English

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. 

This course introduces students to a range of Victorian fiction. It addresses the content, form, and significance of the Victorian novel and how it develops amid the cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts of 19th-century Britain. It also examines the alternative form of the short story and considers what specific kinds of narrative and narrative effects this form enables. Authors to be studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, Bram Stoker, and William Thackeray.

This course introduces the theoretical question of the relationship between literature and high culture to the (less-literary) study of popular culture. Students examine the following key terms and sets of oppositions: (i) high culture vs. low culture; (ii) pop culture vs. popular (or mass) culture (the 2 terms are not the same); (iii) popular culture as resistance vs. pop/mass culture as consumption; and (iv) class and popular culture. Topics include debates about the value of cultural texts that are not of high cultural origins and could be treated as commodities within capitalist societies. Questions include 1. What is the impact and significance of commercially produced cultural products? 2. How do sub- and counter-cultural practices attempt to form alternative values systems? 3. What happens when alternative cultural formations become transformed into the mainstream? Students engage with the debate that the course will unveil and apply concepts learned critically. The course requires students to take prerequisites

This course involves the study of major literary genres of importance for the European literary tradition in translation. It is suitable for students of Classics as well as outside Classics, because it aims to help students to read widely and to engage with a broad range of literary-critical issues. The course focuses on Homer, but also includes reference to other archaic epics (e.g. Hesiod). Issues discussed include structure, plot, and character of the epics, the role of the gods, war and battle scenes, issues of gender and social values, the reception of Homer in later ages.