Courses

Reading changes your life. Sometimes it's a specific book; sometimes it's a way of reading that's new and different. This course will introduce different ways we can read and write about books and media, and their life-changing potential. Designed as an introduction to literary studies, the class will sample different approaches, including (but not limited to) media studies, the novel ("classical" as well as "young adult," whatever that means), graphic novel, memoir, short stories, poetry, and drama. There will be guest speakers representing a range of different approaches. Emphasis will be on building skills and creating community. This is a course for bookworms and wannabe bookworms who want to know what to do next about how books move them.

Full details for ENGL 1100 - How Reading Changes Your Life

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of culture or subculture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures

Our human abilities to communicate about nature, the environment, and climate change are challenged by the scale and scope of the topics. This course enables students to read, write, and design forms of communication that engage with the environment, in order to inform, advocate, and to connect with our world. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1130 - FWS: Writing the Environment

How do we understand the reality of others? For that matter, how do we know and understand our own experience? One answer is writing: writing can crystalize lived experience for others. We can record our observations, our thoughts, our feelings and insights and hopes and failures, to communicate them, to understand them. In this course, we will read nonfiction narratives that explore and shape the self and reality, including the personal essay, memoir, autobiography, documentary film, and journalism. We will write essays that explore and explain these complex issues of presenting one's self and others.

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

What does it mean to be healthy? How do we describe our pain? Who becomes a physician? The practice of medicine isn't confined to scientific knowledge: it raises difficult questions about culture, identity, and bodies, and the stories we tell about all of these. This course will focus on works of literature and media to think about how medical care changes across time and place, and to explore images and narratives that shape our expectations about illness and health. Short writing assignments and longer essays will develop your critical thinking, strengthen your writing skills, and build your awareness of the complex cultural landscape of medical care.

Full details for ENGL 1140 - FWS: Writing Medicine: Stories of Illness and Healing

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of American culture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

How does race inform the way we understand the world around us? How do writers explore their experiences of race and colonialism to challenge conventional notions of nation, citizenship, knowledge, and self? In this class, we engage materials that complicate our ideas of race in order to imagine new forms of identity, social life, and political possibility. We engage with creators who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, or from the Global South. The works we study may include podcasts, graphic novels, memoirs, poetry, plays, or films. Writing projects may be critical, creative, or research-based, as we develop our understanding of race and identity and by extension our capacities as writers.

Full details for ENGL 1160 - FWS: Intersections: Race, Writing, and Power

Reading is experiencing a new revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We still read paper books, but we also read by scrolling on screen, through search engines, and in images and memes. What kinds of texts are emerging in this new era, and how do we read them? How do writing—and our ways of reading—connect with the urgent topics before us now: technology and social control, truth and media, climate change and apocalypse, identity, equality, and human rights? This course will examine the past twenty years of writing in a variety of genres, printed and/or online, from fiction to memoir to poetry and beyond. As we read, we will explore and discover the forms that our own writing can take in response.

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Reading Now

From TV news to rock lyrics, from ads to political speeches to productions of Shakespeare, the forms of culture surround us at every moment. In addition to entertaining us or enticing us, they carry implied messages about who we are, what world we live in, and what we should value. Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all are built on the assumption that learning to decode these messages is a survival skill in today's media-saturated world and also excellent training for reading literature. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

What can a short story do that no other art form can do? We all consume and produce stories. To write about how narrative works, both within and against tradition, is to touch the core of identity, the quick of what makes us human. Storytelling informs all writing. Engaging diverse authors, we will practice not only reading sensitively and incisively but also making evidence-based arguments with power and grace, learning the habits of writing, revision, and documentation that allow us to join public or scholarly conversation. We will embrace "shortness" as a compression of meaning to unpack. Our own writing may include close analyses of texts, syntheses that place stories in critical dialogue, and both creative and research-based projects.

