English

This course explores the age of reason, revolution, and Romanticism through focusing on two generations of a single literary family: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It will place the writings of Wollstonecraft and Godwin within the context of intellectual life in London during the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution. The second half of the course examines Mary and Percy Shelley's inheritance from Godwin and Wollstonecraft through fiction, poetry, and life-writing. A central theme of the course is finding ways to describe the complex literary relationships between members of the family and their circle, which extend beyond traditional models of literary influence towards a form of collaborative authorship. It also asks why writers who were attacked in their day for undermining the institution of the family have attracted increasing critical attention highlighting their identity as a family. Topics which students may choose to focus on include literary responses to the French Revolution, the beginnings of modern feminism, literary celebrity, life-writing, and literature and science. 

This course requires international students to facilitate ten conversation sessions in their maternal language (English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) to French-speaking students. The conversation groups have a maximum of seven students. At the end of the semester, conversation workshop teachers are graded based on evaluations by the French students and a reflective report assignment.

The purpose of the course is to improve students' professional and creative writing abilities through the monthly publication of an online journal: taidajournal.tumblr.com. Students work together as a team to publish each issue, writing and editing stories. News stories as well as those that lean more toward creative writing are accepted. The class includes group discussions, workshops, peer editing conferences, and in-class presentations. Students usually spend the first week of the month presenting their ideas to the class and commenting on their classmates’ ideas.

In this course, students learn to read early forms of English language and literature, using specially edited texts from Old English, Middle English and Older Scots. They also encounter and gain a critical understanding of Renaissance verse, via the study of John Donne's poems and Milton's Paradise Lost.

In this course, students develop their own non-fiction writing, short or longer, through the study of course materials, class discussions, and workshop sessions. Course topics include sport, science, political, and autobiographical writing. The course enables students to develop and draft a number of related or unrelated essays and other creative non-fictions, and to gain an understanding of the writing workshop process.