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.

Instructor: Ko

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

This course will teach you the basic tools and concepts of narrative theory, a branch of literary theory that focuses on stories and story-telling. Using short stories as our primary examples, we will consider how analyzing narratives can provide deeper insight into questions of social justice and injustice, including racial, class, and gender difference as well as global distributions of inequality.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken WRIT 106.

Instructor: Yoon Sun Lee

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

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:

Instructor:

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.

Instructor: Ko

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

A reading of some of the greatest novels of English, American, and European literature, primarily from the 19th century. We will move carefully together through these extraordinary works, seeking to make their deep acquaintance through attentive, shared reading and to add them to your own life storehouse of important literary experiences. Taught primarily in lecture, this course will not be writing-intensive. Designed especially for first-year students and for non-majors, though all others are welcome. A likely reading list: Jane Austen , Emma; Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O, An Earthquake in Chile; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; Henry James, Washington Square; Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Master and Man, Hadji Murad.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 60

Prerequisites:

Instructor:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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.

Instructor: Lee

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.

Instructor: Whitaker

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

From the mid-20th century to 2021, 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 in the last four decades. 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: Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Samanta Schweblin, Ursula Le Guin, Basma Abdel Aziz, Eden Robinson, Vandana Singh. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 119

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Sides

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.

Instructor: Noggle, Whitaker, Brogan

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 120, this course emphasizes the close reading of significant texts, in class discussion and essay writing.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Not open to students who have taken ENG 216.

Instructor: Noggle

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course can substitute ENG 120 as a requirement to the major.

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.

Instructor: Yoon Sun Lee

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

Instructor: Chiasson

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

Instructor: Shetley

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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

Instructor: Ko

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: Spring

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.

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Other Categories: FYS - First Year Seminar

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

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.

Instructor: Chiasson

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.

Instructor: Ndlovu

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

Instructor: Chiasson

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 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

Instructor: Cezair-Thompson, Ndlovu (Fall); Ndlovu (Spring)

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

Instructor: Cezair-Thompson

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

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; 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

Instructor: Meyer

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

Topic for Fall 2024: 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 both the genre of the literary 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:

Instructor: Sides

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Ndlovu

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.

Instructor: Van Nice, Lu

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Ndlovu

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.

Instructor: Whitaker

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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. Not open to students who have taken WRIT 143 in Fall 2022.

Instructor: Lynch

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

What happens to the medieval Christian community when the unity of the Church breaks down? How does a narrative position its author and its characters within contemporary political controversy? Which characters are inside the traditional bounds of community? Which are outside? And how should we interpret the differences between them? In this course, we will examine these and other questions about medieval English literature and culture through the lens of Chaucer's writing. The course focuses on Middle English language and poetics as well as medieval structures of community-political, cultural, religious, and economic. The course will give special attention to how differences and conflicts, including those born of physical disparities and religious heresies, are managed within communities and portrayed in literature.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Whitaker

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

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 Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, 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:

Instructor: Noggle

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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.

Instructor: Grote and Wall-Randell (English)

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:

Instructor:

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; Julius Caesar, a Roman play; and Hamlet, a tragedy. All three 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.

Instructor: Cain

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.

Instructor: Ko

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Noggle

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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

Instructor: Noggle

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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.

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

From ancient pastoral poets to Amanda Gorman, how have writers 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, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. 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.

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Victorian poems stand among the most memorable and best-loved in all of English verse: they're evocative, emotionally powerful, idiosyncratic, psychologically loaded, intellectually engaged, daring, inspiring, and bizarre. We'll study Tennyson, the Brownings, Emily Brontë, the Rossettis, Arnold, Hopkins, and Hardy, with attention to their technique and place in literary history. Themes will include the power and limits of language, tradition and originality, love and sexuality, gender roles, the literary expression of personal crisis, religious faith and doubt, evolution, industrialism, and the role of art. Supplementary prose readings and forays into art history will illuminate literary, aesthetic, and social contexts, particularly those surrounding the Woman Question, female authorship, and representations of female figures.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites:

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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.

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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

Instructor: Wall-Randell

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, Frank O’Hara, Rita Dove, Thom Gunn, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Tyehimba Jess, Jos Charles, 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.

