Courses & Requirements

ENG-110: The Craft of Writing (4.00)

With literature as a context, this course engages students in critical inquiry through reading, discussion, oral presentations, and writing, emphasizing an in-depth exploration of the writing process from generating ideas to polishing the final draft. Students will learn to analyze texts; develop a significant and focused controlling idea; construct well-organized paragraphs to advance the argument or narrative; use sources effectively; and write and speak with clarity, creativity, and eloquence. They will write and revise frequently and will receive regular commentary on their writing.

ENG-210: Advanced Composition (4.00)

Expository writing for students who wish to develop and refine their use of language and their understanding of the writing process. Emphasis on forms of academic discourse, revision and research writing. Students will write several different kinds of academic essays using topics of their own devising. The mechanics of effective revision will be the focus of the course.

Course requisites: 110

ENG-211: Early British Literature (4.00)

The first thousand years of literature in Britain. The course covers Old English heroic tradition, chivalric romance, medieval satire and renaissance lyric and drama, and the early modern epic. Readings include such authors as the Beowulf and Gawain poets, Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton.

Course requisites: 110

ENG-212: British Literature Since 1700 (4.00)

A survey of multiple forms of British literature written after the Renaissance. We begin with a mock epic, a satiric travel narrative, and an ex-slave's autobiography-all from the eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century literature is represented by several Romantic and Victorian poets as well as a novel by Dickens. The course concludes with a unit on Modernism and samples of postcolonial literature. Authors include Swift, Equiano, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Woolf, Auden, Beckett, and Gordimer. Counts toward pre- or post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: 110

ENG-213: American Writing 1600-1900 (4.00)

TRUE AMERICANS: AMERICAN WRITING 1600-1900--In a 1781 essay De Crevecoeur asked: "What is an American?" Throughout the semester, we will pursue answers to this question. This course is a chronological survey of American literature from its beginnings to the turn of the twentieth century with an emphasis on the formation of a national identity and literary tradition. Canonical and non-canonical works of prose, poetry and fiction will be read in their cultural, social and historical contexts as well as through multiple critical approaches and literary theories. Special attention will be paid to issues of race, ethnicity and gender.

Course requisites: Complete ENG-110.

ENG-214: Survey of Amer Literature 1900-PRESENT (4.00)

Surveying literary movements and their cultural contexts in the United States since 1900, students read across genres to learn about American experiences as they are represented in literary and artistic movements like Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. We will examine the contextual and historical moments in which these movements parallel developments in industrialization and technology, immigration policies, civil and women's rights, military conflicts, theories of multiculturalism, and the rise of digital culture in order to interrogate our national literary tradition.

Course requisites: ENG-110;

ENG-215: Literature of Ireland (4.00)

As a site of constant invasion and as "England's first colony and her last," Ireland has engaged in the struggle for national and cultural identity in its literature from the earliest texts (myths, monastic and bardic poetry, ballads) to the satirical works of Jonathan Swift, the Celtic Revival led by Yeats and Gregory, the Gaelic language movement, the postcolonial subjects and arguments of Irish modernism, representations of The Troubles, and the cross-border, cross-boundary perspectives of contemporary literature. We will explore these and related themes in works by Swift, Edgeworth, Synge, Yeats, Gregory, O'Crohan, O'Casey, Kavanagh, Macneice, Deane, Friel, Heaney, Boland, Carr, and others.

Course requisites: Prereq ENG-110

ENG-216: Topics in Black Writing (4.00)

TOPICS IN BLACK WRITING: Exploration of the varieties of American and international black writing across literary periods. Cross-listed with AS/WS-216.

Description for topic "BLACK WOMEN WRITERS"--Some of the most significant achievements in African-American literature during the past thirty-five years have been made by black women writers, culminating in Toni Morrison's receiving the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. This course purports to connect these recent and contemporary works to the body of black women's literature that precedes it. The scope of this survey will range from literary responses to the experience of slavery to the fictional experiments of the post-civil rights generation. The writers to be scrutinized include Wilson, Butler, Hopkins, Walker, Larsen, Jones, and Youngblood. Their works will be contextualized by way of the intersection of their historical, social, cultural and creative moments.

