English

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. 

Haunted castles, labyrinthine catacombs, wailing ghosts, horrifying revelations, mad scientists, and undead antagonists. These are all part of the constellation of signs associated with Gothic literature. Nowadays, echoes of the historical Gothic are part of pop culture and academic theory alike; in Mark Fisher’s words, “The ghosts are swarming at the moment. Hauntology has caught on. It’s a zeitgeist.” This seminar aims to take a step back and look at where it all started. To this end, we will read key texts from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and examine Gothic aesthetics, temporality, and topology in context. We will try to answer questions such as: what are Gothic literature’s historical/cultural origins? What anxieties were embodied and explored through it? And how did it evolve into the 19th and 20th centuries?

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.

The course analyzes selected English literary works with the emphasis on the 19th-century novel and various modernist genres. The influence and reflection of social developments in literature are addressed, as are the perspectives of cultural and literary history. Basic concepts and methods of literary criticism are applied.

This course offers a timely reassessment of the practice of child acting in the early modern theatre. Exploring the output of companies such as the Children of the Chapel Royal alongside works by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, it questions the repeated use of child and adolescent actors to portray female and sexually marginalized characters on stage; and situates the strategies attendant on boy playing in relation to embryonic queer art-forms such as drag and punning cant.

This course introduces students to Wilkie Collins's THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1859‐60), widely considered to be the first and best Victorian sensation novel. Using online resources, the class reads Collins's novel in instalments, as Victorian readers would have done. Students read 40 instalments over 10 weeks, reading four instalments per week. This relatively small amount of primary text reading per week is guided by specific questions about theme and genre and supplemented with contextual reading from ALL THE YEAR ROUND magazine, other historical sources, and secondary reading on periodical theory. Students examine issues such as women's property and inheritance rights, the marriage market, emerging proto‐feminism, alongside themes of madness, criminality, class, and national identity.  This slow and detailed method of reading and studying the novel not only allows for deep examination of the novel's many plots and subplots, themes, motifs, and generic influences, but also allows students to experience the thrill of the novel's many twists and cliffhangers in the same way as contemporary Victorian readers would have done. 

This course examines important historical, cultural, and social influences on language in the United States. We begin with an historical introduction to the English language in the United States, and then turn to other language varieties, such as Native American languages and languages of major immigrant communities (e.g., Spanish, Asian languages). We will also survey major forms of language variation, including regional dialects (e.g., Southern American English), social dialects, and other forms of socially patterned variation (e.g., youth language and slang). Furthermore, we will examine important controversies such as bilingual education and African American Vernacular English, as well as discuss topics such as language policy, language rights, and recent efforts to restrict and revitalize minority languages. Throughout the course, we will try to not only study language in the United States, but will also explore what this particular setting can reveal about issues of language and society in other contexts around the world.

This course will require students to engage in critical thinking, synthesizing information from a wide range of sources (e.g., textbook, academic journals, videos) on a wide range of topics pertaining to the language situation in the United States and participate actively in class activities (e.g., discussions, debates). Students will also engage in an independent research project, the results of which they will present both orally and in written form.