English

As a survey of American poetry, this course introduces poems written across the span of American history, from 17th-century colonial poets to 21st-century (post)modern poets. The course includes poems from writers of diverse ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, writing in a wide variety of poetic forms and idioms. The course compares the literary features of a variety of types of American poetry coming from a number of distinct historical eras, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic communities.

This course focuses on the works of C.S. Lewis, a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist. This course focuses more on his Christian works, specifically SURPRISED BY JOY, THROUGH THE SHADOWLANDS, THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW, THE LAST BATTLE, TILL WE HAVE FACES, AND THE GREAT DIVORCE. This class requires extensive reading.

This course develops the skills required to analyze and contextualize literary prose. The texts to be studied are predominantly Nordic (in English translation), selected from the long and rich tradition of Nordic folk, fairy, and fantastic tales, from Medieval ballads to Gothic tales and postmodern short stories, animated and fantasy film. More generally, the course investigates a variety of narrative components (e.g. narrator, character, genre, theme), and explores why storytelling has been and continues to be a central human activity, how it has changed over time, and how stories reflect changing conceptions of Nordic societies, cultures, and identities. The course introduces students to a broad range of theories and methods in literary studies including narratology, gender studies, print culture, and monster studies.

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.