English

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. 

This course connects students to the city of Berlin through the study and production of non-fiction writing. In order to understand the rich and complicated past and present of this city, students read non-fiction writing about Berlin from the 1920s to the present. Students also experience the city directly through excursions to important city sites, interviewing locals, and conducting their own research. Students turn these moments of engagement into reflective essays about the sites and people they encounter.

This course examines the ways in which language is being (re)formulated on the Web, especially in multilingual settings. The course focuses on the study and management of electronic language evidence on the Web. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

A workshop in writing based on the reading excerpts from world literature, this course aims to practice writing skills while deepening communication with literature while engaging with peers. Readings consist of short and medium-length excerpts (no whole books) from writers including James Baldwin, Edna O’Brien, Patrick MacGill, Naguib Mahfouz, and Émile Zola. Writing will be shared with the class and discussed. Students will be encouraged (not required) to keep a journal for building on ideas they began in class, sharing excerpts only if they wish to do so. In their final paper, students will be asked to write a short work based on anything in class that affected them—in a personal, aesthetic, political, or any other way.

This course introduces the history of American literature between 1492 and 1865.  

In 1620, John Winthrop pictured the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a model of Christian charity.” In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote down the principles of a new American nation, declaring “all men are created equal.” In 1837, Andrew Jackson ended his presidency celebrating that America was “honored and respected by every nation of the world.” 

To readers living a few centuries later, it is impossible to ignore that American “freedom” has gone hand-in-hand with the capture and enslavement of Black people, indigenous genocide and land dispossession, and inequality before the law and in the labor market for the vast majority of people. Importantly, the irony of Winthrop, Jefferson, or Jackson’s words was not lost on those living when they spoke them: political struggle has attended the development of American society, culture, and economy at every step.  Literature is a key window into the debate and bloodshed surrounding this struggle. Studying the development of language and narrative helps us to highlight the contradictions between American ideals and American reality, to understand the historical forces that produce these contradictions, and to study how everyday people try to build a better world, in the past as today.  

Working within the bounds of 1492 (the year Christopher Columbus “discovered” America) and 1865 (when the US Civil War ended), this course examines the early colonial period in the northeast and Virginia; the war for independence from Britain; the removal of the Five “Civilized” Tribes from the southeast; and the establishment, expansion, and abolition of slavery as US colonization crept westward. The course examines a range of primary source documents -- letters, journals, myths, speeches, sermons, laws, poems, songs, memoir, autobiography, confessions, and more -- to explore the early centuries of the United States. 

This course examines literary classics that have attracted controversy for reasons including political content; issues of morality/obscenity; transgressing conventions of form; polemical works; questions of authorial identity and authenticity; and controversies over prizes and literary merit.

This course explores arguably the most popular of secular literary forms from late medieval and early modern Europe. The course explores a range of chivalric romances alongside a variety of other literary, textual, and material productions that testify to a cultural fascination with the ideals of knighthood and with courtly values more generally. The course pays particular attention to the rise of romance literature in the late medieval period, with narratives that were repeatedly translated into English for socially diverse audiences. It explores particular tropes within romance literature and courtly lyric poetry, particularly in respect of the portrayal of women. It has long been recognized that romance literature was often read by mixed gender audiences and the course explores how the genre functioned to guide female behavior against patriarchal and social norms.

As possibly the oldest representation of embodied difference, monsters have always served as warnings not to stray off the beaten path. They might warn against the dangers that lurk in unknown territories or against engaging in aberrant behavior so as to avoid degenerating into something monstrous oneself. Monstrosity is thus not only a matter of those fantastical beings that we find in science fiction and fantasy narratives, but has always been attached to human bodies as well, or those who are designated as inhuman or less than human. In this seminar, we will engage with literary representations of monstrosity that blur the lines between the real and the fantastical and thematize monsters as both supernatural and otherworldly, as well as real material beings. Analyzing such literary constructions of monstrosity thus allows us to delve into an unconscious realm of social anxieties regarding human difference and non-normative embodiment with special attention to the intersections of race, gender, and disability.