and queer theory; it will address historical and present-day constructions of sexuality through selected historical readings but primarily through the vibrant cultural forms produced by queer artists and communities. The course will survey significant queer literature, art, film, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the inventive new forms of recent decades. It will also emphasize the rich diversity of queer culture especially through the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with class, ethnicity and race.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 297

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

This course focuses on the history of Jamaican literature and music with attention to the evolution of Jamaican English. Beginning with early, colonialist writings, we’ll examine tropes used to describe the landscape and the people during the periods of conquest, slavery, rebellion, and plantocracy. We'll proceed through the pre-Independence decades of the twentieth century to analyze the emerging literary and musical traditions and underlying socio-historical influences (nationalism, emigration, the colonial legacy, hybridity, Rastafarian culture, Pan-Africanism). We will study the African roots of Jamaican music and the metamorphosis of popular forms from Mento through Ska to Reggae. We will finally look at postcolonial issues that have influenced writers and musicians from the 1960s to the present (political upheaval, violence, urban poverty, Black consciousness) for Jamaican writers both at home and abroad. Some of the writers to be included: Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, Una Marson, Colin Channer, Kwame Dawes, Lorna Goodison, Marlon James, Andrea Levy, and Bob Marley. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

An exploration of the horror film in America, from 1960 to the present, with particular attention to the ways that imaginary monsters embody real terrors, and the impact of social and technological change on the stories through which we provoke and assuage our fears. We'll study classics of the genre, such as Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Exorcist, as well as contemporary films like Get Out and Midsommar, and read some of the most important work in the rich tradition of critical and theoretical
writing on horror.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 299

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

A workshop in the techniques of fiction writing together with practice in critical evaluation of student work.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: ENG 203 or permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. This course may be repeated once for credit.

A workshop in intensive practice in the writing of poetry. Students who have taken this course once may register for it one additional time.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: ENG 202 or permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course may be repeated once for credit. Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

Topic for Spring 2026: Courtship, Crime, and Cancelation at the Dawn of English Literature

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: ENG 213 or by permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

This course takes its title from Duby’s magisterial history The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, which studies medieval marriage and its implications for marriage and gender relations in modernity. We will build on Duby’s work by considering how medieval romance literature has constructed not only marriage but also race. We will read medieval romances that depict religious differences as physical differences, especially skin color, and we will consider texts in the theological, philosophical, and historical contexts that informed their creation and reception. We will also consider the afterlives of medieval romance in modern love stories that are concerned with race. We will inquire, what do blackness and whiteness mean in chivalric literature and the history of love? And is modern race actually medieval? Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

The term “speculative fiction” has emerged as an inclusive gesture towards the most exciting fiction being written right now. Under its umbrella thrive fiction categories like Gothic, horror, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, dystopian, and environmental fiction (plus heady blends of all these).

Writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQIA+ writers have figured prominently in the contemporary (post 2000) explosion of speculative fiction—writing about “what if” in the future or in the past has proved liberating as a critique of colonial legacies, an exploration of transcultural and transnational experiences in the lives of immigrants, and a re-imagining of gender.

Entering the world of Anglophone speculative fiction requires, too, reflecting on the particular historical and cultural contexts of these texts and exploring the speculative fiction genre through scholarly essays and online literary magazines. Among the authors: Helen Oyeyemi, Vandana Singh, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Larissa Lai, and Claire Colman.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 319

Prerequisites: A 200-level ENG course, or CPLT 180, or ENG 119, or permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

“Evil be thou my good,” resolves Satan in Paradise Lost. This course will explore literary works that follow Milton’s lead in unleashing radical energies that invert or “transvalue” conventional values, whether their authors endorse such inversions or not. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Ellison’s Invisible Man all test the claims of darkness against light. We’ll also consider other examples, and theories, of the Gothic, and the sublime, that stage literature as an uncontrollable contest between irreconcilable forces. Theories of intention will suggest how such a lack of authorial control can seem a literary strength. Throughout we will assess the political potential of the Satanic principle—how it might inspire anti-capitalist, feminist, antiracist, and other oppositional modes of reading.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This changing-topics course provides students with the opportunity to pursue special interests in the study of selected plays of Shakespeare, with special attention to significant critical issues and to the Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural setting. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

Topic for Fall 2025: The Myth of Elizabeth

The only unmarried queen in British history, Elizabeth I maintained her controversial authority through a complicated balancing act, simultaneously playing the roles of nurturing mother, warlike father, alluring lover, and cruel, chaste mistress to her subjects. This course will consider literature of the Elizabethan age by Sidney, Spenser, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and others: poems, prose, and plays that respond to the Virgin Queen. It will also examine Elizabeth's own works (letters, speeches, and poetry), consider the fascinating visual representations of the queen from her lifetime, and survey some later portraits of her and her world in works such as Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth (1998) or the musical Six (2017).