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

What happens when we adapt books into movies, write fan-fiction about video games, or create poetry about paintings? What happens when we write about one genre as though it were another? We have been writing about images and making images about writing for a long time. In addition to conventional types of art and literature like paintings, novels, or poetry, other forms such as film, video games, exhibitions, and virtual reality offer lively areas for analysis. In this class, we will engage with widely varied cultural forms—including, perhaps, experimental poetry, medieval manuscripts, graphic novels, memoirs, plays, films, podcasts, and more—to develop multiple media literacies as we sharpen our own writing about culture, literature, and art.

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with the subject of British literature. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

Groucho Marx once said, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." What is the literary significance of comedy? Why do we use it, and why do we enjoy it? What's funny—and who decides what classifies as funny? Does humor bring us together—spanning the gaps between cultures, identities, and time periods—or does it set us further apart? This course will use comedy as a lens through which to explore the development of literatures in English from 1750 to the present. To investigate these questions, we'll be studying texts by celebrated humorists, such as Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ali Wong. We will also explore the uses and effects of humor in works by less traditionally comedic authors, including Dean Mohamed, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado, Larissa FastHorse, and Helen Oyeyemi.

Full details for ENGL 2020 - Literature in English II: 1750 to the Present

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2080 - Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

Romances were, essentially, medieval science fiction and fantasy writing. They were how authors in the Middle Ages imagined things beyond rational understanding that, at the same time, greatly extended the possibilities of the world around them.  The course will survey some medieval narratives concerned with representative voyages to the otherworld or with the impinging of the otherworld upon ordinary experience. The syllabus will normally include some representative Old Irish otherworld literature:  selections from The Mabinogion; selections from the Lays of Marie de France; Chretian de Troye's Erec, Yvain, and Lancelot; and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  We will finish by looking at a few contemporary otherworld romances, such as selections from J.R.R. Tolkein. All readings will be in modern English. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2100 - Medieval Romance: Voyages to the Otherworld

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musicals-and how, in turn, musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent.

Full details for ENGL 2150 - The American Musical

This course looks at the American Gothic tradition as showing us the fissures in early American political life specifically around the issues of slavery and Native American land rights. While Gothic literature is often relegated to the role of entertainment, it also reveals the ways in which American culture was, as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, "shaped by the presence of the racial other." The Gothic also offers a space through which to offer not just clever observations but scathing critiques by augmenting the sense of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism.

Full details for ENGL 2635 - A Haunted House Divided: The American Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Literature

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Full details for ENGL 2703 - Thinking Media

POW! ZAP! DOOM! This is a class about how we can draw together, studying a medium that is based in the practice, in all senses, of "drawing together." We will read Pulitzer winning memoirs and NSFW gutter rubbish. We will trace the history of sequential art from about 1898 to the present, including caricature, pop art, and meme cultures, Wonder Woman and Wimmin's Comix, Archie and archives. Studying comics requires us to entangle disciplines and to make things: graphic design, marketing, media studies, law, education, and various illuminated cosmologies. What is this medium that teaches us to read the page anew, to speak in bubbles, to witness and play with apocalypse, to enjoy our suspension in the infinite, and to indulge in graphic sensations?

Full details for ENGL 2785 - Comic Books and Graphic Novels

An introductory course in the theory, practice, and reading of fiction, poetry, and allied forms. Both narrative and verse readings are assigned. Students will learn to savor and practice the craft of poetry and narrative writing, developing techniques that inform both. Some class meetings may feature peer review of student work, and instructors may assign writing exercises or prompts.

Full details for ENGL 2800 - Creative Writing

This course offers guidance and an audience for students who wish to gain skill in expository writing—a common term for critical, reflective, investigative, and creative nonfiction. Each section provides a context for writing defined by a form of exposition, a disciplinary area, a practice, or a topic intimately related to the written medium. Course members will read in relevant published material and write and revise their own work regularly, while reviewing and responding to one another's. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term. Topics differ for each section.

