English

The persistence and exacerbation of social and economic inequality in the so-called post-colonial, globalized, or post-racial era has renewed scholarly and popular interest in the relationship between racism and capitalism. This course will examine key works of history, criticism, literature, and pop culture to understand this historical and structural relationship in the context of the United States. 
 
Because this is a graduate course, students enrolled in this course should be prepared to spend several hours outside class time each week reading and watching the course material -- on average per week, 50-75 pages of historical/critical work + 150 pages of fiction. 
 

This course focuses on twenty-first century U.S. fiction. It includes reading works from five to six authors for each section of the course. One half of the course focuses on twenty-first century transnational American fiction: texts that situate the United States at global scales (hemispheric, transatlantic, and transpacific), often with an emphasis on migration. The other half of the course focuses on twenty-first century U.S. fiction that raises and explores questions of selfhood, identity, and gender. Both parts of the course examine how the themes and forms of twenty-first century U.S. fiction relate to the changing identity of the nation, the state, and the self in today’s globalized world. 

The course focuses on the most important 19th century Russian writers with the view to introduce students to their works and ideas. It examines the main socio-political and cultural trends in Russia and in Europe that influenced such writers as Pushkin, Gogol', Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. This course is idea-led: it examines in depth several key themes clearly outlined at the beginning of the course. The list of main themes includes: the legacy of the Enlightenment and the representation of madness in Russian literature; the inter-relationship between the author and the government; the representation of St Petersburg in literature and the construction of Russian national identity; the criticism of Russian imperial policies; the emergence of nihilism and positivism in Russia; and the ongoing dialogue between Russia and the West. The course develops students' literary analytical skills, and enables them to gain deeper insights into the major themes explored by Russian most influential 19th-c. writers as well as into the techniques employed in their works.

Shakespeare occupies an iconic position in English literature and acquaintance with his plays is expected of the informed reader. This course offers an introduction to a representative range of Shakespeare's works. It approaches them through genre and the informing background of English Renaissance history, culture, and politics. By the end of the course, students have a good understanding of the major themes of Shakespeare’s plays and the milieu within which he wrote and performed.

Old English was the language spoken and preserved in written texts up to the mid-eleventh century CE in the regions of the British Isles. It developed from the languages spoken by Germanic peoples coming to Britain from the continental mainland and presents the earliest precursor of Modern English. In this course, we will focus on Old English texts written in verse, exploring their themes, styles, meanings, and the challenges of dealing with a language surviving only in a small number of often unique and damaged manuscripts. Texts we will be reading include heroic poetry, such as Beowulf, elegies, as well as Old English versions of Biblical texts. The focus of our readings will be on the question of how such texts portray concepts of gender, how they construct but also deconstruct gender roles, and how they relate to gender theory in the 21st century. Students will be introduced to the grammar and pronunciation of Old English and will use their knowledge to work with the original texts alongside Modern English translations.

In this course students explore a variety of representations of modern urban United States, focusing specifically on New York and Los Angeles. Students are looking at a number of different genres of writing - fiction, poetry, travel narrative, and screenplay to consider the ways in which the city has been depicted in American literary culture. The relationship between aesthetics and urban geography is also examined through reading a number of key theorists alongside the primary texts. The course encourages both close critical engagement and conceptual thinking about the ways in which city spaces function as part of modern culture.

One of the primary functions literature serves is as a vehicle for memory. From the portrayal of national histories, to the embodiment of collective myths, to the expression of individual identities, literature has both lent authority to and constructed contentious arguments for our image of our past. The literature of central and eastern Europe is particularly rich in explorations of history and memory. While in earlier times literature was called upon to lend social and historical legitimacy to communities without nation-states, more recent literature of the region has played a major role in attempts to come to terms with the catastrophes of the 20th century.

This is an intermediate English Historical Linguistics course which should be taken after studying the basics of linguistics offered in CO201 Introduction to Language Studies and/or CO202 Introduction to English Linguistics at this school or anything equivalent to these anywhere.  

Building on the knowledge from these introductory courses, this course investigates the internal linguistic development of the English language from a synthetic to an analytic language, i.e. loss of inflections, depending on a more fixed word order, and emerging periphrases and function words such as auxiliaries and prepositions in constructing sentences. It also delves into the external influences on the English language throughout its history, namely, lexical borrowings from Greek, Latin (Classical and Medieval), Old Norse, and (Norman-)French words. 

The course first studies selected features of pronunciation, spelling, and grammar of English from its earliest stage of development. It also considers the cultural, social, and political aspects of the external history of English, especially in terms of vocabulary.  

By the end of the course one will have understood why the English language has become the lingua franca of the world but, for many speakers of it, whether native or non-native, ‘”English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but the most difficult to use well’ (C. L. Wrenn, The English Language, 1977, p.9). 

This course introduces students to a varied range of 14th- and 15th-century English and Scottish literary texts: allegory, romance, dream vision, meditation, lyric, and drama. Through these texts students explore the medieval imaginative models of the physical and metaphysical world, considering issues such as society, the body, gender, God, love, and death. Visual images and other kinds of writing and commentary are considered alongside the literary texts, to develop an understanding of the imaginative world which the literature both emerged from and helped to shape.