English

Who has felt authorized to narrate their life history and what has compelled them to tell explanatory stories that make sense of their lives? How accurate is it to call autobiography the history of the self? Do we encounter other histories or selves in autobiography? What is the history of autobiography and how do we read it? Historians reading autobiography for documentary evidence of the past and endeavoring to write about it objectively will find that their task is complicated by the autobiographer’s subjective and often highly creative engagement with memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. This course is intended for students who wish to explore the interdisciplinary links between autobiography, history, literature, and personal narrative, and to acquire strategic theories and cultural understanding for reading these texts.

This course provides a study of literature produced in the United States during the 19th century. It examines cultural diversity throughout history, as it is represented in literature. Its contents cover the following topics: The first literature of the United States, The American Renaissance, Slave narrative and Post-Civil War literature.

Short stories are sometimes revised into longer texts. This can happen for various reasons, ranging from aesthetic refinements to commercial considerations (for instance, the 1950s trend to rework multiple science fiction short stories published in genre magazines into “fix-ups” so as to capitalize on an expanding book market). This seminar will address a selection of American short stories from the second half of the 20th century and their subsequent adaptation, expansion, or incorporation into novel or novel-like formats. Analyzing the individual texts and the changes they undergo from one version to the next will enable us to consider issues of form, genre, narrative, and intertextuality. Texts will include The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950); Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953); Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966); Tracks (Louise Erdrich, 1988), and Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1995/2017).

This course examines the nexus between literature and intercultural communication and analyzes fundamental concepts and principles in the academic field of intercultural communication. The course features excerpts from various books, short stories, and social science articles that treat themes most broadly addressed in intercultural communication research such as identity; the benefits and pitfalls of intercultural contact; personal transformation; discrimination, and cultural change. 

This course traces the premodern histories of contemporary constructions of race and gender, exploring the figuration of these concepts in (mainly) non-dramatic texts from Old English to the 17th-century. Students read works including Old English texts scrutinizing the practices of slavery, early modern women’s conduct books, the diplomatic correspondence between Elizabeth I and the Ottoman “Sultana” Safiye, travel writings by Leo Africanus and Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, and Zadie Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer, THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN. Students draw upon important recent scholarship in Premodern Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Gender Studies, Trans Studies and Queer Temporalities to trace how premodern texts helped to construct, perpetuate, challenge, critique, or explore ideas of race and gender, and how this has shaped our field and our world today. 

This course explores the relationship between literary texts and their precursors. The course moves from the ancient world of classical Greece, Rome, and the Middle East to the present day. Students focus on the transhistorical, however, not chronological. The course introduces some of the ways in which writers speak to one another across and through time, considering what it means for a writer to invoke other literary texts in their work. Students explore different theoretical models for thinking about this relationship, moving beyond ideas of influence to instead consider more creative ways in which texts have existed in relation to one another. 

In this course, students read, view, and analyze a selection of plays, performances, and other texts that pose gender as a central problem. In conjunction with these performance texts, students also read a variety of theoretical texts that offer methods both for interpreting gender in performance and for understanding gender as performance. The course focuses on theatre and performance works produced from the 1950s to the present and covers a range of performance forms, including dramatic realism, experimental theatre, performance art, and drag performance. 

The course educates students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. Students are encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. 

This course offers anyone new to creative writing a chance to learn about different types of writing and to try them out with encouragement, support, and guidance. Students read and discuss inspiring examples of writing (such as poetry, short story, novel, non-fiction and drama) to find literary techniques, craft, and skills that they can apply to their own work. Writing exercises allow students to practice these skills and share their work for feedback. Students also discuss habits and ideas that help them write. Overall, this course offers a welcoming first step to the art of writing creatively.

This course focuses on comic writing for the English stage during one of its most exuberantly creative periods. Beginning with the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and concluding with some of the most daringly sceptical drama of the Restoration period, the course explores the varieties of comic theatre developed over the 17th century, including festive comedy, the carnivalesque, fable, city comedy, and different modes of satire. In doing so, it examines the comic engagement with a range of moral, social and political debates and conflicts, both of the early modern period and in our own time. It also reads the plays in the light of theories of the purposes and workings of comedy, as well as in the context of the very different social and staging conditions obtaining at either end of the century.