English

Made from the stuff of dreams and nightmares, "the fantastic" in literature poses questions about the nature of reality in a changing world. As science transformed understanding of life in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature placed fears and hopes for the future alongside the oldest beliefs and superstitions, creating a new genre of the fantastic, a modern world of monsters and phantoms where nothing is quite what it seems. This course explores the development of the supernatural and fantastic in European literature from fairytales to science fiction, and examines contemporary resonances, including the enduring appeal of a Hollywood monster and a cult internet meme.

The Early Modern period in England – by which we mean, very roughly, 1550-1660 – was a time of immense intellectual, geographical and literary expansion. The period offers us a double perspective: looking back to classical learning and achievement and using that as a model for the present, and offering us a glance forward to what we now think of as ‘the modern’ – that is, modern subjectivities, sexualities, politics and cultures. This course is designed to introduce texts from a period that stretched from the reign of Henry VIII to the English Civil War, with a focus on the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The course tracks the creative intersection of individual writers, literary forms, and the spirit of the age, and opens up a set of new magnificent texts for students to immerse themselves in, through which they develop a sense of the culture out of which they emerged. The primary texts studied in this course are chosen to reflect a broad generic range typical of the Renaissance, including prose, drama, masque and lyric and epic poetry.  

This course explores the significance of James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses and places it in its historical and cultural context. The course begins with two classes considering Joyce's work before its publication (specifically Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). The remaining eight weeks are devoted entirely to Ulysses. Through this study students will gain an awareness of the work's significance within the critical discourses of modernism and realism. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Irish history or culture but students will be expected to engage with these contexts as the module progresses. Recommended reading will be made available before each seminar.

The ability to communicate scientific information well is important if one is to disseminate scientific ideas clearly and accurately. Scientific communication involves more than just writing. It also involves the ability to read, analyze, understand, and critique scientific subject matter in a knowing way, at an appropriate depth and breadth, and with an appropriate style for an intended audience. Within this broad context, this course guides students through writing a scientific research paper, as applied to the physical sciences, for an audience of their peers. Students write about one real physical phenomenon such as one of Hooke’s law, Torricelli’s law, projectile motion, the behavior of a pendulum, or some other suitable phenomenon. Such investigation is supported by simulations and/or practical experiments.

This course explores the thrilling and cataclysmic changes of the 17th century through the prism of poetry. As England came to grips with a fundamental change in the national religion; saw civil war pitting neighbor against neighbor and family against family; witnessed a steep rise in women authors and the emergence of modern science, the country’s values were challenged, overturned and re-formed. The course explore how poets responded to these intense changes. The course explores a wide range of writers, from John Milton and Aphra Behn to Aemilia Lanyer and Robert Hooke. Students analyze the brilliant wit, rich imagery, and evocative forms of the period’s poems and ask what they tell us about the historical conditions of their production, and vice versa. Does political poetry have a particular style? Can poetry propel revolution as well as respond to it? Students investigate the models that poets called upon to write about these unprecedented events. 

This course explores the viability of the Afro-Gothic as a distinctive sub-genre of the postcolonial Gothic. It seeks to answer the question "What is the Afro-Gothic?" through a historicization of the concept Gothic in relation to narratives about, and by, continental and diasporic Africans. In the postcolonial Gothic, the classic tropes of the Gothic—incarceration within labyrinthine structures, tyrannical patriarchs, histories of hidden brutalities, suppressed and deadly secrets, haunting by the past oppressed and abused, and appearances of ghosts and other un-dead figures—are appropriated to exposes legacies of colonial trauma. Our more focused inquiry stems from the peculiar racialization of the Gothic during the 19th century, when Gothic darkness became increasingly associated with African blackness. 

Experimental writing is often counterposed to writing that emphasizes voice, experience, and identity. Exploring the relationships between literary form and subjectivity, between abstract systemic forces and our concrete lived experiences of the world, the course considers how contemporary writers have turned to experimental techniques to channel modes of solidarity, joy and refusal, and to make legible forms of gendered and racial violence. In this way, literary experimentalisms have also provided crucial tools for anti-racist and feminist critique. But what makes a literary text experimental? What does experimental writing have to say about class? And what does it mean to ‘queer’ a text? Asking these and other questions, the course will considers what the literary critic Anthony Reed calls "literature’s means of expanding the domain of the intelligible and thinkable."

Terror expands the soul, said Ann Radcliffe. Does it? Why did Gothic begin in the 18th century? How does it work as a powerful, disturbing, dangerous genre? How did it challenge philosophers and aesthetic thinkers? What can we learn from parodies and satires of Gothic? What questions does it stage and why do they continue to compel and fascinate? Could there be a "Female Gothic"? This course explores a selection of Gothic texts – poems and novels - to investigate the genre's variety of forms and its appeal to readers. 

The focus of this course is on critically evaluating the place and meaning of American popular culture in contemporary life. In order to do so, students look at the complex historical and transnational roots of American popular culture. Students also discuss how American ideals, both constitutional (such as freedom of the press, and also the right to keep and bear arms) and mythic (the American Dream, the frontier, individualism) have influenced the place and content of popular culture in the US.

Through the study of some of the most controversial and celebrated examples of what may be termed as utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian literature, this course explores some key elements of utopian/dystopian/anti-utopian literature. The course examines themes such as the control and manipulation of language, as well as religion, history, and gender and considers the way in which the contemporary can be explored in an imagined future. Examples of texts studied for this course include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s HERLAND (1915), set in an isolated society made up entirely of women and engages with issues relating to gender identity in the early part of the 20th century. Zamyatin's WE (1924) presents a totalitarian society, "OneState", and is arguably the archetype of the modern dystopia. BRAVE NEW WORLD (1931) in an imagined future engages with questions of identity, mass production, and homogenization emerging post World War One.