Description for topic "WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA"--This course will connect recent works from the rich body of literature produced by black women since 1970 to earlier writing by their predecessors. The scope of this survey will range from literary responses to the experience of slavery to contemporary explorations of the black female presence on the global stage. The writers to be scrutinized will include such writers as Wilson, Butler, Hopkins, Walker, Larsen, Jones, Shockley, Levy and Lee. Their works will be interpreted within their historical, social, cultural and aesthetic contexts. Counts toward post-1800 requirement for English majors.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-217: Narratives of Empire (4.00)

Thieves and adventurers, pirates of the high seas and unscrupulous deceivers, wise old men, resourceful teenagers, horse-traders, spies; women, clever, witty, perspicacious; natives, sharp, skillful, and accomplished--a thrilling journey through the British Empire in the process of its formation, from the South Seas and Polynesia to Afghanistan and central India, from North Africa to the Belgian Congo, and the Sudan to southern Africa. Will explore dynamics of domination and exploitation, nature of constructed identities, the dialectic of gender roles and relationships. Texts may include works by Henty, Marrayat, Stevenson, Haggard, Schreiner, Kipling, Conrad, and Forster, among others, as well as films and documentaries. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: 110

ENG-218: Topics in Ethnic American Literatures (4.00)

TOPICS IN ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURES. The study of works by members of ethnically-defined groups (for example, Asian-American Literature or Native-American Literature).

Description for topic "COMPARATIVE ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE"--Whether as a "melting pot," a "salad bowl," or a "mosaic," we know that America is composed of multicultural, multiethnic, and multi linguistic traditions. This course engages a comparative understanding of racialized communities in American literature, including literary productions by authors of African American, American Indian, Chicano/a, Asian American, and Hispanic American traditions. Through comparative analyses, we will regard how textual productions by Americans of different backgrounds understand and negotiate their participation in the development of American cultures. Counts towards post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-219: Gothic Literature (4.00)

In tracing the origin and progress of this genre we shall study works by several celebrated writers of gothic fiction, among them Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Joseph Sheriden Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson, and supplement our literary engagement with a look at some outstanding examples of the gothic in American cinema. To put it all in perspective we will read Fred Botting's informative little book, Gothic, side by side with the novels, romances, and movies that are included in this course. Counts as pre- or post-1800.

Course requisites: ENG-110 or equivalent

ENG-220: Topics in Women and Literature (4.00)

TOPICS IN WOMEN AND LITERATURE--Women as authors and subjects in literature, wherein gender is a central factor of analysis (for example, Early Women Writers or Southern Women Writers). Counts toward pre-1800 or post-1800 requirement depending on topic.

Description for "SOUTHERN WOMEN WRITERS"--The American South has arguably produced a disproportionate amount of the country's most well-regarded authors. In this course, students will examine writing from women living in the southern United States, considering what might make this region, its writers, and its writing, distinctive. Reading texts from a variety of authors, students will think about what aspects might work together to construct the Southern woman's voice--if it exists at all. Texts may include works by Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Monique Truong, Carson McCullers, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Jesmyn Ward. Cross-listed with WS-221.

Description for "EARLY WOMEN WRITERS"--What did it mean for a woman to find her voice at a time when the feminine ideal was to be chaste, silent, and obedient? We will study texts by a servant and a queen, autobiography and fantasy, love poems and tracts, from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Restoration. Cross-listed with WS-221.

Description for "RADICAL KOREAN WOMEN POETS"--This course will investigate radically feminist Korean poetry spanning from Choson Era Korea (16th century) to the present. Students will work to understand major texts written by Korean women writers from both a creative and scholarly perspective. Poets we will study include Hwang Chini and her use of the sijo to express feminine desire, poetry written for and about Korean comfort women. Yi Yonju, a persona poet who adopted the voice of sex workers living on or near American Military bases between the 60s-80s, and the iconoclastic work of Kim Hyesoon and Kim Yideum, two women who are changing the course of Korean poetry in translation as well as apply their ideas to other contexts (i.e. border studies, human rights, women, gender, and sexuality, language and power. Prerequisite ENG-110.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-221: Developments in Fiction (4.00)

Exploration of topics in the history of the novel across literary periods. Counts toward pre- or post-1800 requirement depending on topic.

Course requisites: Prereq: ENG-110

ENG-222: Developments in Poetry (4.00)

Exploration of topics in the history of poetry across literary periods (for example, Lyric Voices or The History of the Ballad).

