Courses by semester
Courses for Fall 2024
Complete Cornell University course descriptions and section times are in the Class Roster.
| Course ID | Title | Offered |
|---|---|---|
| ENGL 1105 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) Full details for ENGL 1105 - FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1111 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1130 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1134 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1140 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) Full details for ENGL 1140 - FWS: Writing Medicine: Stories of Illness and Healing |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1158 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1160 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) Full details for ENGL 1160 - FWS: Intersections: Race, Writing, and Power |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1167 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1168 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1170 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1183 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1191 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 1270 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 2010 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 2010 - Literatures in English I: From Old English to the New World |
Fall. |
| ENGL 2270 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall. |
| ENGL 2400 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature |
Fall. |
| ENGL 2580 |
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 Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books as well as W.G, Sebald's Austerlitz. We shall conclude with several episodes of the acclaimed 2009-2017 French TV series A French Village. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall. |
| ENGL 2603 |
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. |
Fall. |
| ENGL 2620 |
Introduction to Asian American Literature
This course will introduce both a variety of writings and media by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working with a variety of genres, 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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature |
Fall. |
| ENGL 2650 |
Introduction to African American 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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (D-AG) Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 2754 |
Wondrous Literatures of the Near East
This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the "The Story of Sinuhe" and "The Epic of Gilgamesh," as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the "Travels" of Ibn Battuta, the "Shahnameh" of Ferdowsi, and "The Arabian Nights." We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation. Full details for ENGL 2754 - Wondrous Literatures of the Near East |
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| ENGL 2761 |
American Cinema
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies - and in particular Hollywood - have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino). |
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| ENGL 2771 | Africa in Hollywood |
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| ENGL 2800 | Creative Writing |
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| ENGL 2880 | Expository Writing |
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| ENGL 2906 |
Punk Culture: The Art and Politics of Refusal
Punk Culture–comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts–represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary. Full details for ENGL 2906 - Punk Culture: The Art and Politics of Refusal |
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| ENGL 2935 |
New Visions in African Cinema
This undergraduate course introduces the formal and topical innovations that African cinema has experienced since its inception in the 1960s. Sections will explore, among others, Nollywood, sci-fi, and ideological cinema. Films include: Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Mohamed Camara's Dakan, Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki-Bouki, Cheikh Oumar Sissoko's Finzan, Anne-Laure Folly's Women with Open Eyes, Ousmane Sembène's Camp de Thiaroye, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart. |
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| ENGL 2951 |
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, discourses, and disciplines, 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 such impactful contemporaries as Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Layla Long Soldier, Kendrick Lamar, Ilya Kaminsky, Jenny Xie, the website-based Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and AI-generated poetry. |
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| ENGL 3110 | Old English |
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| ENGL 3115 |
Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics
The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception. Full details for ENGL 3115 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics |
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| ENGL 3240 | Blood Politics: Comparative Renaissance Drama |
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| ENGL 3360 |
American Drama and Theatre
Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others. |
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| ENGL 3390 | Jane Austen |
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| ENGL 3500 | The High Modernist Tradition |
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| ENGL 3505 | Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes |
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| ENGL 3560 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 3560 - Thinking from a Different Place: Indigenous Philosophies |
Spring. |
| ENGL 3591 |
Kids Rule! Children's Popular Culture
How is the figure of the child constructed in popular culture? When and to what degree do children participate in the construction of these representations? This course surveys a variety of contemporary media texts (television, film, and the internet) aimed at children ranging in age from pre-kindergarten to young adults. We explore how these texts seek to construct children as empowered consumers, contesting adult conformity. Our theoretical approach complicates definitions of childhood as a time of innocence and potential victimhood and challenges normative constructions of childhood as a time for establishing "proper" sexual and gender identities. Taking a cultural studies approach, the class will consider the connections between the cultural texts and the realms of advertising, toys, and gaming. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 3591 - Kids Rule! Children's Popular Culture |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 3678 |
Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries
"Foreign in a domestic sense" is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called "Insular Cases" of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries. Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG) |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 3742 |
Africans and African Americans in Literature
When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result. In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature. What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet? We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 3742 - Africans and African Americans in Literature |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 3760 |
World Poetry of the Pluriverse: Regional Forms and Global Readers
How do poems travel in the world? How does the world travel in poems? In this seminar, we'll read global case studies in the ways poems can sanctify or protest territorial and linguistic borders, as well as reading diverse critical accounts of the translation, marketing, and archiving of "world literature." We'll study how poetry compares with other communication technologies, enacting its own forms of transit, ecology, and migration. Our readings (across all of time, though focused on the 19th-21st centuries) will investigate how race, class, and gender inflect verse's navigations of local conditions and cosmopolitan scale. Authors may include T.S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, W.B. Yeats, Lorna Goodison, Yi Sang, Derek Walcott, Daphne Marlatt, Christopher Okigbo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Ilya Kaminsky, Ishion Hutchinson, and Valzhyna Mort. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 3760 - World Poetry of the Pluriverse: Regional Forms and Global Readers |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 3795 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 3820 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 3840 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 3903 |
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, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. 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, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 3903 - Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History |
Fall. |
| ENGL 3911 |
Literature, Art, and the Environment
This course examines how philosophical, architectural, filmic, and literary practices shape our understanding of place and space, engaging with theories of mapping, spatiality, and the built environment. Does dwelling on this earth imply building? Is thinking itself an architectural act? What would it mean to undo this 'will to architecture'? What is the relation of the act to the environment? What does the situation of 'things and locations' mean for the possibilities of politics and thought? We will examine poetic and philosophical dimensions of place and site; modernity, nihilism, and its critique; belonging, the uncanny, and the stranger; utopia, dystopia, and the global built environment through readings, films, and artistic practices from figures and groups including Archigram, Bachelard, Badiou, Massimo Cacciari, Derrida, Heidegger, Isozaki Arata, Jameson, Karatani, Kiarostami, Henri Lefebvre, WG Sebald, Wallace Stevens, Superstudio, Manfredo Tafuri, Tarkovsky, Raymond Williams, and more. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 3911 - Literature, Art, and the Environment |
Fall. |
| ENGL 3941 |
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. |
Spring. |
| ENGL 4020 |
Literature as Moral Inquiry
What can literary works, especially novels, tell us about moral issues? Should they be seen as suggesting a form of moral inquiry similar to the kind of philosophical discussion we get in, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics? Can reading philosophical works in ethics together with novels that deal with similar themes help us understand these themes better? This course is an attempt to answer these questions. We will read selections from Aristotle, Kant, and other thinkers and use these works to help us understand the nature of moral inquiry in novels like Eliot's Middlemarch, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Films will include Barbie (2023) and Official Secrets (2019). Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 4030 |
Poetry in Process
Many distinguished poets have taught at Cornell. In this course we'll focus on three, all of them widely acclaimed: A. R. Ammons, Alice Fulton, Ishion Hutchinson. A. R. Ammons is best known for charting the interplay of scientific and spiritual phenomena, in poems ranging from brief lyrics to book-length epics written on adding machine tape. Alice Fulton, who was Ammons's student, carries on his interests in science and spirituality while bringing to them a distinctively feminist perspective. Born in Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson writes poems that explore the fraught relations between geography and history in the light of colonial violence. We'll survey each poet's work from earliest to most recent phases, paying special attention to their development of new techniques and original visions. Students may write poems as well as critical essays responding to the poets' work. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 4240 |
Metamorphoses in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Stories of transformation have been central to literary traditions for thousands of years, but these tales of shape-shifting took on a special life in the English Renaissance, when Ovid's Metamorphoses surged in popularity. This course will explore the fundamental connection between literary creativity and unstable identities – whether these narratives of metamorphosis show humans turning to beasts, trees, or stones, men changing into women, or inanimate objects coming to life and taking human form. Class readings draw on examples from Ovid, Shakespeare, and other Renaissance poets, as well as the re-imagining of these fantasies in modern science fiction and make-over shows. What do these stories of metamorphosis tell us about what it means to be human – or not? Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 4240 - Metamorphoses in Renaissance Literature and Culture |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 4382 |
Paul de Man
This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. "The Rhetoric of Temporality, "Semiology and Rhetoric," "The Resistance to Theory," "Autobiography as De-Facement," "Shelley Disfigured," "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall. |
| ENGL 4625 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction |
Fall. |
| ENGL 4675 |
The Environmental Imagination in American Literature