Full details for ENGL 2880 - Expository Writing

This course will explore how in the body of world literature humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning.  Spanning from ancient epic and origin myths through nineteenth century novels and colonial narratives to contemporary science fiction, we will inquire, through our reading: what is a world?  How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world and deconstruct or undo worlds?  Readings will range widely across time and world space (with authors such as Hesiod, Balzac, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Bacigalupi) and will include attention to contemporary theories of world literature.

Full details for ENGL 2971 - Reading for the End of Time

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

Full details for ENGL 2999 - The First American University

Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "darker side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf

Chaucer became known as the "father of English poetry" before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not just because he is the granddaddy of this language and its literature; it's because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical and, oh yes, notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's brilliant early work, and then dig into his two greatest achievements: the epic Troilus and Crisyede, and The Canterbury Tales, his oft-censored panorama of medieval English life. Chaucer will be read in Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and pleasant. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3190 - Chaucer

This course is designed to explore the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics through careful attention to literary explorations of the complex problem of evil in a range of literary and visual texts including genres from myth through poetry and drama to painting and film. We will read and study excerpts of works from Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, through Shakespeare, Cervantes, María de Zayas, Leibniz, Milton, Hieronymous Bosch, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The recurring questions for us along the way will be about the role of reading and interpretation in relation to the problem of evil and what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the "richness of the real." This class may be used toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3245 - Evil: The Literary Question of the Human

This course will begin with some of the earliest theoretical works on personal and historical trauma and pass through several traditions of interpretation (French, American, etc.). Then we will move to more recent attempts to rethink the theory of trauma as it crosses cultural and linguistic borders outside of Europe and the US. Among other questions we will consider the relations among personal, collective, and political trauma and address the imperatives and challenges of thinking trauma in a global context.

Full details for ENGL 3452 - Trauma Across Borders

Jane Austen and zombies, A Christmas Carol in 3D, PBS miniseries: why is nineteenth-century fiction so un-dead? The plot of the Victorian novel—sexual betrayal, pathological greed, the sadistic damage wrought on helpless children—reflects wrenching social, scientific, and technological transformations whose global sweep rivals that of our own era's conflicts. Intertwining domestic and imperial spaces, realistic fiction embodied the most innovative attempt to grasp and contain such seismic shifts in an entertaining idiom for a rising mass readership. These works refract the cultural debates of the age and suggest sources of redemption. We can take pleasure in them even as we critically analyze how the Victorians live now. Likely authors include: Dickens, Gaskell, Brontë, Eliot, Collins, Schreiner, and Hardy.

Full details for ENGL 3470 - The Victorian Novel

How have Irish playwrights reached out to the world, how do theatrical productions travel internationally, and how do dramatists adapt their work to local audiences in a global marketplace? We will journey with Lady Gregory onto American campuses, see Beckett staged in Sarajevo, and consider how contemporary playwrights reflect on cultural tensions within Ireland: debates about immigration and emigration, the influence of new media, and the social impact of global financial crises. What performance strategies are embedded in the mobility of exiles and émigrés? What becomes of a National Theater in a transnational world? How are actors trained in Ireland today, and how does the Irish accent sound as it projects across borders? In addition to canonical and contemporary plays, we will consider dance and film performances.

Full details for ENGL 3515 - Ireland's World Stages: Drama and Mobility

"My existence is a scandal," Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of "art for art's sake" and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or obscene, the Decadent writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, A. C. Swinburne, and especially Oscar Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, and design.

Full details for ENGL 3550 - Decadence

How can we account for the contemporary popularity of podcasts? In what ways do they build on, and break from, earlier forms of writing for the ear? In this class we will study innovative podcast fictions like Welcome to Night Vale, Forest 404, and Homecoming together with pathbreaking aural works of the 20th century, from The War of the Worlds to John Cage's Roaratorio and albums by the Firesign Theatre. We will consider the new opportunities and challenges of the podcasting medium, making our own recordings along the way. And we will look at well-known authors — from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas to Ursula Le Guin and Amiri Baraka — who experimented with then-new technologies like the gramophone, radio, audiotape, LP, headphones, the Walkman, and more. 