Course requisites: 110

ENG-223: Developments in Drama (4.00)

Exploration of topics in the history of drama across literary periods (for example, Woman Dramatists or Revenge Plays).

Course requisites: 110

ENG-224: Queer Literature (4.00)

Definitions of identity based on sexuality are relatively recent; in this course, we will survey the historical and social construction of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer identities in literature. Situating texts into frames of literary, social, and cultural representations of queerness, we will historicize the development of non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities in an effort to illustrate that our contemporary ideas about sexuality and LGBTQ identities are informed by various academic disciplines, cultural influences, and political ideologies. Cross-listed with WS-218.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-225: Women and Film (4.00)

This course will focus on the history of film with primary focuses on the achievements of women film directors and on feminist film criticism. We will examine the contributions of women film directors to such film historical moments as the Silent 160 Cinema, the Hollywood Studio System, the international art film, and contemporary independent film. Theoretical considerations will include ideology and genre, gender and spectatorship, and the cinematic gaze. Films for analysis will include the work of Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Agnes Varda, Patricia Rozema, Jane Campion, Cheryl Dunye, and Catherine Breillat. Students will acquire a familiarity with current issues in film studies in addition to an overview of the development of narrative film. Students will utilize an array of critical skills to analyze film as a social/cultural text as well as an art form. Course requirements will include regular screenings, weekly essays, online exercises, weekly quizzes, and a synthesizing final exercise. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. (Cross-listed with WS-225.)

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-227: Southern Women Writers (4.00)

The American South has arguably produced a disproportionate amount of the country's most well-regarded authors. In this course, students will examine writing from women living in the southern United States, considering what might make this region, its writers, and its writing, distinctive. Reading texts from a variety of authors, students will think about what aspects might work together to construct the Southern woman's voice--if it exists at all. Texts may include works by Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Monique Truong, Carson McCullers, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Jesmyn Ward. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. (Cross-listed with WS-227.)

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-228: The Engl Language: History & Controversy (4.00)

For better or worse, English has become the language of the globe, spoken by peoples around the world, millions of whom have a national and cultural identity starkly different from that of the traditional Anglophone areas of Great Britain and the U.S. This course begins with the global present of the diversity of world Englishes, and then scrutinizes the origins of the language, from the misty prehistories of the Indo-Europeans and Germanic tribes, to the earliest records of the language left by the Germanic colonizers of the British island, through the gradual growth of the language to its present status today. Throughout, the course emphasizes the many varieties of the language both across time and at any given moment, from the first recorded varieties to the present, and the relation of these varieties to power and authority; individual, social, and national identity; and discrimination and social inequity. It interrogates myths about English, even ones that haunt its own textbooks. And it considers how events in world history-like the bloody invasions of the British island, like British and American imperialism-have had profound consequences on the very language that we will be speaking in the classroom.

Course requisites: ENG-110 or equivalent, including exemption

ENG-230: Film As Art: Intro to Film Studies (4.00)

This course will focus on the basics of film as an art. Fundamental elements of film, such as editing, sound, cinematography, and mise-en-scene will be explored in relation to the particular storytelling power of films. Emphasis will also be placed on the nature of narrative form in film. Attention will also be paid to the ideological dimension of film and to selected issues in film history and theory. Films for analysis will be drawn from both Hollywood and international cinemas. Special Unit on Irish Film for Global Study Tour: Ireland when scheduled. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-233: Shakespeare & the Folktale (4.00)

Shakespeare based a number of his plays on European folktales: The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, among others. This course examines how Shakespeare adapted these stories for the Renaissance London theater. Counts toward pre-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-234: Shakespeare & the Modern World (4.00)

Even after his death, Shakespeare continues to create. His plays are extraordinarily successful because they are so endlessly adaptable. Japanese films, African dramas, and American novels have all taken Shakespeare's plays as powerful pre-texts for their own works, which fill in blanks, offer alternative perspectives, critique, and remake. We will study a selection of Shakespeare's works and the twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that revise them, both as comments upon Shakespeare and in their own right. Counts toward pre- or post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-235: Human and the Divine in World Lit (4.00)

