English

Why was love such a burning topic in pre-modern France? How did poetry and prose fashion attitudes towards women, men, love, and sex? What were pre-modern constructions of gender and were there any alternatives to traditional models? During this course, students answer these questions by consulting a wide range of pre-modern texts, including courtly romance, lyric poetry, short stories, and longer narrative. They examine the portrayal of love and the conventions that govern its representations in literature. Topics include the body, virtues and vices, marriage, sexuality, seduction, chastity and violence. Students compare how men and women treat these themes, and look at how women write in genres traditionally dominated by men. Knowledge of French is not required. English translations of the works studied can be read.

Designed for sophmore students and above, this course requires no previous knowledge of literary criticism. Introducing textual analysis through hands-on exercises, the course exposes students to various perspectives for reading literature and culture through lenses of class, gender, power, knowledge production, economics, health, globalization, etc. The course covers important debates in literary and cultural studies, developing skills for analyzing texts to help them succeed in literature courses. Over two semesters, six professors introduce a variety of critical lenses for viewing literature and society. Students engage with a range of literary and cultural objects to gain new perspectives on our world and better prepare them for future courses in DFLL. Students may take one or both semesters. 

This is the second semester of the course. 

This course explores the timeless journey of coming of age through a diverse selection of literary works, ranging from classic novels to contemporary fiction and short stories. By examining these texts, the course delves into the emotional, social, and cultural challenges faced by characters as they navigate the transition from youth to adulthood. Through close reading and class discussions, the course explores how themes like identity, relationships, societal expectations, and self-discovery are reflected and reimagined across different historical periods, cultural contexts, and narrative styles. 

This course introduces students to a wide range of texts (literary, visual, and academic), concepts, ideas, theories, and practices, both historical and contemporary, and the skills they need to analyze them. The course is divided into two 5-week blocks, devoted respectively to reading literary texts, visual cultures, cultural theory and politics, and linguistics. 

This course considers a range of recent novels produced by Irish writers considering the relationship between writers and the state, north and south. Students explore what kind of difference literature can make to a society’s growing consciousness of itself. Issues to be addressed include modernity in an Irish context, sexuality, violence, the fantastic, religion and its aftermath,  the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, and the connections between literary production and the imagined "nation."  The course treats Edna O’Brien’s debut novel THE COUNTRY GIRLS (1960), as its founding text. O’Brien has said that the Archbishop of Dublin and Charles J Haughey (who was at that time Minister for Justice) characterized the book as “filth” that “should not be allowed in any decent home”. Her first three novels were subject to multiple public burnings. The course also considers works by writers such as Brian Moore, John Banville, Anne Enright, Kevin Barry, Niamh Campbell, Colm Tóibín, Eoin McNamee, Anna Burns, and Sally Rooney. 

Students explore major formal, historical, and theoretical questions posed by the novel, including key ideas in narrative theory, the relationship between the novel and modernity and why the novel is often viewed as a central form for representing social life.

The course focuses on North American literature (USA and Canada) written in English, with a special emphasis on identity issues and the making of "national" literatures. Classic and funding texts are compared to outline the symbolic and mythological patterns that have shaped the US and the Canadian realities, from the European colonization till the end of the 19th century. In this class, literature is investigated through a constant dialogue with other arts, including media, cinema, photography, and the visual arts. The concepts of identity, memory, community, inner/outer landscape constitute the thematic paradigms to approach the evolving mentalities underpinning the evolution of complex identity processes in the so-called New World. This course features a series of guest scholars to encourage the dialogue between literature and civic society so to widen our knowledge of learning and training opportunities available nationally or internationally. The list of featured guests will be available when classes start. Students learn the literary history of the period at stake; they acquire useful literary tools to analyze fictional productions and question them in relation to the complex and heterogeneous North American realities.

To write effectively in an academic context is to be able to convey ideas in a manner that is clear, concise, and engaging. Writing in an Academic Context gives you the tools and techniques for this by teaching you about topics such as coherence, cohesion, conciseness, and hedging. The course is extremely hands-on and mostly focused on what comes after the first draft has been written. It helps polish writing skills by 1) teaching the underlying mechanisms of effective academic writing, and 2) providing weekly practice sessions with targeted peer (and tutor) support that serve to consolidate theory and writing skills. In doing so, the course looks beyond the content of academic articles to examine the fundamental mechanics of writing to adapt writing for different audiences across disciplines and concentrations. This course is interactive and writing intensive.

This course examines multiple interactions/connections/confrontations between popular culture products and acts of political and social protest/resistance in the historical and contemporary English-speaking world. It demonstrates how the political and cultural worlds collide/intersect as they study the uses, meanings, symbolic language, motives, and activations of popular culture works in the context of collective acts of protest. The course not only looks at the obvious tension between popular culture and protest, when the former is defined solely along the lines of the "mainstream," but the overlooked and fertile infusion of the two, as in the connections between the abolitionist movement and slave narratives, between the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, between working class activism and realist writing, between modernist experimentation and feminism, between carnivalization and the LGBT movement, between the Windrush Generation, Reggae, Black British poetry, etc. It also explores the activation and sometimes adaptation of popular culture within contexts of collective acts of protest for greater rights/influence/power for marginalized groups organized around gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, class, generation/age, etc. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this course draws on concepts and theories from history, literary studies, political communication (among potentially other options), applied to the study of the connections between popular culture actors and their works and sites of collective action. The course firsts gives a general introduction to the core concepts and theories of the course, followed by modules organized around various genres of cultural production, including (but not exclusively) music (e.g. slave songs, Jazz, Reggae, Hip Hop), theatre (e.g. musical theatre, Vaudeville, literature (e.g. slave narratives, Harlem Renaissance, performance poetry, post-colonial texts, graphic novels), visual arts (e.g. Black Arts Movement, protest graffiti), physical monuments (e.g. Confederate statues, imperial figures). The course thus examines the ways that popular culture is mobilized to advance the collective causes of marginalized and disadvantaged groups in their historical and contemporary struggle for liberation and equality, and how "high" as well as "popular" literature play a role in this.