English

Dylan Trigg argues that time and place are the twin pillars of identity, and that selfhood is constructed in the space in between them (A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, xiii). This course is concerned with that space in between, with the ways in which time and place interact to create or facilitate experience in children’s literature. Across a literary chronology that moves from 1954 to 2016, the course provides access points into diverse and complex representations of place and interpretations of time in books written for children and young people. Students engage with a broad range of texts, exploring how the central concepts have developed in the latter part of the 20th century, across a variety of modes and genres, using the core texts as touchstones for discussion and analysis. 

This is a project-centered course, in which students will choose and research a topic of their own choice (subject to approval), with the aim of producing a popularly-oriented non-fiction text which exhibits the fruits of sound scholarship. It examines the structures and strategies of a number of published texts, examining their structure and style, and the variety of sub-genres that can be deployed in writing creative non-fiction.

This course introduces the history of American literature after 1865.

In 1900, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois could hardly have anticipated how enduring that color line would be or how complex it would grow, both in the United States and across the world under American empire. As one example, Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed out in 1967 that while under segregation in the U.S. Black and white men could hardly sit on the same bus, the state was happy to sit them side-by-side in warplanes meant to kill Vietnamese people. Evidently, the color line is entwined with lines of class and nation -- who works, who rules -- in ways we must study closely if the twenty-first century is to look different from the twentieth.

This course examines how these lines have been drawn and redrawn in the post-Civil War era and across the “American century,” from Jim Crow to Banana Republics, from Black Power to what the Zapatistas call “the fourth world war.” Along the way, it studies study fiction, film, and poetry from some of the greatest minds in American culture and politics.

The course features works of authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, George Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., Che Guevara, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

Students should expect to read 10-25 pages of material per week or more. 

This course examines some of the best contemporary writing in English, from a range of cultures. It covers a range of genres including the novel, the graphic novel, short fiction, and poetry. In addition to providing a grounding in contemporary literature, this course focuses on what it means to read and write in the twenty-first century.

This course provides an introduction to the literature of the English Renaissance, studied in a variety of historical contexts—poetic, intellectual, religious, and political. It offers a broad understanding of the most important literary trends in Renaissance England, analyzes the trends as connected with the ideas and socio-political development of the period, and develops critical reading and writing skills in English.

This course provides an introduction to the analysis of discourse and dialogue. It discusses the major theoretical and methodological areas of study in discourse analysis from functional and socio-cognitive perspectives as well as applications in mediated, multimodal, and computational/corpus-assisted settings. 

This course is a dynamic exploration of William Shakespeare’s London and literature inspired by and set in his city. The course is designed introduces students to the historical and cultural milieu of 16th and 17th-century London through a variety of genres, including drama, prose, verse, and broadside ballads. Historical accounts, artefacts, and maps provide context to the rich material for critical reading offered by these texts. Students learn about historical research methodologies while sharpening their literary close reading skills. 

This course introduces students to a range of Victorian fiction. It addresses the content, form, and significance of the Victorian novel and how it develops amid the cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts of 19th-century Britain. It also examines the alternative form of the short story and considers what specific kinds of narrative and narrative effects this form enables. Authors to be studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, Bram Stoker, and William Thackeray.

On this course, students read a variety of Victorian texts from across many genres to explore many different issues and themes including print culture; periodicals and serialization; religious, sexual, national, and ethnic identity; the women’s movement; the crisis of faith; industrialization and the city; ecology; human and non-human animal identity; imperialism. Although the course is structured around the work of major representative writers, students consider a variety of literary and non-literary texts to get a sense of the dynamism and variety of writing and debate in the period. This course examines a range of English writing across the Victorian period, some of it very familiar and some of it neglected or forgotten work. Authors studied vary from year to year, but representative authors include the Brontës, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Braddon, and H. G. Wells. A major focus of this course is the exploration of relationships between literary texts and the historical, social, and political contexts which shaped their imaginative creation. Essentially, this is a course about setting Victorian writing in its intellectual and cultural context.