What is the essence of humanity? What is humanity's place in the cosmos, and what is the purpose of human life? From the very beginning of recorded history and in vastly differing cultures around the globe, human beings have sought answers to these questions through their understanding of their relation to a divine Other. This course examines some provocative and powerful literary meditations on the human/divine relation, meditations spread out over several millennia and originating from five different continents. It explores, among other things, the distinctive ways these meditations seek to account for basic aspects of human experience-for example, gender, sex, racial/ethnic difference, wealth inequity, hunger, yearning, aggression, violence, pain, and death-as well the points of contact among what may seem otherwise quite different works. Cross-listed with REL-299.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-236: Literature & Political Violence (4.00)

American writers have been considering the question of when it is right and just to employ violence for political purposes since, at least, Thomas Paine's Common Sense. In this course, we will consider this question and how Americans have written about political violence and protest over the course of the country's history. We will situate our texts by interrogating events and historical moments that will allow us to contemplate how leaders have used violence for political means, and we will reflect on how these leaders, and the historical events they have precipitated, are depicted in American literature, to better understand how writers shape our understanding of what political violence is. Our explorations of the course theme will include readings by authors such as Thomas Paine, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Tim O'Brien, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzalda, John Lewis, and others. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-238: Fantasy & Race in Medieval Literature (4.00)

This course examines the literary features, ideological aims, and sociocultural significance of medieval fantasy literature, exploring in particular the ways in which race appears and functions in this literature. The geographical and temporal center of gravity is literature produced in Britain in the years 1300-1500, but the course will also consider works of literature produced earlier, later, and elsewhere, including outside of Europe.

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-240: Lit & Leadership: Global Perspectives (4.00)

This course explores varying concepts of leadership by examining a selection of literary texts from across the globe. Based on fundamental skills of critical reading and critical appreciation, it also seeks to explore the role of intuitive understanding, mindfulness, and inclusivity in representations of leadership in literature. The course scrutinizes power structures and the incidence of marginalization, domination, and exploitation within and between societies, cultural groups, and nations, of which the selected literary texts offer a variety of scenarios across a wide range of geographical, social, religious, and political terrains, to contextualize and foreground the struggle of a protagonist in the quest for self-actualization. In mirroring life and its labors, its systems of exclusion and inclusion, these texts present characters and situations from which we can learn much about discovery of self in hostile and inhospitable environments and the ability to inspire and lead others in the process. The course focuses on developing cross-cultural understanding and exploring models of leadership to disrupt and overcome the regimes of marginalization and exclusion. Texts will include novels, movies, plays, biographies, fairy or folk tales, and essays, to be selected from the following works, among others, Joseph Badaracco's "Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature," Plato's "The Trial and Death of Socrates," Sophocles' "Antigone," Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Shaw's "St. Joan," Gogol's "Dead Souls," Achebe's "Things Fall Apart," Ngugi's "Petals of Blood," Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," V.S. Naipal's "The Mimic Men," Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now!," Edwidge Danticat's "Breath, Eyes, Memory," and Malala Yousufzai's "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban."

Course requisites: ENG-110

ENG-280: Perspectives on Literature (4.00)

The foundation course for the English major, introducing both methods of literary research and major concepts, concerns, and figures in contemporary literary theory. This course is designed to make us more intentional readers and writers. As we learn about the assumptions and approaches of selected literary critics and theorists, we will become more aware of our own assumptions and more deliberate about our approaches as critical and creative writers of literature.

Course requisites: One 200-level literature course

ENG-310: Queering the Renaissance (4.00)

Men desiring men, women desiring women, women presenting themselves as men, and men presenting themselves as women abound in early modern plays and poems. This course, which borrows its title from a path-breaking 1994 collection of critical essays, examines English Renaissance texts in which gender and sexual expression are not directed by male/female or hetero-/homosexual binaries. It will also consider literary criticism and modern adaptations of these texts, both for the light they shed on the primary texts and as objects of analysis in their own rights. Counts toward pre-1800 requirement. (Cross-listed with WS-310).

Course requisites: One 200-level English course

ENG-316: Gender, Sexuality, and Canterbury Tales (4.00)

In writing the Wife of Bath's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer took on the persona of a boisterous fivetime widow in order to complain about the myriad ways that men abuse women, and then to tell a story in which Queen Guinevere orders that a rapist knight must go on a quest to discover what every woman really wants. Many centuries later, literary scholars are still arguing about exactly what Chaucer was up to in this cross-dressing, oddly self-interrogating literary performance, but all agree that it raises complex issues regarding sex and gender that remain powerfully resonant today. In this course we will read several works by Chaucer, identifying issues of sex and gender as they emerge in their literary and historical contexts, and considering them also through the lens of contemporary feminist, gender, and queer theory. We will seek to discover both what light that theory sheds on Chaucer's writing and how Chaucer's writing anticipates, complicates, and even evades that theory. Counts toward pre-1800 requirement. (Cross-listed with WS-316.)