Full details for ENGL 3615 - Podcast, Radio, Gramophone: Literary Technologies of Sound

What is (or was) American empire? This course examines U.S. literature from WWII to the early 21st century. This period has been termed the "American century" because of the U.S.'s dominant role in shaping global politics and culture, a dominance backed by military interventions abroad and the rise of the police state at home. How do the era's writers negotiate and challenge the police, military, and imperial powers of the U.S. state? We will place fiction, poetry, and essays in conversation with historical documents and policies, asking how literature has imagined an end to the American century.

Full details for ENGL 3630 - U.S. Literature and the End of the American Century

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Full details for ENGL 3741 - Design Thinking, Media, and Community

This course focuses upon the writing of fiction or related narrative forms. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. Many students will choose to write short stories, but excerpts from longer works will also be accepted.

Full details for ENGL 3820 - Narrative Writing

This course focuses upon the writing of poetry. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work.

Full details for ENGL 3840 - Poetry Writing

Writers of creative nonfiction plumb the depths of their experience and comment memorably on the passing scene. They write reflectively on themselves and journalistically on the activities and artifacts of others. The voice they seek is at once uniquely personal, objectively persuasive, and accessible to others who want to relish their view of the world and learn from it. This course is for the writer (beyond the first year of college) who wants to experiment with style and voice to find new writerly personae in a workshop environment. During the semester, we'll read models of literary nonfiction, including one another's, and work to develop a portfolio of diverse and polished writing.

Full details for ENGL 3890 - The Personal Voice: Nonfiction Writing

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

Full details for ENGL 3910 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled "The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming." This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka).   Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today's world ("what they knew") as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

Full details for ENGL 3920 - Introduction to Critical Theory

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for ENGL 3934 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, Spanish, and German leftist political figures like Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Dolores Ibarrui, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? What is the political utility of autobiographies like these? With special attention to the question of gender, ethnicity, religion, and race.

Full details for ENGL 3989 - The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth

The seminar focuses on Shakespeare's last plays including those known by the generic title of 'romances' – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest – as well as his collaborations – All is True (Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and finally the currently much discussed 'lost play' Cardenio, which links Shakespeare in intriguing ways to that other great writer of the early modern period, Cervantes. As we study the final works of Shakespeare's career, we will consider the critical-theoretical question of lateness itself. What is a "late" work? What does that mean specifically in the case of Shakespeare? We will pay particular attention to dramatic form and historical context – including ways in which the plays themselves call the notion of historical context into question.

Full details for ENGL 4270 - Advanced Seminar in Shakespeare

Though it now seems a positive character trait, curiosity was long considered a dangerous vice. What happened to bring about such a dramatic change in how curiosity was valued? What might make this desire to know dangerous or promising? This class places these questions at the center of its exploration of science and literature. We will explore the lives of historical scientists alongside literature's myriad stories of men and women who knew too much, including spies, mad scientists, and nosy children, from Adam and Eve and Alice in Wonderland to Doctor Faustus and Doctor Frankenstein.

Full details for ENGL 4421 - Curiosity: The Science and Literature of Knowing Too Much

This seminar will investigate the narrative uses of history and memory in US fiction, focusing particularly on the impact of gender on these representations. How do US writers use history in their fiction, and to what ends? What are the effects on drawing on received historical narratives? What challenges does the attempt to represent a historical event pose for a writer of fiction and how might the author negotiate those challenges? Is History a gendered category and, if so, would "male" and "female" and "trans" histories be narrated differently? We will look at the effects of constructing one's own history to fill a void in the received historical narrative, exploring the relationship between history (or History) and memory as well as the fictional representations of that relationship.