Instructor: Brogan

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

A study of American poetry in the last two years. Emphasis on poets with one or two books. Students will write short review-essays. Authors may include: Sally Wen Mao, Terrance Hayes, Danez Smith, jos charles, A.E. Stallings, Jenny Xie, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Shane Macrae, J. Michael Martinez, and Jana Prikryl.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

The modernist revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century is one of the most important revolutions in the history of English—writers radically rethought what a poem is, what a novel is, what writing itself is. We are still the heirs of the great innovators who emerged during that time: Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Moore, Stevens, Williams, Hughes. In this course we will look at what connects their work and the profound divisions among them.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Instructor:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

We will focus on recent American poets who have responded, in a variety of forms and stances, to the demands of social and political action. An important challenge for American poets of the last fifty years has been, as Walt Whitman suggested, to maintain a position “both in and out of the game” - to exist at the seam between private imperatives and public demands, and often to call that very distinction into question. Poets will include: Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman, Natalie Diaz, Claudia Rankine, Tommy Pico, Cathy Park Hong, Terrance Hayes, jos charles, Sumita Chakraborty, Wendy Chen. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: At least one prior class in the English Department.

Instructor: Chiasson

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

A survey of the great poems and poets of the last 50 years, a period when serious poetry has often had to remind us it even exists. Our poets articulate the inside story of what being an American person feels like in an age of mounting visual spectacle, and in an environment where identities are suddenly, often thrillingly, sometimes distressingly, in question. Poets include: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, the poets of “The New York School” (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler), Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, A.R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Robert Pinsky, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, D.A. Powell, Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, and others.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 45

Prerequisites: None

Instructor:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit.

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

Instructor: Chiasson

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Brogan

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 variously 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, Paule Marshall, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, and Berenice Abbott, and others. Filmmakers may include Vincente Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 258

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Brogan

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Cezair-Thompson

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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:

Instructor: Cudjoe

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Between the breakdown of the studio system and the advent of the blockbuster era, American filmmaking enjoyed a decade of extraordinary achievement. We'll study a range of great films produced in the late 60s and 70s, such as Bonnie and Clyde, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Chinatown, Annie Hall, Shampoo, Carrie, and Apocalypse Now, exploring their distinctive combination of American genre and European art-film style, and connecting them to the social and political contexts of this turbulent moment in American history.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 261

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Shetley

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This is the greatest, most thrilling and inspiring period in American literary history, and the central theme represented and explored in it is freedom, and its relationship to power. Power and freedom—the charged and complex dynamics of these intersecting terms, ideas, and conflicted realities: we will examine this theme in literature, religion, social reform, sexual and racial liberation, and more. Authors to be studied will include Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Stowe, Henry James. We will enrich our work by studying films dealing with the period—for example, Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), about one of the first regiments of African-American troops, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).; and we also will consider the visual arts—photography and American landscape painting. The literature that we will read and respond to in this course was written 150 years ago, but the issues that these writers engage are totally relevant to who we are and where we are today. In important ways this is really a course in contemporary American literature.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 262

Prerequisites: None

Instructor:

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

Instructor: Cudjoe

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.

Instructor:

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

A selection of short novels, essays, short stories, memoirs, poems and films ranging, in this special term, from the 1960s to the present. Authors and directors to be studied include James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Philip Roth, Spike Lee, Edward Jones, Denis Johnson, Rachel Kushner and others.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites:

Instructor:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

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

Instructor: Winner

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

Instructor: P. Fisher

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

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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.

Instructor: Lambert

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Noggle

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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 Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and Henry James's Daisy Miller.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Rodensky

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.

Instructor:

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

Instructor: Lambert

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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.

Instructor: Lambert

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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, Supreme Court cases, poetry, graphic novels, films, journalism, and theory.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 277

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Rich

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.

Instructor: Lu

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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.

Instructor: Maurissette

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

A course on the poetry of one of the key figures in American Literature of the past fifty years. Topics include: Bidart as a confessional and post-confessional writer, incorporating the innovations of his mentors, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop; Bidart as experimental poet, extending the high-Modernist line pioneered by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; Bidart as a practitioner of the dramatic monologue as channelled from Shakespeare to Robert Frost; as a regional poet of California and New England; as a poet of queer identity; and, crucially, as a poet of unsurpassed formal and rhetorical inventiveness. We will read Bidart's collected volume, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, in its entirety.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Chiasson

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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.

