Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for Fall 2023

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
ENGL1105 FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics
Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will in some way address the subject of sexual politics. 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 1105 - FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1111 FWS: Writing Across Cultures
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1120 FWS: Writing and Community Engagement
From literature to literacy, comics to archival work, writing can build bridges between campus and communities. Sections vary in topic, and issues may include healthcare, social justice, environmental studies, and others, but all will enable students to work with community partners. Students will learn skills in critical thinking and reflection, writing for specialized and non-specialized audiences, community engagement, and cultural awareness. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1120 - FWS: Writing and Community Engagement

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1130 FWS: Writing the Environment
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1134 FWS: True Stories
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1140 FWS: Writing Medicine: Stories of Illness and Healing
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1158 FWS: American Voices
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1160 FWS: Intersections: Race, Writing, and Power
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1167 FWS: Reading Now
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1168 FWS: Cultural Studies
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1170 FWS: Short Stories
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1183 FWS: Word and Image
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1191 FWS: British Literature
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL1270 FWS: Writing About Literature
Reading lists vary from section to section, but close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing are central to all. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, or drama, or include a mix of literary kinds. By engaging in discussions and working with varied writing assignments, students will explore major modes and genres of English poetry and prose, and may learn about versification techniques, rhetorical strategies, performance as interpretation, and thematic and topical concerns. In the process students will expand the possibilities of their own writing. Sections that invite students to study and write critically about plays or films in a variety of dramatic idioms and cultural traditions may require attendance at screenings or at live productions by the theatre department. All sections are taught by Department of English faculty. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

Fall, Spring.
ENGL2010 Literatures in English I: From Old English to the New World
English 2010 is an introduction to key works of English and American literature for majors and non-majors. Here's a chance to study some of the greatest hits of the literary tradition in a single semester: Beowulf; Arthurian legends; works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Sageyowatha, Phillis Wheatley. Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society. How did literature factor in England's transformation from a cultural backwater into a global empire? What role does literature play in disciplining, civilizing, and colonizing subjects? When and how is it used to delight, resist, and rebel? From our reading, we will create a toolkit of literary terms and techniques. And through a series of exercises, students will get hands-on experience with literary experimentation. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2010 - Literatures in English I: From Old English to the New World

Fall.
ENGL2035 Science Fiction
Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-à-vis seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

Full details for ENGL 2035 - Science Fiction

Fall.
ENGL2160 Television
In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Full details for ENGL 2160 - Television

Fall.
ENGL2270 Shakespeare
This course aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central and continuing place in Renaissance culture and beyond. We will read poetry and primarily plays representing the shape of Shakespeare's career as it moves through comedies, histories, tragedies, and a romance.  Specific plays include The Two Gentleman of Verona, Richard II, Henry IV (Part 1), Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will focus on dramatic forms (genres), Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions.  While we will view some scenes from film adaptations, the main focus is on careful close interaction with the language of the plays. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2270 - Shakespeare

Fall.
ENGL2400 Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature
Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.

Full details for ENGL 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature

Fall.
ENGL2580 Imagining the Holocaust
How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences—Wiesel's Night, Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank—before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's "The Shawl." We shall also read the mythopoeic vision of Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, the illuminating distortions of Epstein's King of the Jews, the Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books.

Full details for ENGL 2580 - Imagining the Holocaust

Fall.
ENGL2600 Introduction to Native American Literature
The production of North American Indigenous literatures began long before European colonization, and persists in a variety of printed, sung, carved, painted, written, spoken, and digital media. From oral traditions transmitted through memory and mnemonics to contemporary genres and media, Native North American authors offer Indigenous perspectives on social, political, and environmental experience, through deft artistry and place-specific aesthetics. Our attention will focus on the contexts from which particular Native American literatures emerge, the ethics to consider when entering Indigenous intellectual territory, and close attention to common themes and techniques that frequently appear in contemporary Native American literature. Readings will feature a range of novels, poetry, short fiction, graphic novel/comics, and film.

Full details for ENGL 2600 - Introduction to Native American Literature

Fall.
ENGL2603 The Novels of Toni Morrison
Each year this seven-week, one-credit course focuses on a different novel by Nobel Laureate and Cornell alumna Toni Morrison. We read and discuss each novel in the context of Morrison's life and career, her place in African American, US, and world literature, and her exploration of crucial questions regarding identity, race, gender, history, oppression, and autonomy. Please see the class roster for the current semester's featured novel. Students will read the novel closely, with attention to its place in Morrison's career and in literary and cultural history.