Full details for ENGL 4521 - Gender, Memory, and History in Twentieth Century Fiction

This seminar will read key texts in critical video game studies to consider how race, gender, indigeneity, and sexuality shape the code and the machines that we play. In addition to critical readings by scholars in Indigenous studies, Black feminism, and video game studies including Joanne Barker, Christine Sharpe, Bo Ruberg, and, we will also read creative works by Mark Danielewski, Gabrielle Zevin, and Elissa Washuta among others to consider how books, narratives, and non-fiction essays transform in relation to video games.

Full details for ENGL 4680 - Critical Approaches to Video Games

This class offers the opportunity to read James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses in relation to major concepts and methods of media studies, book history, and material text scholarship.  Challenging, multifarious, and often very funny, Ulysses takes place over the course of a single day in the colonized metropolis of Dublin at the dawn of the age of global communications.  Drawing upon the unique resources of Cornell University Library (including its important collection of Joyce manuscripts) and Cornell Cinema, this class will attend to the numerous forms of media Joyce describes and imagines, to the conditions of print publication that made the novel possible (and others that tried to ban it), and to the electric and electronic media art that responded to Ulysses and tried to reproduce its effects.

Full details for ENGL 4700 - Reading the Media of Joyce's Ulysses

This course is intended for creative writers who have completed  ENGL 3840 or ENGL 3850 and wish to refine their poetry writing. It may include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. In addition to the instructor's assigned writing requirements, students may work on longer-form verse writing projects.

Full details for ENGL 4800 - Advanced Poetry Writing

This course is intended for narrative writing students who have completed ENGL 3820 or ENGL 3830 and wish to refine their writing. It may include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. In addition to the instructor's assigned writing requirements, students may work on longer-form narrative writing projects.

Full details for ENGL 4801 - Advanced Narrative Writing

The purpose of the Honors Seminar is to acquaint students with methods of study and research to help them write their senior Honors Essay. However, all interested students are welcome to enroll. The seminar will require a substantial essay that incorporates literary evidence and critical material effectively, and develops an argument. Topics and instructors vary each semester. For Spring 2024 the topic is: Paradise Lost. This class counts toward the pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Full details for ENGL 4910 - Honors Seminar I

This course is the second of a two-part series of courses required for students pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English. The first course in the series is ENGL 4930 Honors Essay Tutorial I.

Full details for ENGL 4940 - Honors Essay Tutorial II

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ENGL 4950 - Independent Study

Seemingly timeless concepts of natural sex and gender have a history. In fact, they have many histories, some of which are only just starting to be written. This class examines the relationship between the (human and non-human) natural world and concepts of sex-gender variance in pre- modernity. It asks: How might crossing pre-modern conceptions of sex and gender with those of our contemporary moment lead us to approach cultural objects from the past differently? And what can pre-modern sources reveal about the histories behind the sex-gender diversity of today's natural world? We will pursue these questions through readings of contemporary scholarly literature on the topic and through the analysis of historical examples comprised of visual and textual materials studied in translation.

Full details for ENGL 4989 - Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture

Taught by curators and archivists in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, this seminar provides an introduction to the analysis of books and unique archival documents as physical objects. Students will work hands-on with rare materials in the Carl A. Kroch Library to learn the skills necessary to pursue original research dependent upon locating and studying primary sources such as rare books, archival collections, photographs, and other unique artifacts. Topics covered will include descriptive bibliography and the analysis of books (their manufacture, distribution, and audiences), an introduction to archival arrangement and description, and how to navigate institutional repositories of rare materials. Students will also have the opportunity to discuss strategies and methods for locating materials related to their own projects or areas of study.

Full details for ENGL 6050 - Archives and Artifacts

Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "darker side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English.

Full details for ENGL 6120 - Beowulf

Chaucer became known as the "father of English poetry" before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not only because he was the model for a number of key literary forms and features, or because he opened projects that invited participation and imitation. It's also because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical, scientific, and notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's early work against a few of his own models, then dig into his two greatest achievements: Troilus and Crisyede and The Canterbury Tales.  We'll learn to read Chaucer's Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and rewarding.