Instructor: González

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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:

Instructor: Lee

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.

Instructor: Rich

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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.

Instructor: González

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.

Instructor: Y. Lee

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

London started to become a global, multicultural city in the eighteenth century. How has it changed and how has it remained the same? This course examines how London has been experienced and represented in literary works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. We will explore how the city has been imagined in terms of disease, crime, power and pleasure. We will consider what types of stories London inspires, and who gets to tells them​. Authors will include Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, and Zadie Smith.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Lee

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: 30

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 290,ENG 290

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Lambert

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall

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 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.

Instructor: Whitaker

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

Instructor: Shetley

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

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 depictions and genres of H.I.V./AIDS writing, including Pulitzer Prize-winning plays like Angels In America 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, Precious, 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 control and protect populations. We will look at journal articles, scholarly and popular-science books (excerpts), as well as literary and cinematic texts. Also some archival materials from ACT UP Boston, the activist group. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: WGST 294

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: González

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: González

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

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

Instructor: Brogan

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

Instructor: P. Fisher

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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

Instructor: Cezair-Thompson

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

Instructor: Shetley

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.

Instructor: Cezair-Thompson

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.

Instructor: González

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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

In Advanced Writing for Television, we’ll pick up where Writing for Television left off. Students will continue to practice the skills of writing teleplays—character and story development; structure and arc; tension and conflict; audience, premise, and tone; scenes, description, action, and dialogue; and voice and clarity. We’ll start by studying a range of TV shows: comedies, dramas, web series, and others. Through reading scripts, watching shows, and discussing both in class, students will develop a more advanced and specific understanding of what makes a show work. Through their own writing, students will practice applying the lessons they’ve learned. In the workshop process, we’ll discuss everything that comes up in students’ scripts—what’s working, what’s not, and what we can all learn about TV writing from each example.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CAMS 30 8

Prerequisites: CAMS 208/ENG 208

Instructor: Holmes

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit

This changing-topics course provides students with the opportunity to pursue special interests in the interdisciplinary study of culture and civilization during the millennium between approximately 500 and 1500 CE. While the Middle Ages traditionally encompasses European literature and history, it is increasingly a multicultural Mediterranean and global field of study, multifaceted by nature and touching on a wide array of subjects. 

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Open to Juniors and Seniors 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.

Instructor: Whitaker

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 Calderwood seminar in public writing will show that there is no such thing as dead poetry. In a series of weekly writing and editing exercises ranging from movie reviews to op-eds, we will explore the many ways that the great poetry of centuries past speaks directly to modern experience. We will be taught both by the poets themselves (whose eloquence will rub off on us) and each other, as each student will pick a poet whose writing she will become expert at relaying to a lay audience. By the end of the semester, not only will you be able to persuade a newspaper reader that blank verse matters as much as Twitter; you will also learn how to articulate the value of your English major to a prospective employer--and how to transmit your excitement about the latest discoveries in your field to friends and parents.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 12

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.

Instructor: Lynch

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Other Categories: CSPW - Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

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.

Instructor: Whitaker

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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.

Instructor: Sides

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Noggle

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

Topic for Spring 2025: Shakespeare in Performance Around the Globe

The globalization of Shakespeare has only accelerated in the past quarter century, generating a trove of new stage productions, films and adaptations that continue to re-imagine, challenge and revitalize Shakespeare. This course will explore some of the more striking examples, in both English and other languages, from a Korean stage version of A Midsummer Night's Dream and a Chinese film adaptation of Hamlet (The Banquet) to Spanish and Indian retellings of Othello. In the process, we will also investigate what concepts like authenticity, translation, and adaptation mean in an intercultural context. The reading list will be finalized at a later date so that local productions can be considered, but will most likely include: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear.

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.

Instructor: Ko

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

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 changing-topics course provides students with the opportunity to pursue special interests in the study of major writers and ideas in 16th and 17th century literature.

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.

Instructor:

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.

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.

Instructor: Rich

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.

Instructor:

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.

Instructor: Yoon Lee

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.

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

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.