Full details for ENGL 2603 - The Novels of Toni Morrison

Fall.
ENGL2620 Introduction to Asian American Literature
This course will introduce both a variety of writings by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working primarily with novels, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

Fall or Spring.
ENGL2665 Octavia Butler
MacArthur "Genius" grant winner Octavia Butler is famously known as a science fiction writer, but her novels, short stories and essays both adhere to and disrupt expectations in the genre. Throughout her writing career, Butler explored themes of space travel, time travel, African indigeneity, gender, race, spirituality, and ecological degradation. This class, will introduce students to Octavia Butler's work and the creative fields she helped spawn. Additionally, we will investigate and contextualize these themes alongside the scholarly fields of Black feminist studies, the environmental humanities, Black speculation fiction, Afrofuturism, disability studies and more!

Full details for ENGL 2665 - Octavia Butler

Fall or Spring.
ENGL2800 Creative Writing
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

Fall, Spring, Summer.
ENGL2880 Expository 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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL2951 Poetry's Image
Where do we get our images of poets, and of poetry? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in music and popular culture? How do such figures inform both the images we find in poems and poetry's own image? What is poetry's relation to other genres and discourses, to self and language, history and politics? Exploring such issues in verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media, including among others Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Parra, and Bolaño, the course will arc toward impactful recent interventions by such contemporaries as Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Layla Long Soldier, Kendrick Lamar, and Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries. 

Full details for ENGL 2951 - Poetry's Image

Fall.
ENGL3110 Old English
In this course, we will read and discuss some of the earliest surviving English poetry and prose. Attention will be paid to (1) learning to read the language in which this literature is written, (2) evaluating the poetry as poetry: its form, structure, style, and varieties of meaning, and (3) seeing what can be learned about the culture of Anglo-Saxon England and about the early Germanic world in general, from an examination of the Old English literary records. We will begin by reading some easy prose and will go on to consider some more challenging heroic, elegiac, and devotional poetry, including an excerpt from the masterpiece Beowulf. The course may also be used as preparation for the sequence ENGL 3120/ENGL 6120. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3110 - Old English

Fall.
ENGL3240 Blood Politics: Comparative Renaissance Drama
Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3240 - Blood Politics: Comparative Renaissance Drama

Fall or Spring.
ENGL3255 Revolution or Reform?
This course explores the relation between literary and utopian Enlightenment cultures in Western history.  For each moment of rapid change, from Plato to the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond, we will focus on two texts: one which promoted the enlightened and revolutionary utopian social blueprint; and one offering an alternative model of transformation or a dystopian account of the utopian model. You will come away from this course having a chronologically wide and intellectually deep immersion in 2500 years of European philosophical and literary history. Throughout, you are encouraged to think about what resources we use to imagine social transformation and to ask if revolution is in fact the best way to effect social transformation. This class may be used toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3255 - Revolution or Reform?

Fall.
ENGL3370 Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen
How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond?  What role has politics played in the theatre?  How has performance been used to examine concepts of identity, community, and nationality?  And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present.  We will focus on theatre that responds directly to moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements, Women's and Gender Equality Movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.

Full details for ENGL 3370 - Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen

Fall.
ENGL3525 Howls and Love Songs: Twentieth Century American Poetry
Our focus in this course will be on the vibrantly varied body of poetry produced in the United States during the 20th century. Encompassing strains of worldly celebration and prophetic rage, visionary ecstasy and minute attention to ordinary life, this poetry breaks new ground in every decade, mixing formal and stylistic innovation with a continuously expanding sense of the national landscape in all its demographic and cultural diversity. Poets to be studied include Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others. This course counts toward the Literatures of the Americas and post-1800 requirements for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3525 - Howls and Love Songs: Twentieth Century American Poetry

Fall.
ENGL3560 Thinking from a Different Place: Indigenous Philosophies
The Western nation-state has failed to solve the two most pressing, indeed catastrophic, global problems: poverty and climate change. This failure is due to the inability of national policy to imagine a world beyond a boundary drawn by the formative capitalist ideas of property, production, and profit. The course will begin by discussing the historical origin and continuing force of these ideas while raising questions about their limits. Then it will look at a range of alternative ideas about how the world should work if we want to keep it socially, economically, and ecologically in balance. The alternatives we will query come from a range of Indigenous writers of fiction, poetry, and theory, who locate themselves in Native American (north and south), Aboriginal, and Maori communities.

