English

This course explores five principal plays by William Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, King Lear, and The Tempest. It introduces students to Shakespeare’s language, poetic form (particularly the sonnet), and dramatic genres—including comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Reading the plays in roughly chronological order, we situate them within the historical and social contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. We also examine the enduring appeal of Shakespeare, considering him not only as a poet and dramatist, but also as a man of the theatre and a cultural icon whose influence has shaped literature, performance, and global imagination for centuries.

For much of its recent history, the development speculative fiction has been driven - sometimes quietly, sometimes less so - by the pages of magazines. This course is about two interconnected things: the place of the short story in the history of science fiction and fantasy, and the place of science fiction and fantasy in magazine print culture of the last 140 years. Students read some of the most iconic short stories in the genre, and also the magazines in which they appeared, tracing the evolution of both genre and medium across the long twentieth century.

This course discusses the relationship between current social issues and dystopian imagination and focuses on evaluation and analysis by putting various Korean texts in dialog with other texts, including classics from around the world. The main goal of this course is to make the fictional horror-based world more culturally relevant to modern society and the world today.  

Topics include how literature is used to explore and comment on political and cultural issues, how classical literature is adapted and interpreted through contemporary cinema and mass media, and the idea of cinema as a literary art form. 

Discussion centers around several texts – films, poetry, music, and a novel - which we will analyze in detail. 

Friedrich Nietzsche infamously declared that God is dead. Later, Carl Jung diagnosed the distinctive illness of the twentieth century as that of a godless age in search of meaning. The twentieth century witnessed a rejection of old, official myths (God, the immortal soul, the nation state, etc.), which are supplanted by new ones that first emerge in so-called low, popular culture. Fantasy texts address various crises of meaning, by providing readers and audiences with new myths, new gods. This course explores the connections between fantasy, popular media and crises in the conception of the modern self, as mapped through events such as WWII, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the triumph of late capitalism, and present-day fundamentalist terrorism. Sigmund Freud asserts that fantasy fulfills unconscious wishes, or 'lacks'. What do our enduring popular myths of roughly the last 100 years reveal about us, individually and collectively? Why are characters like Aslan, Superman, Batman and Bilbo Baggins such enduring figures of the modern imagination, easily translating from medium to medium (cheap paperbacks and comics, to film and TV)? Do they represent a hunger for old authority? Or, could they be archetypes of new humanist liberation? The course addresses these questions and others through analysis of a selection of key comics and fantasy texts.

This course examines how literary and visual works from different periods from across the world engage with Empire, slavery, and their legacies. The course introduces students to the complexities of race, class, gender, and their representations in a variety of expressive forms.

This course allows for a close examination of the Caribbean's creole identity by assessing Caribbean literary and cultural works from the 20th- and 21st centuries. Film, music, religion, literature, and food are explored to specifically examine the influence of slavery on Caribbean culture.

The course discusses contemporary U.S. American graphic memoirs, exploring how comics serve as a powerful medium for autobiographical storytelling. It examines how artists narrate personal and intimate experiences through the interplay of image and text. Students analyze how image and text work together to visualize trauma, self-representation, memory, and resilience—and learn what makes the comic medium such an affective space for narrating stories of illness, displacement, queerness, race, and coming of age. The exploration focuses on both the form and content of these works, analyzing how issues of gender, class, and race are portrayed within these narratives and how they engage with broader U.S. American cultural, social, and political contexts. Readings include a diverse range of voices and styles, from graphic memoirs like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, to more recent works by George Takei, Cece Bell, Nora Krug, and Kindra Neely. As part of the course, students have the opportunity to create their own short graphic memoirs, using accessible tools such as Making Comics by Lynda Barry, Canva, or StoryboardThat. This activity is planned to invite students to experiment with visual storytelling and reflect on their own experiences—no artistic background or drawing skills required.

This course familiarizes students with 20th-century English-language literature through analyzing texts belonging to diverse literary genres: poetry, drama, and prose. It covers works by Joseph Conrad; Henry James; W.B. Yeats; James Joyce; T.S. Eliot; Virginia Woolf; Samuel Beckett; W.H. Auden; Seamus Heaney, and Moya Cannon.

This course explores how poetry can address sustainability issues relevant to participants' professional, personal, and academic lives. Participants are encouraged to use poetry to deepen their connection with sustainability-related themes that are meaningful to them. It aims to use poetry's emotional impact to transform readers into active agents of change. The course extends poetry's potential beyond the literature classroom, encouraging participants to decenter human perspectives through the analysis of poems. The course provides a basic introduction to the tools required for analyzing poetry and facilitates the application of these to poems on various sustainability topics. Concepts from poetry analysis that are covered include the use of figurative language, diction, tone, as well as form and structure. Additionally, the course explores poetry and affective responses by exploring how poetry engages emotions. The course delves into both individual and collaborative responses to poetry and how such responses reshape perceptions of sustainability issues through an affective/reader-response lens. A creative-writing component is also integrated into the course. Participants use the writing of poetry to explore sustainability themes.

This seminar investigates how different recent adaptations engage with the classical nostos epic. During the semester, students discuss the following reworkings of Homer’s Odyssey: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway (2021).