English

This course analyses a selection of poems written by authors in English, with special emphasis on the literary and linguistic aspects of the language. It also involves the analysis of poems, the theories that feed poetic creation and its critical reception. The course will consider the status of lyric poetry in Western culture, and the history of the form in English poetry.

This course examines how literary and cultural works address the state of perpetual war of the historical present. Focusing on Third World decolonization contexts, it considers how writers and artists interrogate the gender, racial, and national ideologies that fuel violence, and how literary cultural analysis contributes towards understanding the global unevenly distributed effects of war.

This course explores the interplay of parody, rewriting, and intertextuality in eighteenth-century British fiction and will examine how authors of the period and beyond engage with each other's works and with broader cultural contexts and norms. Through close reading, analysis, and discussion students will gain an understanding of the evolution of the novel form and its relationship to other forms, texts, and contexts.

This course introduces students to English poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Poetry written during this period tends to be formal and stylized as well as public and political in content. Students will learn how to analyze the formal elements of poetry and to identify various poetic genres including the sonnet, epic/mock-epic, pastoral/georgic, and the elegy. The course will address the following questions: How does poetic form communicate meaning? Why do certain poetic forms prevail over others in given historical periods? What kinds of changes do we see in poetic authorship and readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? How do poets engage in conversations with one another? We will begin with shorter poems, progress to longer selections from Milton and Pope, and end with abolition poetry and poems about animals. 

This course fosters creative and critical thinking through the diversification of reading texts and modes of expression (writing, performance, artwork). Students practice various communication skills centered on a specific topic and cultivate creative thinking processes. The course explores various historical forms of communities and examines works related to these themes to reflect on what a truly just community and its leadership should be like. While engaging with the texts through discussions and writing, the course emphasizes creative thinking rather than purely academic understanding. 

Topics include: reading texts without relying on fixed interpretation; seeking answers actively rather than passively accepting traditional responses; how to independently gather materials on a given topic, reconstruct various types of texts (literature, film, art) from one’s perspective, and derive new interpretations; how to organize and express independently interpreted materials from a unique viewpoint; and how to develop a capacity to move beyond exclusive thinking that holds one's own ideas as the only truth. 

This course aims to develop students' English language skills at an advanced level via reading, performing, and writing about various types of drama. Students will read and perform selections ranging from comedy through tragedy to a contemporary play to examine the differences between the English language in drama and English language in other types of written text.

This is an independent research course with research arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific research topics vary each term and are described on a special project form for each student. A substantial paper is required. The number of units varies with the student’s project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student’s special study project form.

This course explores the literary tradition of German women writers, focusing on primary texts by contemporary women writers from the 20th and 21st centuries, with an additional focus on Berlin. The course examines modern German culture, society and the gender politics that create the frame of reference for understanding literary texts.

This course examines the rise of novel reading in English as an educative, aesthetic and passionate practice from the 17th century to the present. The course moves chronologically to examine how novels and the world came to be understood as mutually constitutive, how novels create and sustain attachments amongst their readers, how the genre of the novel became available for interrogations of national, gendered, racial, sexual and class identity, of liberty and intellectual emancipation, and of pleasure.

This course focuses on academic writing, equipping students with a solid foundation regarding its basic components and methods. To this end, students will develop a research project over the course of the semester, starting from the beginning stages of proposing a research topic and question for study, through to the steps of finding and using material from sources, outlining and drafting the paper, and revising and presenting their work. These efforts will culminate in the successful submission of a research paper at the end of the semester. Note: This course assumes that students are familiar with the basic paragraph structure as well as basic essay format—for example, by having taken College English 2: Writing, though this is not a prerequisite nor is it the only way to acquire an understanding of how to write paragraphs and essays. If this is not the case, please be sure to talk with the professor on the first day of class.