Full details for ENGL 6190 - Chaucer

This graduate seminar examines Asian American racialization, gender, and sexuality. Q & A marks several meanings, the first being the intersectional subjectivity of Queer and Asian. Q & A also signals the questions and answers that emanate from queer and Asian considerations. How might we view "queer" and "Asian" within multiply entangled intellectual genealogies, political formations, and relational socialities? Where is the queer within Asian American studies, and what horizon of possibilities is afforded by a queering of Asian American studies? Conversely, how does Asian racialization complicate queer studies, particularly in engagement with or in addition to queer of color critique? Beyond, how might we locate queer Asian influences in fields of study including disability studies, performance studies, and environmental studies?

Full details for ENGL 6633 - Q and A: Asian American Gender and Sexuality

In this course we will investigate texts that challenge us to conceptualize formations of power and domination as well as formations of resistance as subversion. We will operationalize foundational and more recent texts in Black Cultural Criticism to guide our investigations. In doing so, students will learn the conceptual and methodological strategies scholars have used to formulate their research and writing processes. Students will also be challenged with developing and articulating their own concepts and methodological approaches to research questions they devise and refine throughout the semester.

Full details for ENGL 6642 - New Directions in Black Cultural Criticism: Concepts and Methods

An introduction to the concepts and methods humanities scholars employ when working with data. We will discuss the concept, history, and politics of data; the logics, practices, and problems associated with quantification; data collection, analysis, and presentation; what it means to understand datasets as scholarship; and more. We will explore various computational projects and digital archives, asking what decisions scholars have made in constructing and interpreting their data and interrogating the consequences of those decisions. The class will include a hands-on component: participants will learn techniques for exploring existing humanities datasets and for constructing their own. The course is open to students across the humanities, although it will focus on literary and cultural studies. No experience with digital tools or methods is required or expected.

Full details for ENGL 6701 - Humanities Data

This course juxtaposes selected significant theoretical concepts and ensuing critical methodologies from the mid-twentieth century to the current moment, including poststructuralism, marxist theory, critical race theory, gender theory, new materialism, and eco-criticism. We will engage with major conceptual statements, as well as illustrative and symptomatic methods of critique. Thus, the course will include reflection on the nature, status, and impact of critique itself, as a signal of the place of humanistic inquiry in intellectual, ethical, and political contexts. Theoretical readings will include statements by Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Stephen Greenblatt, Cornel West, Jane Bennett, and Ursula Heise. Explorations of method will offer opportunities for students to test concepts in relation to their own critical practice, and to project a theoretical rationale for their experience as critics.

Full details for ENGL 6707 - Theory and Method

Urban Justice Labs are innovative seminars designed to bring students into direct contact with complex questions about race and social justice within the context of American urban culture, architecture, humanities, and media. Drawing from Cornell's collections, such as the Hip Hop Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, the Human Sexuality Collection, holdings on American Indian History and Culture, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, and the Johnson Museum of Art, students will leverage archival materials to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban justice. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. Topic: Sound, Music, Public Space.

Full details for ENGL 6919 - Urban Justice Lab

The MFA poetry seminar is a required course for MFA poetry students.

Full details for ENGL 7800 - MFA Seminar: Poetry

The MFA fiction seminar is a required course for all MFA fiction students.

Full details for ENGL 7801 - MFA Seminar: Fiction

This is a required course for students pursuing an MFA degree in Creative Writing. The course will focus on the pedagogical methodology and philosophical approaches to teaching creative writing. The workshop format will include readings, guest speakers, lesson plan development, and the vetting of syllabi. Graduate students in both poetry and fiction will share ideas on teaching and thesis development.

Full details for ENGL 7890 - Pedagogical and Thesis Development

This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for ENGL 7940 - Directed Study

This course should be used for an independent study in which a small group of students works with one member of the graduate faculty. After getting permission of the instructor, students should contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for ENGL 7950 - Group Study