English

This course explores the basic principles of writing prose fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction using a mixture of reading, writing, peer appraisal, and group project work. Students learn to critique, review, and appraise written work, from creative and critical analysis perspectives, applied in both individual and group-focused settings. They gain greater proficiency and abilities in intensive, in-depth, and extensive creative writing and reading, and they extend their capacity for creative and critical self-reflection. Students develop abilities in independent analysis, judgment, critical evaluation, and thought, in conjunction with progressing redrafting, revision, research, and note-taking skills. They also develop technical writing skills, basic publishing and design skills, and facilitate greater understanding and knowledge of editorial and publishing processes, in particular proof-reading, copy-editing, and various aspects of typesetting, design, and layout.

In this course, students study two classic Victorian novels alongside poetry, drama, essays, scientific writing, and paintings and visual material. The course demonstrates the extraordinary range of experimentation in Victorian literary writing and art in this period. For example, students read Dickens's DOMBEY AND SON to think about modernity and machines in the 1840s, but also to think about the sea and the maritime nature of the British empire. Other seminars are spent finding out what the Victorians thought and felt about nature, gardens, animals, science, sexual pleasure and pain, religion, the violence of British imperialism, environmental exploitation, a growing commodity culture, capitalism, and the changing status of women. 

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.