This course focuses on works that exemplify environmental consciousness—a sense that humans are not the center of the world and that to think they are may have catastrophic consequences for humans themselves. Environmental literature is not just a major strand of American literature but one of its most distinctive contributions to the literature of the world. We will be reading works mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, both poetry and fiction, confronting the challenges of thinking and writing with an ecological consciousness in the 21st. Cornell being a rich environment in which to pursue such investigations, creative projects will be encouraged. Inspiration is assured. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 4675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 4696 |
Political Violence in Contemporary Fiction: Silence as Compassion or Complicity
This course examines contemporary works of fiction that depict episodes of political violence between WWII and today. During this period, there have been 344 conflicts that have killed 500 or more people, but the public attention they receive varies tremendously. New novels and stories disclose and challenge silences surrounding events neglected in global public memory. What role can these works play in altering the kinds of stories heard within and beyond the university? Which voices do they portray as empowered or neglected? How can silence around violence be both compassionate and complicit? What are the ethics of storytelling related to different forms of silence, and what does it mean to read in a way that is compassionate or complicitly silent? Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall. |
| ENGL 4705 |
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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 4705 - Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media |
Fall. |
| ENGL 4800 |
Advanced Poetry Writing
This course is intended for creative writers who have completed ENGL 3840 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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 4801 |
Advanced Narrative Writing
This course is intended for narrative writing students who have completed ENGL 3820 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. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 4820 |
Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Seminar
The most studied and written about work in Western Literature outside the Bible, Hamlet according to Harold Bloom, is our secular savior and our ambassador to death. This course centers on a close reading of the play. Through research and assigned readings the course tests theoretical viewpoints about the play against the text itself by reading the theory in relationship to the production history. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 4820 - Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Seminar |
Fall. |
| ENGL 4850 |
Reading for Writers
Reading for Writers examines literary works through the eyes of a writer, focusing on the craft of literature. Topics vary with each section and semester and may focus on fiction, poetry, or both. Please see the class roster for a description. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG) |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 4912 |
Black Women's Autobiography in the 21st Century WritingHerStory
Black women first began to shape the genre of autobiography during antebellum era slavery. They were prolific in developing the genre of autobiography throughout the twentieth century, to the point of emerging as serial autobiographers in the case of Maya Angelou. Significantly, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1970), the first autobiography of six by Angelou, along with autobiographies by a range of other black women writers, helped to launch the renaissance in black women's literature and criticism in African American literature during the 1970s. In this course, we will focus on how black women have continued to write and share their personal stories in the new millennium by examining autobiographies that they have produced in the first years of the twenty-first century. More broadly, we will consider the impact of this writing on twenty-first century African American literature, as well as African diasporan writing in Africa and the Caribbean. In the process, we will draw on a range of critical and theoretical perspectives. We will read memoirs and autobiographies by a range of figures, including Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lewis, Monica Coleman, Serena Williams, Gabrielle Union, and Tiffany Haddish, among others. Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG) Full details for ENGL 4912 - Black Women's Autobiography in the 21st Century WritingHerStory |
Fall. |
| ENGL 4930 |
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. The Honors Director in English will contact students to set up the first meeting time. |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 4940 |
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. |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 4950 |
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. |
Fall, Spring, Summer. |
| ENGL 6000 |
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. |
| ENGL 6110 |
Old English
English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into "early Middle English," when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed. |
Fall. |
| ENGL 6235 |
Making Use of Renaissance Literature
English Renaissance poetry boasted a classically inspired commitment to "pleasure and profit," but a cognate concern with utility and experience permeated both literature the vernacular technologies of everyday life. This course considers the ubiquity of "how-to" writing in early modern England, as such imperatives shaped both lived experience and cultural production. Readings draw from prose and poetic genres (including essay, dialogue, and pamphlet; and lyric, didactic and devotional verse) and cover practical and impractical advice on conduct, the passions, and technologies of everyday life, including recipes, letters, hygiene, and diet. We will weigh the virtues of a range of historical and theoretical approaches to these questions, including new historicism, psychoanalysis, theories of racialization and embodiment, the sociology of manners, feminist criticism, and biopolitics and governmentality. Full details for ENGL 6235 - Making Use of Renaissance Literature |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 6330 |
Animals, Affect, and Climate: The Counterhuman Imaginary
This course juxtaposes core strains of current posthumanist theory—new materialism or "thing theory," the "affective turn," ecocriticism or environmental humanities, and literary animal studies. Using eighteenth-century literature, culture, and intellectual discourse as a starting point and then sampling related materials in the Anglo-American tradition from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will define these theoretical scenarios, and evaluate the broader impact of approaches to the other-than-human in literary theory and in formal critique. Texts (and selections): Newton, Opticks; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature; Voltaire, Candide; Auster, Timbuktu; Heise, Imagining Extinction; Kohn, How Forests Think; Braidotti, The Posthuman. Full details for ENGL 6330 - Animals, Affect, and Climate: The Counterhuman Imaginary |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 6382 |