Full details for ENGL 3560 - Thinking from a Different Place: Indigenous Philosophies

Spring.
ENGL3778 Free Speech, Censorship, and the Age of Global Media
Disinformation, gag laws, de-platforming, violent hate speech, recommendation algorithms, chatbots, image generators. This course will help us make sense of our increasingly volatile public sphere by surveying the history of free speech and censorship from the print revolution to the information age. In democratic societies, freedom of expression is both a cultural value and protected right; yet governments routinely regulate speech through a variety of mechanisms: from direct censorship, to licensing and copyright laws, to high court decisions about what qualifies as "speech." We'll track the categories of dangerous speech—blasphemy, pornography, treason, libel—as they've changed over time. And we'll also consider forms censorship that protect freedoms and ensure civil discourse, such as banning racial stereotyping or genocide denial.

Full details for ENGL 3778 - Free Speech, Censorship, and the Age of Global Media

Fall or Spring.
ENGL3781 Human Rights in Law and Culture
Whereas human rights find legal expression in visionary documents like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the many principles tied to human rights have long been debated by philosophers, artists, theologians, and writers. This course studies the evolution of human rights as cultural artifacts, examining how ideas about rights and humanitarianism were fashioned within literature, philosophy, film, public debate, and various international legal forums over history. Through readings covering large topics like crimes against humanity, immigration, abolitionism, and universal suffrage, we will ask: how did the world assent to a global culture of human rights? What hopes and dreams have human rights embodied? Conversely, what recurring critiques have been raised about the norms informing human rights?

Full details for ENGL 3781 - Human Rights in Law and Culture

Fall or Spring.
ENGL3795 Communicating Climate Change
There is a lot of consensus about the science of climate change. But many members of the public remain confused or uninformed about the severity of the situation. Some are paralyzed by fear. Others are blissfully ignorant. What are the best ways of communicating climate change to a variety of audiences? Should we tell stories? Make documentaries? Dramatize the science? This course will ask you to read, write and design many different forms and genres in order to experiment with the problem of communicating climate change, from pie-charts to science fiction and from photography to TED Talks. What can each form tell us about climate change that the others cannot? We will take on a real-world communication project over the course of the semester.

Full details for ENGL 3795 - Communicating Climate Change

Fall or Spring.
ENGL3820 Narrative Writing
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL3840 Poetry 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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL3903 Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History
More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective--even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period of history. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Albania, the UK, and the United States.

Full details for ENGL 3903 - Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History

Fall.
ENGL3909 Telling Jewish Stories
Stories--whether orally told or written down in treasured texts, whether in Jewish languages or the languages of the myriad places where Jews have lived--are essential to the life of this age-old and ever-changing culture. We will read together widely, from Talmudic tales to modern Yiddish and Hebrew texts, twentieth-century American Jewish fiction, and beyond. We will consider what makes a story (not just a Jewish one) special. We will listen to the stories of the elders among us, and we will work at becoming better storytellers ourselves.

Full details for ENGL 3909 - Telling Jewish Stories

Fall.
ENGL3941 Political Journalism
This course will explore the traditional dynamic and norms of political press coverage in the United States, and the impact of those patterns on both the government and the nation; some of the ways longstanding norms have recently shifted, and continue to shift; the larger historical forces and long-term trends driving those changes; and the theoretical questions, logistical challenges and ethical dilemmas these changes pose for both political journalists and those they cover. The course will equally cover the practice of political reporting, including weekly analysis and discussion of current press coverage, in-class exercises and simulations, readings from academic and journalistic sources, and visits from leading political reporters and former spokespeople able to offer a firsthand perspective on the topics.

Full details for ENGL 3941 - Political Journalism

Spring.
ENGL4511 The Global South Novel and World Literature
The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this "arrested dialectic" and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts. This class counts toward the Literatures of the Global South and post-1800 requirements for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 4511 - The Global South Novel and World Literature

Fall or Spring.
ENGL4535 The Modern Imagination: The Major Authors
This is an indispensable, probing, and pleasurable course focusing on major works of nineteenth, twentieth, and contemporary English and European literature. Readings will include works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Ferrante, Pamuk, Kundera, and W. G. Sebald. The emphasis will be on the joys of close reading of individual texts, but we shall place the authors and works within the context of literary, political, cultural, and intellectual history. We shall also be aware of critical and theoretical approaches. The course will seek to define the development of literary modernism and as well as Post-Modernism. We shall be especially interested in the relationship between modern literature and modern painting and sculpture, but no prior experience in art is required.

