English

This course examines the development throughout modern drama from realism and naturalism to absurdism and post-modernist theatre. Topics include Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Churchill, and Shepherd as well as contemporary Singaporean dramatist Kuo Pao Kun. In addition to understanding how changing theatrical trends embody changing epistemological, ontological and ideological attitudes, students develop a powerful comparative appreciation of the interconnected evolution of Asian and Western drama.

Students participate in creative writing exercises and improvisation games to find their playwriting voice as well as honing an ear for the spoken word onstage. Students examine examples of play scripts with a view to recognizing and utilizing techniques and generate new scripts via exercises and assignments. Students gain a practitioner's understanding of the creative process to evaluate their own writing and its impact on readers and audiences. This course requires a prerequisite.

This course examines the ways in which theory can be used as an interpretive practice in literary criticism and how literary scholars think, read, and write with theory. It focuses on how to generate and sustain a dialogue between literary and theoretical texts and trains the ability to identify the resonances and tensions that exist between these distinct registers of writing. Through the overlapping exigences of race, gender, and ecology, the course explores how theory—as critically engaged with literature—might clarify and fundamentally transform how to make sense of the world.

This course explores basic concepts of cognitive linguistics and their application to the analysis of the English language. It examines the structure of English through the study of linguistic conceptualization and basic results of cognitive science.

This course offers a study of the comics medium which includes graphic narratives, comics, graphic novels, and manga. It discusses the medium through different time periods, formats, materials, styles, aesthetics, genres, and themes with a focus on long-form works.

This course teaches the basics of major literary theories. Each lecture focuses on a specific theoretical approach to texts and cultural phenomena, such as psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, gender and queer criticism, new historicism, and postcolonial criticism. By engaging with diverse critical frameworks, the course aims to deepen our appreciation for the richness and complexity of literature and other cultural forms.

From an ecocritical approach, this course explores the ways in which literature and culture represent, and interact with, the natural world, ecological consciousness, and social transformation. It examines how these issues and concerns are reflected in literary texts. This course also discusses a variety of critical approaches and literary responses to the period commonly referred to as the Anthropocence/Capitalocene, considering how literature can become a tool to promote environmental sustainability, multispecies dialogues, and social justice.

This course studies the history of English literature, exploring key texts from each literary period, and examines English literary texts from cultural and social perspectives. In particular, the course analyzes literary classics such as Beowulf and works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro, situating them in their cultural and social contexts.

This course examines the celebrated Chinese novel Journey to the West - the story about the dispossessed, marginalized, and demonized, Journey to the West exemplifies a sort of plurilingual, multicultural cosmopolitanism that is deeply resonate with the world today. Drawing on recent movements in literary studies—ecocriticism, gender and sexuality, food studies, animal-human interspecies interaction, the bureaucratic turn—students explore in the text English translation and study its global reception and why the novel continues to be popular.

This course introduces students to the world of poetry, which includes both composition: inspiration, methods, forms and reception: reviewing poetry, statements of poetics, writing for poetry outlets, and public readings. Students examine shifting conventions, evaluation, and how poets write about poetry. Coursework involves a combination of written assignments, peer workshops, and public readings.