Course requisites: ENG-110 or equivalent

ENG-319: Jane Austen (4.00)

Jane Austen's novels have always been popular, respected, and beloved, but contextualizing them reveals how very astute they were in examining the social relations and social problems of her day. This course will focus on close, contextualized readings of Austen's six completed novels. We will consider how these readings illuminate the historical moments in which Austen wrote. How did she conceive of courtship, love, and proper conduct for young women? How do her novels reach beyond these topics and address economic, political, philosophical, and gender issues? How does she use the form of the novel to do all this? What is her legacy for the centuries of fiction that followed her? Counts toward pre- or post-1800 requirement. Cross-listed with WS-319.

Course requisites: Complete any 4-credit 200-level English course.

ENG-320: Performance Approaches to Literature for Children and Young Adults (4.00)

PERFORMANCE APPROACHES TO LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS--The study of literature written for young readers, with an emphasis on translating texts for performance. May be taught in a hybrid format. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. Cross-listed with THE-320.

ENG-321: Studies in Romanticism (4.00)

STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM--Thematic, generic or period studies (for example, British Romantic Writers, Transatlantic Romanticisms, Romanticism Through the Ages, or Romanticism, Orientalism and Imperialism). Description for "BRITISH ROMANTIC POETRY/PROSE"--This course focuses on one of the most remarkable periods of creativity in English literary history that signaled the decline of old feudal structures and ushered in an era of individualism, political revolution, and democratic values. Paradoxically, it also ended up generating a sense of revolutionary elitism and notions of artistic autonomy and cultural superiority that came to represent an important feature of European, and, of course, British, imperialism. Romantic writers, in turn, were heavily influenced by the Orient and freely appropriated its texts, aesthetics, and themes even as they satirized its mores and manners. In this course we shall trace the genesis of the Romantic movement in the reaffirmation of feeling and emotion over the classical (and Enlightenment) values of reason and restraint and study the relationship of the writers and their works to nature, imagination, and folklore, as also to political and cultural changes in England and to the grand design of empire building that was in full swing at this time. Course texts may include writings by, among others, William Jones, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Edmund Burke, Robert Burns, Anna Barbauld, William Blake, Hannah More Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Moore, Byron, the Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

Course requisites: 200-level literature course

ENG-322: The Brontë Sisters (4.00)

Between them, the three Brontë sisters produced a notable corpus of poetry and seven memorable novels, at least five of which have acquired a cherished position in the English literary canon-Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Agnes Grey. The other two, Charlotte Bronte's The Professor and Shirley, are better known to scholars than to readers generally. In this course, we will study the contributions of the sisters to the development of the novel, particularly in the area of the bildungsroman, the novel of (self-)education, and also scrutinize the tussle between the romantic strain of storytelling and the narrative of psychological realism. Taking into account debates about gender and the woman question, as well as ideologies of race, class, gender and empire during the Victorian period, the course will explore how the texts relate to, or are in dialogue with, these debates and ideologies. Central to our study of the assigned texts is the critical examination of relationships, interactions and outcomes among dominant and marginalized cultures, subcultures and groups, such as women, minorities, racial others, and those discriminated against on the basis of class or social rank. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. (Cross-listed with WS-322).

Course requisites: One 200-level English course

ENG-325: African American Fiction and Film (4.00)

The African American novel has proven to be a vibrant and resilient form, giving expression to the experiences and concerns of black people for more than 150 years. Through the representational potentialities provided by fiction, black writers have given witness and testimony to a people's quest for freedom, identity, justice, and equality. A primary category of analysis will be gender, as the reading list will consist of paired texts by female and male writers. A special film component will be available for film studies credit. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. Cross-listed with AS-325.

