English

This course introduces students to the style, history, politics, and controversies of modernism. Students read central modernist texts, alongside a selection of modernist and modern writers, critics, journalists and intellectuals. Students explore how modernism developed in the 1910s and 20s, and examine a range of contexts for its stylistic experiments in narrative and point of view, in urban life, war, sexual emancipation, and psychology.

This course examines the main historical periods of the English language with particular emphasis on the medieval period (Old and Middle English). It discusses the main changes from Old English to Modern English in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis. This course also explores the process of the standardization of English and the varieties of English that exist today.

This course examines works of fiction that explain or dismiss the supernatural. Topics include David Hume’s infamous and controversial take on miracles, Sigmund Freud’s “uncanny,” Tzvetan Todorov’s “fantastic,” Alejo Carpentier’s idea of the “marvelous real,” etc. The course focuses on the historical ways of thinking about certain texts and a terminology for doing so, exploring the tension between what is real and unreal, what is natural and supernatural, in a variety of ways: for the readerly pleasures of terror and suspense; as allegories of personal or political or social trauma; as problematic racist and misogynistic symbols of feared “otherness”; and also as a site from which oppressed and marginalized communities can resist.

This course addresses issues of nationhood and identity in British and Irish writing since the 1920s, including recent works by postcolonial writers. The content ranges across a wide geographical area and covers a broad spectrum of literary styles, themes and narrative voices. While the primary focus is on selected works of fiction and poetry, the course also examines key concepts in literary and cultural theory. Authors discussed include Sebastian Barry, Mohsin Hamid, Nikita Lalwani, Andrea Levy, Sam Selvon, Kamila Shamsie, and Irvine Welsh.

This course provides opportunities to read, write, and investigate an array of creative nonfiction writing such as personal narrative/memoir, profile, essays on popular culture, and the lyric essay.  The class reads a variety of works, ranging from popular, literary, and experimental, including but not limited to the works of Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Brown, Eula Biss, Hanif Abdurraqib, Jenny Zhang, IIya Kaminsky, Virginia Woolf, and others. The course covers the core elements of prose writing: voice, scene, description, and structure.

This course examines Shakespeare’s plays alongside their film adaptations, exploring the relationship between literature and visual media. Through readings and film screenings, the course analyzes how Shakespeare’s works were influenced by the cultural and social contexts of his time, and how modern adaptations reflect the contexts of their own production and reception. Each week focuses on a Shakespearean play and its significant film adaptations, discussing the nuanced and often innovative ways in which Shakespeare’s timeless texts have been read by scholars, readers, theater practitioners and filmmakers and reimagined through adaptation.

The course focuses on a selection from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, along with some writing by Chaucer’s contemporaries, and more recent translators and adaptors such as Patience Agbabi. Students consider such central themes as genre, gender, constructions of the self and community. The lectures provide a context for the selected texts and raise central issues and stimulate debate. Seminars involve workshop elements to help students to read Chaucer’s Middle English and also engage in close reading exercises. 

The Romantic movement originated in the 18th-century revival of balladry and romance and later absorbed the political and intellectual energies of the French Revolution, transforming received modes of expression and sparking a far-reaching debate on the power of the imagination and the nature of authorship. Studying male and female writers from 1760 to 1830, this course traces the development of the Romantic aesthetic, highlighting national and regional strands within British Romanticism while also exploring its engagement with the wider world. The Romantic revolution in poetry features prominently, along with the broad variety of other forms characteristic of the period, including the novel, autobiography, political pamphlets, and literary theory.

The course introduces students to the important medieval genre of romance. It considers the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, as well as works by Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Sir Thomas Malory. Students also increase their knowledge and understanding of medieval literature, building on material in earlier courses. 
 

This course focuses on the cultural construction of revenge and revenge tragedy as a dramatic genre in the early modern period. Students engage with a thrilling and variously gruesome / funny / deeply moving play, not studied elsewhere on the program. The course spans the early modern period quite broadly, starting with translations of Seneca and Elizabethan attitudes toward revenge, and ending two-monarchs later on the Caroline stage. Typically, these plays enable students to explore, among other things: sexual revenge and gender politics; constructions of racial and national identity; ideas of parody and metatheatre; and madness and moral ambiguity. Students analyze both canonical and less well-known works to map the evolution of the genre. These plays present students with a limited author demographic, but the course draws on work by women and writers of color responding to early modern revenge drama, exploring performance (contemporary and early modern), adaptation and appropriation wherever possible.