English

This course encourages new readings of American literature through the lens of theories that have developed in the field of gender and women’s studies over the last decades. It introduces a wide array of critical perspectives, ranging from early advocates of gynocriticism and theoreticians of “women’s writing,” to champions of intersectionality, queer studies, masculinity studies, and ecofeminism. The course pays special attention to the development of Black and Chicana feminist discourse and to their contribution to gender politics. It uses key concepts such as revision, mestizaje, silence, queering, performance, empowerment, resistance, embodiment, margin, and center to foster a revaluation of certain canonical or lesser-known texts and, sometimes, to uncover hidden layers of meaning beneath more conventional readings. The literary texts included are drawn from different periods and from a variety of genres (novel, short fiction, poetry) and include extracts from works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Carmen Tafolla, Paula Gunn Allen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Writing the Flâneuse, this seminar course explores representations of metropolitan spaces and experiences in 20th-century women’s writing. The figure of the flâneur – a term used to define a male wanderer and observer of urban life – has long been integral to critical explorations of modernity, from Charles Baudelaire's THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE through to James Joyce's ULYSSES (1922). However, students on this course are introduced to the contrasting feminine figure of the flâneuse – a female wanderer and observer of urban life – across the 20th century, drawing attention to the many re-evaluative efforts to bring matters of gender as well as the centrality of women's writing and experience to the forefront of studies of modern literature. It offers a critical and historical framework for approaching the figure of the flâneuse, reading primary texts alongside key critical works, and further incorporating discussions of space, spectacle, urban geography, mobility, consumer culture and labor. The course follows a broadly chronological trajectory, drawing on examples from novels, short fiction, and poetry by a diverse range of British and North American writers.

The course analyses selected American literary works from the mid-17th century to today. The texts include fiction, poetry, traditional autobiographies as well as hybrid forms. Discussions will focus on aspects such as "truth", gender, race, ethnicity and morals.

The course introduces students to the nature and applications of classical and biblical texts and traditions in English literature. The main premises of the course are that writers are also readers, and that among the factors which contribute to a reader's construction of a text is previous experience of other literature; that people have read the same texts in different ways at different times and found different texts more meaningful at some times than others; that since the 1930s, or thereabouts, we have largely lost easy, personal access to a range of expectations and knowledge of classical literatures and the Bible, which were previously shared by many writers and their readers. The course provides opportunities for students to experience at first hand, from selected texts, some of the literary forms, themes, and characteristic sensibilities of ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel, which provide meaningful contexts for English literary texts.

A century of politeness and Enlightenment, but also one of revolution and filth, the 18th century was a period of excitement and change. The literature of the time both reflects and shapes this perception, and the Irish literary scene is particularly striking for the variety and richness of its literary productions. Many of the 18th century’s greatest writers attended Trinity College Dublin – Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift – while many also attended the city’s brothels and taverns, as well as frequenting Smock Alley Theatre or visiting Marsh’s Library. Different urban and rural venues provide the setting, the stage, or the inspiration for a variety of literature across genres, including poetry, plays, life writing and novels. Many of the male and female writers on this course also had cosmopolitan aspirations, and several moved to London to pursue careers there. The course will highlight these connections between Ireland and England, and indeed France, investigating the realities of authorship and readership across the 18th century. As well as familiarizing students with the literary developments taking place in Ireland, and Dublin in particular, the course also engages with issues such as gender, sexuality, and the commodification of the female body; performance and the self; and politics and national identity. It also draws on the wonderful richness of built literary heritage from eighteenth-century Dublin, and includes a research visit to Marsh's Library. 

As critics including Eric Hayot have pointed out, it can be difficult to analyze and write about contemporary culture because we lack the critical distance to gain perspective on works that depict our own historical moment. This course provides some of that critical distance, or "leverage" as Hayot describes it. Through its comparative approach, the course explores how socio-political topics that are of pressing concern to writers, artists, and thinkers now were also examined in earlier periods. The course illustrates how studying the ways in which these themes and issues were represented and understood in the past enables us to enrich our engagement with the contemporary iteration of those topics today. The course considers a different socio-political topic each week, examining how it has been explored in a pair of texts. The course covers a range of creative works, critical concepts and cultural theories from the 20th and 21st centuries. The genres covered by the course include novels, films, essays, autofiction, memoir, a play, TV episode, and photo-text book. 

This course offers a comparative study and close reading of the major heroic epics of ancient Greece and Rome: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Greece), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Rome). Topics include the warrior ethic, the distinction between kleos (glory) and time (honor), heroic friendship, of nostos (homecoming), fate and the gods, oral vs. written poetry, the social function of epic, myth and epic, and the changing nature of heroism. It also explores more closely the themes of retribution and justice, as they are very starkly presented in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and of human and divine concepts of justice in Sophocles's Antigone.

This seminar is designed to offer students a first insight into the broad range of writings during the Romantic period. It explores a number of the many authors, genres, and thematic facets of the Romantic period, from responses to the French revolution in essays, poetry, and fiction to programmatic turns towards a new kind of poetry, issues of Romantic nature writing, and the Romantic imagination (also in the visual arts). Travel narratives, the concern with science, and finally the socioeconomic contexts of publishing is also addressed. Thus, the literary versatility and (cultural) politics marking the Romantic period comes to the fore within their broader contexts; almost inevitably, gender as a critical category plays a key role.

The first part of this course explores one of the founding works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya’s BLESS ME, ULTIMA (1972), a coming-of-age novel combining magical realism with an exploration of the social and identity issues faced by Chicanos in the modern United States. The second part of the course focuses on Henry Fielding’s THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS AND OF HIS FRIEND MR. ABRAHAM ADAMS (1742), the author’s first full-length novel self-defined as a “comic epic poem in prose.” The course studies narratological issues as well as the social, political, and gender dimensions of the texts.

This course offers students a unique opportunity to spend a whole semester reading one single poem, albeit a very large one: John Milton’s PARADISE LOST (1674). One of the greatest works of English literature, this epic consists of twelve books, most of which we will devote a whole week to reading and talking about. Taking in a range of issues including love, marriage, religion, politics, education, freedom of speech, and the rights of rulers and citizens within a free commonwealth, students see why Milton still has so much to say to us.