Full details for ENGL 4535 - The Modern Imagination: The Major Authors

Fall.
ENGL4625 Contemporary Native American Fiction
If you haven't read contemporary U.S. American Indian fiction, then it might be fair to ask how much you know about the United States, its origins and its current condition. Since the 1960s, American Indians have been producing a significant body of award-wining novels and short stories. In 1969, for example, N. Scott Momaday, from the Kiowa nation, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and in 2012 Louise Erdrich, who is Anishinaabe, won the National Book Award for her novel The Round House. In between these two notable moments and since we can list an impressive number of Native storytellers whose work is aesthetically powerful, offering us a narrative of the United States that counters the official history. Centrally the course will focus on the various formal approaches Native writers take from surrealism to realism in representing the (post)colonial situation of Indian country and the ongoing resistance in Indian country to the U.S. legal and political regime.

Full details for ENGL 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

Fall.
ENGL4705 Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media
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 4705 - Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media

Fall.
ENGL4800 Advanced Poetry Writing
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL4801 Advanced Narrative 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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL4920 Honors Seminar II
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 Fall 2023 the topic is: The Politics and Joy in Black Women's Writing. This class counts toward the post-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II

Fall or Spring.
ENGL4930 Honors Essay Tutorial I
Students should secure a thesis advisor by the end of the junior year and should enroll in that faculty member's section of ENGL 4930. Students enrolling in the fall will automatically be enrolled in a discussion section, which will meet a few times throughout the semester and will give students a chance to get together with other honors students to discuss issues pertinent to writing a thesis. Topics will include compiling a critical bibliography and writing a prospectus. Professor Ellis Hanson, the Honors Director in English, will contact students to set up the first meeting time.

Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

Fall, Spring.
ENGL4940 Honors Essay Tutorial II
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL4948 Pleasure and Neoliberalism
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for ENGL 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

Fall.
ENGL4950 Independent Study
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

Fall, Spring, Summer.
ENGL4984 The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures
This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for ENGL 4984 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

Fall.
ENGL6000 Colloquium for Entering Students
An introduction to practical and theoretical aspects of graduate English studies, conducted with the help of weekly visitors from the Literatures in English department. There will be regular short readings and brief presentations, but no formal papers. The colloquium is required for all entering PhD students; MFA students are welcome to attend any sessions that interest them.

Full details for ENGL 6000 - Colloquium for Entering Students

Fall.
ENGL6110 Old English
In this course, we will read and discuss some of the earliest surviving English poetry and prose. Attention will be paid to (1) learning to read the language in which this literature is written, (2) evaluating the poetry as poetry: its form, structure, style, and varieties of meaning, and (3) seeing what can be learned about the culture of Anglo-Saxon England and about the early Germanic world in general, from an examination of the Old English literary records. We will begin by reading some easy prose and will go on to consider some more challenging heroic, elegiac, and devotional poetry, including an excerpt from the masterpiece Beowulf. The course may also be used as preparation for the sequence ENGL 3120/ENGL 6120.

Full details for ENGL 6110 - Old English

Fall.
ENGL6191 Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm: Late Medieval to Early Modern
Fear of idolatry is a recurrent feature of Western culture. The Christian image threatens to short-circuit the flow of spirituality between humans and God, just as images of the ancient, pagan gods threaten dangerously to preserve the energies of those lascivious and vengeful deities. And images, whether secular or religious, are always potentially threatening to literate culture: they compete with words, and seem to possess a much more immediate power to mesmerize the imagination. The Protestant Reformation in particular targeted images as the enemy to a true religion of the Word. Legislation in England determined the wholesale destruction of religious images (iconoclasm) between 1538 and 1644. On the other hand, many writers and artists, both secular and religious, look to the image for salvation of sorts. Guided by these perceptions, we will be looking to a range of pre- and post-Reformation texts and contexts. The course will be equally divided between late medieval and early modern texts. Students without Middle English should feel entirely at ease to take this course: all texts will be presented in reader-friendly editions.