Instructor: Hickey

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

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 writers and ideas in 19th century 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.

Instructor:

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 August 1872, Benjamin Jowett (the head of Oxford's Balliol College and one of the century's most eminent scholars) wrote George Eliot a fan letter. In it, Jowett not only identified Middlemarch, the novel Eliot published earlier that year, as her “great work,” but also reported that “It is a bond of conversation and friendship everywhere.” And so it has been ever since. In this course, we will explore the great novels of the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. In addition to reading Eliot's novels, we will take up critical responses to them, beginning with those of Eliot's contemporaries. In particular, we will consider readers' objections to her representations of religion, female autonomy, and sexuality. As we ourselves become part of Eliot's readership, we will think about her development as a novelist and critic who reimagined the novel as central to the moral and intellectual lives of the reading public. Eliot wanted her novels to make a deep and lasting impression on her readers, as indeed they do. Novels will include Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, The Lifted Veil, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.

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. Not open to students who have taken this class as a topic of ENG 345.

Instructor: Rodensky

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

“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.

Instructor: Meyer

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

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.

Instructor: Rodensky

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.

Instructor:

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; Fall

Notes:

Units: 0.5

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

Instructor:

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; Fall

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.

Instructor: Fan

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit. Class will meet on Feb. 5, 12, March 5, 12, 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.

Instructor: Chiasson

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

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 20th century literature.

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.

Instructor:

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 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.

Instructor: Cain

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

The poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, arguably the most important American poet of the nineteenth century, provide a window into one of the most thrilling and idiosyncratic minds in literature. Dickinson lived her entire adult life in her family's elegant home on the main street of Amherst, Massachusetts, writing in her spacious bedroom through the night. The house and its views, as well as its gardens and paths, are all vivid presences in her work. Dickinson hand-wrote all of her poems on paper she scavenged around the house; scholars are still debating how to read and interpret her hand-done poems. To study Dickinson is to be confronted with questions that seem sometimes more forensic than literary critical. We will explore Dickinson's online archives and visit, several times, her house and gardens in Amherst. This course should appeal not only to lovers of poetry but to lovers of old houses, scrapbooks, ghost stories, and the material history of the New England region.

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.

Instructor: Chiasson

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Wendy Judge Paulson '69 Ecology of Place Living Laboratory course. This course does not satisfy the Natural and Physical Sciences Laboratory requirement.

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.

Instructor: González

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course explores the rise, the stakes, and the ironies of literary celebrity from the mid-20th century to the present. Beginning with the peculiar case of the Beat author, as exemplified by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, we consider what their uncommon degree of fame meant to literature and vice versa in the post-World War II era—a time when a rapidly changing media ecology, rising consumerism, and intensifying Cold War nationalism made for curious marriages: between avant-garde art and pop culture, between countercultural ambitions and commercial appropriation. We will also examine contemporary texts by authors including David Foster Wallace and Patricia Lockwood that address technology and its importance to self-fashioning. Focusing on celebrity as both a complex sociological process and as a perspective-warping stimulus we experience daily, this course will help us to demystify the products of celebrity culture while cultivating a reasonable appreciation for the power of its aesthetic appeal.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 359

Prerequisites: One course in literature.

Instructor: Winner

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the department.

Instructor:

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.

Instructor: Shetley

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.

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.

Instructor: Shetley

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

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

We will study in depth 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 study 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.

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.

Instructor: Cain

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Willa Cather, Pulitzer-prize winning American woman novelist of the early twentieth century, is best known for her novels about settlers on the Great Plains, My Ántonia, O Pioneers! and, set a generation later, The Song of the Lark. The power of the land and questions about the way humans should best relate to the land are at the center of her work. Cather lived most of her life with her companion, Edith Lewis, and her alternative views on heterosexuality, marriage, and transgressive female sexuality emerge in indirect and interesting ways in her fiction. Other intriguing issues in her work include immigration, inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations, the nature of the body in health and illness, tensions between rural and urban life, the development of the artist, especially the woman artist, and the emotional consequences of war.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: AMST 386

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.

Instructor: Meyer

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

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.

Instructor:

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.

Instructor: Cezair-Thompson (English)

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.

Instructor: Rodensky

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.

Instructor: Whitaker

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.