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

This course explores the complex relationship between literature and law, focusing on how each represents and responds to violence and its aftermath, especially in terms of memory and repair. Our goal will not be to judge the efficacy of literary and legal projects, but rather to study how they imagine and enact issues of testimony, commemoration, apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation. We will seek to understand how different forms of life correspond to the various legal theories and codes we’ll encounter, and how literature challenges or corroborates these specifically legal subjects, life worlds, and behaviors. We will also ask whether there are cases in which literature intervenes in jurisprudence, imagining or demanding its own model of law. The class will explore these issues in relation to existing twentieth-century juridical paradigms such as postwar military trials, human rights, reparations, and reconciliation.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 334

Prerequisites: At least one literature course in any department or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

This changing-topics course provides students with the opportunity to pursue special interests in the study of major writers and ideas that began and flourished from 1660 to 1789, often called the Age of Enlightenment.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

This course reads Jane Austen alongside other women writers of her time, and examines her novels in the context of war and revolution. These revolutions took place not only on battlefields but within British thought, politics, and culture, particularly concerning the boundaries and definitions of gender, race, empire, and class. Comparing Austen’s novels to other authors, such as Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Hays, we will see how Austen shapes a mode of representation responsive to her moment. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

How do siblings, sibling relationships, and conceptions of brotherhood and sisterhood figure in Romantic-period authorship and texts? What is particularly Romantic about sisters and brothers? We'll consider such questions from several different angles, looking, for example, at the following: representations of siblings in literary texts; sister-brother writers (but also the importance of non-writing siblings); the relation of genius to genes; the complications of step-siblings, half-siblings, and siblings-in-law; the overlap or conflict of sibling relationships with friendship, marriage, romantic love, and self-love; and brotherhood as metaphor (revolutionary, abolitionist, Christian). Texts by Joanna Baillie, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, DeQuincey, Byron, Austen (Sense and Sensibility), M. Shelley (Frankenstein), P. Shelley, Keats.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 18

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Study of Romantic poems (and some prose), focusing on the role of love and sex in Romantic conceptions of imagination. Passion, sympathy, sensibility; the lover as Romantic subject; gendering the sublime and the beautiful; sexual/textual ambiguity; gender and genius; the sublime potential of unutterable or unspeakable love; the beloved as muse; enchantresses and demon lovers as figures of imagination; the attractions, dangers, excesses, and failures of idealizing erotic imagination (sentimentalism, narcissism, solipsism, disenchantment); desire as Romantic quest; sexual politics; marriage (and its discontents); non-normative or transgressive sex; (homo)erotics of Romantic literary friendship, rivalry, and collaboration. Texts by Charlotte Smith, Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Mary Robinson, 'Sapphic' poets, Caroline Lamb, Byron, Felicia Hemans, P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and John Clare.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Topic for Spring 2026: John Keats. Lines of Influence from Homer to the Present

The subject of this course is Keats and the lines of influence that connect him to his literary predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. We’ll focus on the Keats’s life and works, from his youthful poetic experiments to the famous odes; from sonnets to romances and fragments of grand works left unfinished on his death. Reading his immortal letters alongside his poetry, we’ll trace the influence of Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Mary Tighe; examine connections to P.B.Shelley and other contemporaries; and explore the poet’s own influence on such diverse successors as Tennyson, Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman, Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Jorge Luis Borges, Countee Cullen, Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Philip Pullman, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, and Inua Ellems. Over the span of the semester, we’ll read all of Keats’s major poems, many of his letters, and selected writings by those who inspired him and those he inspired. Student work may focus on Keats alone or on Keats and another writer.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

“Reader, I married him,” Jane Eyre tells us as her novel draws to a close. Many nineteenth-century novels end with a marriage. So despite suggestions within the body of the novel that women's traditional role is not a satisfying one, the heroine often seems contented in that role by the novel's end. But what happens if the heroine chooses wrongly? In this course, we will consider novels that look at a heroine's life after a marriage that she comes to regret, as well as some novels in which the bad romantic choices do not result in marriage. What do these novels of romantic mistake have to say about women's lives? Probable authors: Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, James, Austen, Eliot.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken at least two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