Full details for ENGL 6191 - Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm: Late Medieval to Early Modern

Fall.
ENGL6575 Anti-Liberalisms
Critiques of liberalism have been central not only to leftist or radical visions of politics but also to critical theory (whether in literary studies, law, or political theory). Yet opposition to liberalism has also fueled a rightwing or reactionary politics—and in ways increasingly operative today. This Seminar examines the common ground connecting—and points of divergence between—left and right anti-liberalisms over history and into the present. Readings will investigate the frequents components of anti-liberal critique (whether targeted at capitalism, legal positivism, the state, or individualism); recurring alternatives to liberalism (Romanticism, communitarianism, vitalism); and various shared intellectual touchstones (Schmitt, Marcuse, Nietzsche, Marx). What are the guises of anti-liberalism today, and to what extent does such thinking unite both ends of the political spectrum?

Full details for ENGL 6575 - Anti-Liberalisms

Fall or Spring.
ENGL6635 Literature of the Civil War
The works we will read this term imagine and embody a nation's survival when it faces war within its own boundaries. With a primary focus on poetry and novels, we will also look at photographs, political cartoons, recruitment posters, and trading cards—items that give a visual resonance to the iconography of national violence. Asking about gendered and racialized embodiments associated with the national project on both sides of the conflict, we will want to find out how gender, race, and nation are written into 19th-century North America.

Full details for ENGL 6635 - Literature of the Civil War

Fall.
ENGL6776 Affect Theory
This course examines how claims about feeling ground literary theory, with particular emphasis on the consequences of the affective turn in the early 2002s, from therapeutic criticism to the biopolitics of sentiment. How does the work of feeling register in literary form? What evidence is there that feelings are experienced, discussed, or represented in historically and culturally specific ways? When does affect theory turn to literature for evidence? How do competing conceptions of affect contribute to feminist, queer, and critical race theory? We will build genealogies from Deleuze and Sedgwick to more recent work by Terada, Ngai, Berlant, Terada, Schuller, Ahmed, and more. Literary readings will include a few novels (Charlotte Brontë, Sigrid Nunez), and long poems (Anne Carson; Claudia Rankine).

Full details for ENGL 6776 - Affect Theory

Fall or Spring.
ENGL6972 Derrida In/And Africa
From the late-1970s on, the Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida began to be much troubled by his African past. Reading Derrida as an African, reading for the African in Derrida, in, we might say, deconstruction, might find its apogee in Monolingualism, Or, the Prosthesis of the Other, but this course will "trace" the moment of African articulation in Derrida to both earlier moments and other texts, including Specters of Marx, and The Other Heading.

Full details for ENGL 6972 - Derrida In/And Africa

Spring.
ENGL7800 MFA Seminar: Poetry
The MFA poetry seminar is a required course for MFA poetry students.

Full details for ENGL 7800 - MFA Seminar: Poetry

Fall, Spring.
ENGL7801 MFA Seminar: Fiction
The MFA fiction seminar is a required course for all MFA fiction students.

Full details for ENGL 7801 - MFA Seminar: Fiction

Fall, Spring.
ENGL7880 Literary Small Publishing
In this course, we'll build the skills necessary to edit and publish a small magazine and will learn how to produce the kind of popular critical writing that drives literary conversation outside of academia. We'll talk about taste, craft, and critical etiquette, and will end the semester having written, peer-reviewed, and published online a small suite of incidental pieces: one book review, one interview with a writer, and one essay on some aspect of the craft of writing.

Full details for ENGL 7880 - Literary Small Publishing

Fall.
ENGL7920 Prospectus and Dissertation Strategies
This workshop will prepare you to research and write your dissertation. We will begin by introducing you to the genre of the dissertation prospectus, including its length and standard contents (such as the central research question/s, methodological approach, scholarly implications, chapter breakdown, and short bibliography).  The seminar will function as a workshop, providing you with in-depth feedback on drafts of your prospectus.  Midway through the workshop each student will have a rough draft of your dissertation prospectus as well as materials that can be used as the basis for grant and fellowship proposals.  In later weeks we will develop more general strategies for researching and writing the dissertation.

Full details for ENGL 7920 - Prospectus and Dissertation Strategies

Fall.
ENGL7940 Directed Study
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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL7950 Group 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

Fall, Spring.
ENGL7960 Placement Seminar
This seminar will help prepare graduate students for the academic job market. Though students will study sample materials from successful job applicants, much of the seminar will function as a workshop, providing them with in-depth feedback on multiple drafts of their job materials. Interview skills will be practiced in every seminar meeting. The seminar meetings will be supplemented with individual conferences with the placement mentor, and students should also share copies of their job materials with their dissertation committees.

Full details for ENGL 7960 - Placement Seminar

Fall.
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