English

This course gives students a broad grounding in the antebellum literature and culture of the United States, from colonial settlement to Civil War. Focusing on the self-conscious acts of speech and declaration which characterized early attempts to bring the new nation into being, the course introduces students to a range of texts designed to be spoken, including jeremiads, lyceum lectures, and orations. Students are encouraged to think about the powers and limitations of these early American voicings, and they draw on a range of literary media - from travelogues and letters to political pamphlets and legal documents - as well as elements of rhetoric and style, to explore literary experiments set on establishing a distinct, "American" voice. The course's wide historical range offers students the opportunity to develop an understanding of the relationship between literary production and the major social and political issues that shaped the early Republic.

This course explores how the Middles Ages has been rejected, reiterated, and reimagined in modernity. Beginning with the Gothic literature of the 18th century, the course tracks medieval revivals and reworkings across period, nation, and medium to explore how the medieval past is refashioned according to contemporary ideologies. What does it mean to describe an element of contemporary culture as "medieval"? Why and how have people turned towards the Middle Ages to understand the present and imagine the future? In addition to popular medieval literature and major critical and political movements, medievalisms in art, architecture, film, photography, music, and video games are potential subjects of study. Key topics include temporality, authenticity, gender, performance, nationalism, fantasy, racism, and cultural memory. 

This course addresses the literature of the 17th century, tightly defined as the period running from the accession of Charles I in 1625 through the Civil War (1642-9) and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II (1660) to the end of the so-called "early-modern" era in 1700. 

This course provides a comprehensive survey of English literature from its origins through the late eighteenth century. It provides a critical analysis of some of the classical works of English poetry and prose from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, paying close attention to historical context and literary theory. 

This course introduces students to a range of contemporary Irish writings, spanning non-fiction, the novel, short stories and poetry, closely examining the choice of theme, the significance of form, and the nature of the works' impact. In analyzing the depiction of contemporary Irish urban and rural society in contemporary fiction, students engage with ongoing debates concerning the function and importance of literary representation in the context of social crisis and change. The interrogation of Irishness and identity in the course texts is examined as is writers' preoccupation with the transnational and the global.

This course introduces students to the life and work of one of the most significant poets in English literature, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). It also explores Yeats’ influence on modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry. The first half of the course focuses on Yeats’ development as a poet from his early to late years. The second half of the course studies the work of British and Irish poets who have been influenced by Yeats’ writing. These poets include: Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Seamus Heaney (1939-2014), Derek Mahon (1941- ), Paul Muldoon (1951- ), Peter McDonald (1962- ), and others. 
 
Students will have the opportunity to practice writing their own formal poems and participate in peer review of classmates’ work in several poetry workshops. 

This course examines a selection of writings from a variety of national contexts, and analyses a range of texts across the corpus (broadly understood) of the "Coming of Age" narrative. The course explores how writers have responded to the challenge of depicting the complex processes informing how we become who we are, and what we understand to be the rites of passage from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. How do we find "our voice"? What gets in the way of personal growth, or of us feeling wholly ourselves? What is the impact of nature, nurture, education, language, family, geography, and ideology, for example?

This course provides a study of English literature from its origins to the mid-eighteenth century. It analyzes some of the classic poetry and prose works written in England in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

What is “the contemporary”? How has contemporary literature since the turn of the twenty-first century engaged with some of the most pressing social, political, and cultural concerns of the current moment? This course takes the experience and representation of time as its central analytic for examining these questions. Through a range of novels written since the turn of the twenty-first century, the course introduces the emergent social, political, and cultural concerns currently occupying the contemporary imagination.