George Eliot believed that art could teach us how to be better people, and she wrote novels that she hoped would make a difference in the world. That’s Wellesley’s mission too. In this course, we’ll read five of Eliot’s seven major works (Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda) and consider the “difference” Eliot wanted to make in her readers and their communities. We will explore not only the novels themselves but also their contemporary reviews as well as Eliot’s letters and essays. In addition, we will take up the wider questions that Eliot raises about the force and function of literature and examine recent essays about how and whether fiction changes its readers.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; Fall

Notes:

Units: 0.5

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes:

An advanced, intensive writing workshop, open to six students, named for a late Wellesley professor who valued good writing. This is a class in writing non-fiction prose, the kind that might someday land a writer in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Our genre is often called "literary journalism," and here the special skills -- technical precision, ability for physical description, and psychological insight -- necessary for writing fiction are applied to real-life events and personalities. We will read and emulate authors like Joan Didion, Hilton Als, Janet Malcolm, Robert Mcfarlane, and Terry Castle, and each student will produce a 5,000 word-piece of their own.

Units: 0.5

Max Enrollment: 6

Prerequisites: Open to qualified students by permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. Class will meet on Jan. 29, Feb. 5, Feb. 26, March 5, with unscheduled time in between to be used for research and writing.

An advanced seminar in the poetry of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. We will read Glück's entire oeuvre, from Firstborn (1968), written partly in late adolescence and expressing the passions and fears of a young person, to Marigold and Rose (2022), written for her infant grandchildren. Glück's subjects were the phases and cycles of ongoing life. She explores the experiences of being a child, wanting a child, having a child, having grandchildren; of being part of relationships and communities--a marriage, a village, friendships, artistic collaboration, a college faculty--and of leaving behind, or being excluded from, those structures; of finding passionate comfort in art, music, poetry, TV, gardening, cooking; of facing illness and disability in a changing body; of being a woman in a patriarchal culture and in an art that favors men. These subjects and others were embodied in changing forms that challenge us by the clarity and complexity of their emotional logic and the sheer force of their beauty.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: ENG 120, one English course at the 200 level.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

In the 21st century, the historical novel has moved globally into literary fiction--novels characterized by complex narrative structures, richer use of language, and more wide-ranging questions about history, time, identity. What makes a novel precisely historical? Why do recent literary historical fictions often toggle between the past and present, as characters in the present look to the past for their own histories? How do historical novels embrace genre hybridity by incorporating science fiction or the gothic? How do these novels not only use history as their setting, but seek to question our notions of history? Texts range from the Ugandan epic Kintu (Jennifer Nansuguba Makumbi), to You Dreamed of Empires A (Álvaro Enrique)--a mashup of the encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan, to Han Kang''s Human Acts--the visceral account of the 1980 democratic uprising in South Korea. All texts will be read in English.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 354

Prerequisites: One 100 or 200 level course in literature in any language and literature department.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

This course will survey Hemingway's literary career: his novels, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea; his brilliant short stories from In Our Time and other collections; and his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. We will give special attention to the young Hemingway, who survived serious wounds in World War I and who worked hard to establish himself as a writer in the 1920s when he was living in Paris with his wife and child. In addition, we will contextualize our discussion through film, painting, and photography. Our goals will be to understand Hemingway's extraordinary style -- its complexity, emotional power, and depth -- and his charismatic personality as it is displayed in both his life and his writing.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This seminar focuses on the rich and strange archive of modern lesbian literature of the twentieth century. We begin with the “mother” of Sapphic Modernism, Sappho herself, and continue through the Interwar Era with the High Modernism of Virginia Woolf, the Black Modernism of Nella Larsen, the Parisian “Lost Generation” of Gertrude Stein, and the Late Modernism of Djuna Barnes. After an interlude during the Second World War, with the poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), we turn to the 1950s and the beginning of the so-called American Century, with the postwar pulp and noir writings of Ann Bannon and Patricia Highsmith. We continue into the 1960s, with the “toward Stonewall” lesbian novel Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, and end with Adrienne Rich in the post–“Stonewall” Era. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the department.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.

