English

This course examines ideas about seduction, sexuality and race, in early modern poetry, drama, and prose. The first half explores texts that grapple with race and ethnic identity in William Shakespeare’s OTHELLO; Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s DESDEMONA; Keith Hamilton Cobb’s AMERICAN MOOR; and Aphra Behn’s OROONOKO. The second half explores three great poetic sequences of seduction: William Shakespeare’s VENUS AND ADONIS, Christopher Marlowe’s HERO LEANDER, and Mary Wroth’s PAMPHILIA TO AMPHILANTHUS. Debates about erotic versus chaste love, heteronormativity and queerness, will be the focus. The course introduces students to current critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race. It will also attend to questions around literary genre: poetic form (erotic epyllion, sonnet sequence), drama (masque, tragedy), and the emerging novel.

The course invites students to consider the ways in which the investments of literary and critical theory—most centrally language, class, race, gender, and sexuality—have intersected and overlapped in relation to socio-political transformations from the 1970s to the present. Each week is organized around one or more of these intersections, which students address though discussions of critical and literary texts and films. Topics of discussion might include the relationship between waged and unwaged work, and the systems of gender and race that are organized around the poles of this relationship; the construction of categories that are presented as “normal”; the category of the human; the relationship between finance and representation; the politics of visibility; the relationship between aesthetics and social structure; the challenge of trying to define the social, political, and cultural characteristics of the present (and the recent past). 

This course explores the growth and development of popular literature from the Victorian era up to the present day. Students are introduced to key themes and theories of the popular as well as texts and contexts from a wide range of popular genres: crime fiction, fantasy, horror, science fiction, romance, and the newly emerged category of "Domestic Noir" amongst them. Each text is situated within the context of its genre as well as the historical/social context of the time at which it was written. Students are encouraged to think about ideas of “popularity” and “canonicity” and to interrogate the reasons why certain texts and genres dominate the bestseller lists and the popular imagination at different times.

This course presents British and Irish literature through texts related to historical periods and major aesthetic currents in the history of Britain and Ireland. It provides tools for analysis, reading, and argumentation for written and oral expression. The course covers the methods of literary criticism and enriches literary culture through the reading of canonical texts. 

This course examines the literature of the people who lived in the British Isles in the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500), including: the transformations of myth and legend in this period; the study of different medieval approaches to storytelling; intersections between history and the imagination; the treatment of gender roles and relations; and Christian influences on pagan stories.