Course requisites: One 200-level English course

ENG-327: African Americans Abroad (4.00)

This course will focus on the literature produced by African American writers in response to their experiences of expatriation, exile, and travel in Europe and Africa. African American geographical movement is usually associated with the Middle Passage of the slave trade and the Great Migration from the Southern states to the North in the twentieth century. Less attention has been paid an African American diasporic mobility whereby black men and women have ranged far and wide across the Atlantic in search of physical safety, equal treatment, artistic inspiration, political asylum, economic opportunity, spiritual expression, and personal liberation. Some specific issues for scrutiny include: the shifting meaning of an American identity for blacks abroad; the ramifications of encounters with diasporic Africans; the effect of international experience and writing upon the shaping of the African American literary voice and tradition; the critique of America and its institutions and attitudes proffered from a geographically removed vantage point; the heightened ability of expatriate blacks to understand the workings of American racism; and the impact of black women living and traveling abroad. Primary texts will include fiction, essays, travel writing, autobiographies, and memoirs by such authors as David Dorr, Nancy Prince, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Anita Reynolds, James Baldwin, Shay Youngblood, and Andre Lee. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. (Cross-listed with AS-327.)

Course requisites: One 200-level English course

ENG-330: Studies in Literary Genre (4.00)

STUDIES IN LITERARY GENRE--Studies focusing on specific traditional, marginal or innovative literary genres (for example, Modern Drama, Autobiography or The Graphic Novel).

Description for "LIFE WRITING"--From genres like captivity narratives, slave narratives, and commonplace books, to contemporary iterations in memoir, blogs, and reality television, literary life writing matters. Life narratives demand that readers attend to histories, lives, languages, and experiences that are often unfamiliar or different from their own. Reading transnational self-representational texts raises questions about ethics, veracity, memory, and subjectivity, and we will explore these issues and others as we examine how life writers understand and represent selfhood, addressing inherent implications of reading stories of others' lives.

Description for "GRAPHIC NOVELS"--This course looks at the recent explosion in comics. Topics include history of comics in newspapers and counterculture magazines; the rise of graphic memoir; comics theory. Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechtel, Mat Johnson, Alan Moore, Marjane Satrapi, and others.

Course requisites: 200-level literature course

ENG-332: Modernism (4.00)

The Modernists changed the face of literature, working from urban and rural spaces, in and outside conventional borders. This course will study the texts of the Modernists, exploring the different ways in which this group contested conventions and created a new space for artists by continuously challenging perceptions of art and trying to remake old traditions in modern ways. Readings will include both canonical and neglected works from authors such as William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. In addition to literary examples of Modernism, students will examine different media from the period, including film and music. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: Complete any 200-level English course.

ENG-338: Asian American Literature (4.00)

In genres as distinct as short stories, essays, novels, memoir, graphic narrative, and film, this course takes as its focus some of the myriad ways in which Asian American writers have negotiated and articulated a variety of literary positions in the twentieth century. Authors examined in this course explore questions of identity formation in relation to racial construction, international migrations of labor and capital, class, sexuality, military conflict, geography, language, silence, generational conflict, and performance. At the same time, we will consider representations of Asian American experience in literature and in film and discuss the ways in which these texts are in conversation with the term "Asian American." Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: One 200-level English course

ENG-339: Film and Fashion (4.00)

This course will explore the relationship between film and fashion: how the film medium and film culture further the agendas of the fashion industry and how fashion as a category of meaning shapes film narratives. The class will examine fashion as language, as an industry, and as an art. The class will also focus on the intersections of fashion and society and culture. Special topics will include the nature of the fashion system, film and the fashion biography, the fashion designer as auteur, the model as icon and muse, celebrity and fashion, fashion and feminism, fashion and gender, fashion and race, and fashion and sexual identities. Films will be utilized to facilitate these discussions and to serve as the texts for analysis. Reading assignments will include commentary by such contemporary fashion and cultural critics as Christopher Breward, Tim Edward, Elizabeth Wilson, Joanne Entwistle, Fred Davis, Stella Bruzzi, Pamela Church Gibson, Jennifer Craik, Jane Gaines, bell hooks, Valerie Steele, and Sarah Street. We will also consider influential fashion concepts by Baudrillard, Barthes, Simmel, Flugel, Bordieu, Butler, and Veblen. Films for class screening will include works by such film auteurs as Douglas Sirk, Luis Bunuel, and Tom Ford, as well as recent fashion documentaries. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: One 200-level ENG course.

