English

This course introduces students to poetry in English. Working across a wide range of examples, from the ancient through the contemporary, it introduces poetic genres, techniques, and key theoretical debates in the history of poetry. It helps students to make sense of how poetry works, why poets make the choices they do, and how poetic experiences emerge from the conjunction of sound, rhythm, form, the body, lyric subjects, performance, readers and listeners.

This course involves intensive reading on American literary masterpieces. The course begins with an introduction to American literature from 1914 to 1945. Readings include works by such authors as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Mazine Hong Kingston, and Alice Walker. 

This course examines trends in the depiction of European cities in literature and film from the 1980s to the present. It explores the relationship between aesthetic representations and social-cultural contexts, paying attention to traditions of literary and cinematic urbanism while also engaging with contemporary questions concerning urban identity and culture. The course provides students with the opportunity to pursue a substantial research project of their choosing, focusing either on one author's representation of more than one city, or on one city's representation by more than one author (/film-maker etc).

The new twenties of today bear more than a passing resemblance to the Jazz Age that F. Scott Fitzgerald so memorably chronicled. The role of literature itself, on the other hand, has in the meantime changed dramatically. At the centennial of the full arrival of Anglo-American literary Modernism (The WASTELAND and ULYSSES headline the literary milestones published in 1922) this seminar revisits Fitzgerald's oeuvre, guided by the central question: In what way does Fitzgerald, an author tied to a particular era like few others, speak to our own time and predicaments today? The course explores Fitzgerald's life and works in his own context first—against the social and cultural history of the interwar period—and then engage his novels and short fiction through a number of critical lenses and close readings, including Marxist and intersectional approaches (focused on class, race, and gender), ecocriticism, and affect theory, along themes ranging from addiction and celebrity, to masculinity and fascism.