The course will explore the work of three leading postwar American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and James Merrill. We will approach these poets as creators of distinctive poetic styles and voices, as figures within the poetry world of their time, and as queer artists involved in complex negotiations of concealment and disclosure. We’ll situate their work within (and outside) some of the major schools of postwar poetry, and look at the reception of that work by critics in their time and ours. We’ll use letters and other recently available documents to illuminate the poetry. We’ll examine the role in their careers of different forms and locales of expatriation (Bishop in Brazil, Ashbery in France, Merrill in Greece). Most of all, we’ll seek to engage with and understand three compelling bodies of poetic achievement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 367

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: ENG 360 and permission of the department.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.

This course addresses the role of the archive in literary and cultural studies. It examines the debates, theories, and methods that emerge in relation to archival research, particularly around issues of memory, recovery, access, materiality, and the relationship between research and researcher. The syllabus includes units on power and history, bodies and affect, reading along or against the grain, photography and mediation, colonial archives, the Black Atlantic, human rights, and the ephemeral. We also will be reading primary literary sources indelibly inflected through archival matters. Assignments are designed to encourage students to a) consider the influence of archival encounters; b) develop relationships with local archives and greater orientation in such literary institutions; and c) reflect on how the archive might bear on their approach to literary study.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

A survey of major developments in literary theory and criticism. The emphasis is on breadth of coverage. Discussion will focus on important perspectives and schools of thought from Plato to the present day. We will consider, for instance, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, post-colonialism, race theory, and post-humanism as they have contributed to the interpretation of literature.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: EC - Epistemology and Cognition; LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

We will study three great American novels: Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881, rev. 1908); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900); and Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country  (1913). We also will consider two film adaptations: The Portrait of a Lady (1996; dir. Jane Campion, starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich); and Carrie (1952; dir. William Wyler; starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones). In addition: portraits of women by the painters John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, and Mary Cassatt, and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keefe. Also: visits to the Davis Museum and Special Collections.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 383

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

This changing topics course provides an intensive study of major writers. The course will focus on primary texts, but also give attention to the biographical, literary, and historical context.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.

This course explores the role of narratives in response to mass trauma, focusing on regions of Africa and African Diaspora societies. Drawing on the emerging fields of trauma narrative, we will examine the effectiveness of oral, written and cinematic narratives in overcoming legacies of suffering and building peace. Topics include: violence in colonial and postcolonial Central Africa, the Biafran war, South Africa during and after Apartheid and Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. We will also explore the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its impact on African-American and Caribbean societies. Types of narrative include novels, memoirs, films, plays, and data from truth and reconciliation commissions. Students will be exposed to trauma narrative not only as text but as a social and political instrument for post-conflict reconstruction.

Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 388

Prerequisites: At least one literature course in any department or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

While literary criticism might seem like an esoteric or unworldly pursuit, it has relevance and consequence beyond the narrow world of academic journals. It shapes reading lists at the high school, college, and graduate level and contributes to cultural conversations about expanding the canon. It also has the potential to create connections between academic scholarship and the larger world it inhabits. In this Calderwood seminar, we will read selected works of contemporary literary criticism (and a few short stories) and consider the place of published criticism in the wider culture. Over the course of the semester, students will produce several short pieces exploring criticism’s significance and present their work to the class as part of our weekly writing workshops. Assignments -- including op-eds, reviews of public talks, memoranda, podcasts, and blog posts --  will target a non-specialist reading audience. This course will give students the opportunity to build on their own experiences as readers of literature and writers of literary criticism as they engage with the questions and controversies that criticism raises.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 12

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Other Categories: CSPW - Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Through literary and interdisciplinary methods, this course examines the nature of race. While current debates about race often assume it to be an exclusively modern problem, this course uses classical, medieval, early modern, and modern materials to investigate the long history of race and the means by which thinkers have categorized groups of people and investigated the differences between them through the ages. The course examines the development of race through discourses of linguistic, physical, geographic, and religious difference - from the Tower of Babel to Aristotle, from the Crusades to nineteenth-century racial taxonomies, from Chaucer to Toni Morrison. Considering the roles physical appearance has played in each of these arenas, we will thoughtfully consider the questions: How do we discern racializing discourses? What historical discourses have led to modern race? How do we best analyze literary and related materials to understand how racial ideology has impacted texts? And to understand how texts have impacted racial ideology? Through these and other inquiries, we will arrive at some answers for the big question, What Is Racial Difference? Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to all students who have taken two literature courses in the department, at least one of which must be 200 level, or by permission of the instructor to other qualified students. Not open to students who have taken ENG 291.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200 level as ENG 291.