ENG-340: Ethnicity in American Literature (4.00)

This course asks students to examine debates over "authenticity" and representation, the influences of global conflict and border spaces, the resonances of cultural myths and memory, and the role of popular culture and nostalgia in ethnic American literature. We will discuss the many and intersectional ways in which groups are ethnicized and racialized, and how they engage power, geography, and cultural production. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.

Course requisites: One 200-level ENG course.

ENG-342: African Literature (4.00)

This course introduces students to a selection of postcolonial texts from across the African continent. It examines systemic structures of domination and exploitation, colonial and local, and investigates issues of race, class, tribal affiliation, identity, and gender in order to understand both the nature of the societies depicted and the motivating impulses behind the texts we study. The interdisciplinary approach will allow us to identify the residual effects of colonization as well as the internal dynamics of various postcolonial societies in Africa within a historical context. At the same time, we will examine the stylistic, formal, and technical elements to appraise the aesthetic and imaginative qualities of the assigned material. Texts originally produced in English as well as those translated from local languages may be used. Counts toward post-1800 requirement. Cross-listed with AS-342.

Course requisites: Complete any 200-level English course.

ENG-350: Studies in Modernism (4.00)

STUDIES IN MODERNISM--Thematic or generic studies (for example, Modern Poetry, or Virginia Woolf and Modernism). Cross-listed with WS-350.

Description for "ENG-350 WOMEN'S VOICES IN MODERN IRISH LITERATURE"--While women writers have always contributed to Irish literature, their voices and works have achieved new distinction and resonance in the modern era, whether the subject be growing up and living in a colony or a divided country, domestic life, class conflict, romance, politics, the position of women, social criticism, or art. This course examines the poetry, novels, plays, and memoirs of modern Irish women writers as they address the evolving problem of what it means today, and what it has meant since the beginning of the independence struggle in the early twentieth century, to be Irish and female. We will explore the efforts of these writers to identify and pursue new topics for present and future artistic exploration, studying works by writers such as Sydney Owenson, Augusta Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, Kathleen Tynan, Kate O'Brien, Mary Lavin, Eavan Boland, Clare Boylan, Deirdre Madden, Jennifer Johnston, Marie Jones, Edna O'Brien, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Marina Carr, Anne Enright, Vona Groark, and others.

Course requisites: One 200-level English course

ENG-360: Women & Films of Pedro Almodóvar (4.00)

ALL ABOUT WOMEN ON THE VERGE: WOMEN AND THE FILMS OF P. ALMODOVAR. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain's best known film maker, has stood the test of time and come to personify the emergence of a revitalized Spanish culture in the wake of thirty-six years of military dictatorship. In fact, many attribute the international prominence of contemporary Spanish cinema to the popularity of his films beyond the borders of his native country. But while few question the significance of his artistic vision, his works have often aroused strong criticism, in spite of his own claims that he "loves women," for the sometimes-questionable treatment of female characters. In addition to viewing a selection of films by Almodóvar, students will read and discuss the different kinds of texts that have been written about his films (i.e., scholarly journal articles, newspaper reviews and popular opinion) as well as consider more general notions regarding the interpretation of film and the portrayal of women in the arts. Cross-listed with SPA/WS-360.

Course requisites: ENG-110 prereq required (or permission)

ENG-366: Queer & Trans Film Theory (4.00)

This course provides an introduction to LGBTQ+ film theory through contemporary cinema. Students will draw on foundational film concepts (such as shot, scene, editing, sound, and mise-en-scene) to analyze queer and trans film cinema. Attentive to the intersections of gender and sexuality with race, class, disability, regionalism, nationalism, and other axes of oppression, the course content may include topics in HIV/AIDS activism through film, queer-of-color critique, post-colonial and Third Cinema, and disability film studies, among others. Cross-listed with WS-366.

Course requisites: WS-110 (Intro Queer Studies) or ENG-230 (Intro Film Studies)

ENG-480: Senior Research Seminar in Literature (4.00)

This capstone course enables the senior English major to pursue independent research in a seminar setting. The course focuses on identifying, articulating, and responding to significant research questions-initially in the works of others and then as crucial stages in the development of the student's own critical essay (about 25 pages of writing). Working with a faculty adviser who serves as a content expert, the student explores a topic and develops the inquiry into a substantial scholarly essay, revises the work to high standard, participates in peer workshops, and presents the work at a public event. For the relationship of this seminar to senior independent study, see 490 (literature).

Course requisites: Restricted to senior English majors