English

This course covers the study and evaluation of the culture of English-speaking people, such as language behavior, values, and customs, so that students can become familiar with both cultures as well as the ability to use the two languages in a sympathetic manner. 

This offering of the course examines: What makes one an American? Underlying at the root of the concept of American is the belief in one’s ability to “make” oneself into the image of an ideal American, which is inextricably linked with the cultural myth of self-invention that underwrites the American Dream. In this course, we examine how various American texts from the founding of the nation to the early 1930s contribute to, challenge, and revise our understanding of the American self, and consider how these texts give voice to particular social and historical experiences—both individual and national—and how those voices simultaneously direct and question the way we read such experiences as “American.”  

Students explore how changing social and political conditions are reflected in various texts, and how these texts participate in or question the construction of national identity. In this process, we ponder the ways in which these cultural texts both articulate and participate in broader historical struggles to establish the meaning of “America” itself. 

This course introduces students to a range of 21st Century literature written in English with a focus on crisis in the contemporary moment. It equips students with critical ideas and theoretical concepts that will help them to understand the literature of their own time. Students consider examples of a range of genres: poetry, creative non-fiction, the essay, and fiction. Students are encouraged to read texts in a number of contexts and will consider writers’ responses to, for instance: displacement, environmental change, geopolitical conflict, austerity, Black Lives Matter, the contemporary archive, desire and the overarching issue of crisis. They also consider a range of aesthetic innovations, for example: the turn to creative non-fiction, the re-emergence of the political essay, the development of the prose poem. Overall, the course considers how writers are responding to crises of the present period and how, through their writing, they model modes of agency.

In this course, students draw on approaches from Cultural Studies to examine the relationship between literature as a creative industry and literature as aesthetic practice. Focusing on 20th and 21st century works by authors traditionally situated at ‘the margins’ of nation-based literary systems, students ask what role marketing and the literary industry might have to play in how a writer’s voice becomes heard. In doing so, students take up Graham Huggans’ suggestion that a boom in postcolonial literature has been accompanied by a fetishization of difference or a ‘marketing of the margins’ which is at odds with many of the positions espoused in that literature. Students move beyond the Anglophone context in order to explore the application of this idea to authors from a range of countries and texts originally written in French, German, and Spanish.

This course examines the anonymous song-poetry which stands in contrast to the 'court' tradition of panegyric and learned poetry of the 17th century. Neglected by most of the early collectors, it has been regarded by some critics as containing some of the most powerful Gaelic poetry extant. The course considers (1) questions of definition, range and subject matter, authorship and transmission; (2) the evidence of the orain luaidh, which raise all these questions in acute form; (3) the relationship between these 'sub-literary' compositions and the rest of the Gaelic tradition; and (4) the assessment of these songs from a literary point of view. The lecture in the first hour will be delivered in English. The tutorial in the second hour is available in either Gaelic or English, dependent on individual degree programs.

This course explores five principal plays by William Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, King Lear, and The Tempest. It introduces students to Shakespeare’s language, poetic form (particularly the sonnet), and dramatic genres—including comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Reading the plays in roughly chronological order, we situate them within the historical and social contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. We also examine the enduring appeal of Shakespeare, considering him not only as a poet and dramatist, but also as a man of the theatre and a cultural icon whose influence has shaped literature, performance, and global imagination for centuries.

For much of its recent history, the development speculative fiction has been driven - sometimes quietly, sometimes less so - by the pages of magazines. This course is about two interconnected things: the place of the short story in the history of science fiction and fantasy, and the place of science fiction and fantasy in magazine print culture of the last 140 years. Students read some of the most iconic short stories in the genre, and also the magazines in which they appeared, tracing the evolution of both genre and medium across the long twentieth century.

This course discusses the relationship between current social issues and dystopian imagination and focuses on evaluation and analysis by putting various Korean texts in dialog with other texts, including classics from around the world. The main goal of this course is to make the fictional horror-based world more culturally relevant to modern society and the world today.  

Topics include how literature is used to explore and comment on political and cultural issues, how classical literature is adapted and interpreted through contemporary cinema and mass media, and the idea of cinema as a literary art form. 

Discussion centers around several texts – films, poetry, music, and a novel - which we will analyze in detail. 

Friedrich Nietzsche infamously declared that God is dead. Later, Carl Jung diagnosed the distinctive illness of the twentieth century as that of a godless age in search of meaning. The twentieth century witnessed a rejection of old, official myths (God, the immortal soul, the nation state, etc.), which are supplanted by new ones that first emerge in so-called low, popular culture. Fantasy texts address various crises of meaning, by providing readers and audiences with new myths, new gods. This course explores the connections between fantasy, popular media and crises in the conception of the modern self, as mapped through events such as WWII, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the triumph of late capitalism, and present-day fundamentalist terrorism. Sigmund Freud asserts that fantasy fulfills unconscious wishes, or 'lacks'. What do our enduring popular myths of roughly the last 100 years reveal about us, individually and collectively? Why are characters like Aslan, Superman, Batman and Bilbo Baggins such enduring figures of the modern imagination, easily translating from medium to medium (cheap paperbacks and comics, to film and TV)? Do they represent a hunger for old authority? Or, could they be archetypes of new humanist liberation? The course addresses these questions and others through analysis of a selection of key comics and fantasy texts.

This course examines how literary and visual works from different periods from across the world engage with Empire, slavery, and their legacies. The course introduces students to the complexities of race, class, gender, and their representations in a variety of expressive forms.

This course allows for a close examination of the Caribbean's creole identity by assessing Caribbean literary and cultural works from the 20th- and 21st centuries. Film, music, religion, literature, and food are explored to specifically examine the influence of slavery on Caribbean culture.