Paul de Man
This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. "The Rhetoric of Temporality, "Semiology and Rhetoric," "The Resistance to Theory," "Autobiography as De-Facement," "Shelley Disfigured," "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate. |
Fall. |
| ENGL 6410 |
Women Writers in North America, 1830-1930
Not quite a survey, this course investigates several terms that its title might obscure. Drawing on theoretical constructions of gender, genre, race, and history, the course considers the historical conditions for women writers as they produce works under conditions of necessity, pleasure, politics, and polemical insistence. We will read poetry, short stories, letters, and novels. Authors will include Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as Emily Dickinson, Alice and Phoebe Cary, Sui Sin Far, Sarah Winnemucca, Maria Ruiz de Burton, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Full details for ENGL 6410 - Women Writers in North America, 1830-1930 |
Fall. |
| ENGL 6554 |
Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style
"I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me," the critic Roland Barthes once wrote. How do we take pleasure in a text, even when it appears to betray us? How do we speak of the erotics of style beyond the mere thematic interpretation of sexual representation? Has such an erotics even been written yet? To explore a methodology for contemplating this elusive embrace between the aesthetic and the erotic, we will consider influential works of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer theory alongside a survey of great modernist novelists whose innovative experiments in prose style have proved most sensual and most challenging, among them Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes. Full details for ENGL 6554 - Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style |
Fall. |
| ENGL 6560 |
Politics and Joy in Black Women's Writing
This course will look at how Black women writers negotiated enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow era segregation while also managing to find avenues of joy, escapism, and a certain kind of freedom through art-making. In addition to reading primary texts by Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Bond, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others we will also look at critical and theoretical work by Hortense Spillers, Saidiyah Hartman, Barbara Fields, and Karen Fields. Full details for ENGL 6560 - Politics and Joy in Black Women's Writing |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 6663 |
Latinx Field Formations and The Politics of Transformative Study
How do social justice and decolonial movements transform our habits of study and our systems of valuation? This course will examine the emergence of Latinx Studies as a field, paying careful attention to the creative arts (theater, literature, dance, film, art, music) in tension with the challenges emerging alongside social movements including school desegregation, environmental justice, anticarceral, immigrant and voting rights struggles. Not only will our work consider how performative practices have been central to such struggles, but we will also examine how the study of these practices became a discipline in the academy (just as they were disciplined by it). We will study major literary texts as well as other creative forms to understand how a sutured Latinidad emerged. Full details for ENGL 6663 - Latinx Field Formations and The Politics of Transformative Study |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 6694 |
Political Violence in Contemporary Fiction: Silence as Compassion or Complicity
This course examines contemporary works of fiction that depict episodes of political violence between WWII and today. During this period, there have been 344 conflicts that have killed 500 or more people, but the public attention they receive varies tremendously. New novels and stories disclose and challenge silences surrounding events neglected in global public memory. What role can these works play in altering the kinds of stories heard within and beyond the university? Which voices do they portray as empowered or neglected? How can silence around violence be both compassionate and complicit? What are the ethics of storytelling related to different forms of silence, and what does it mean to read in a way that is compassionate or complicitly silent? |
Fall. |
| ENGL 6791 |
Acoustic Horizons
The course will explore the philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics of sound along the artistic interface of cinema, video, performance, and new media art. From analysis of synchronization of sound and image in the talking movie to its discruption in experimental music, video, new media and sound art, we will consider the prominence of sound and noise as carriers of gender, ethnic and cultural difference. We also will explore the theory of sound, from tracts on futurism, feminism, new music, and sampling, to more recent acoustic applications of eco-theory in which sound merges with discourses of water and environment. In addition to studying a wide range of artistic production in audio, sound, new media, and screen arts, we will discuss the dialogical impact of theoretical discussions of sound in psychoanalysis and aesthetics, as well as the phenomenal growth of digital acoustic horizons in the Pacific Rim. |
Fall. |
| ENGL 7800 |
MFA Seminar: Poetry
The MFA poetry seminar is a required course for MFA poetry students. |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 7801 |
MFA Seminar: Fiction
The MFA fiction seminar is a required course for all MFA fiction students. |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 7850 |
Reading for Writers
In general, Reading for Writers examines literary works through the eyes of a writer, focusing on the craft of literature. While the class is geared toward MFA students, all graduate students are welcome to enroll. Topics vary with each section and semester. For descriptions, please consult the class roster. |
Fall or Spring. |
| ENGL 7880 |
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. |
Fall. |
| ENGL 7910 |
Article Writing Seminar
This workshop will take students through the process of writing and revising an academic article. We will begin by introducing the genre of the article and its key components (central claims, methodological approach, scholarly intervention, readings). The seminar will address the foundations of writing and the academic publishing landscape alongside a variety of landmark articles across subdisciplines and journals. It will, however, primarily function as a workshop, providing in-depth feedback and allowing students to leave the course with a polished article draft and the resources for its submission. |
Fall. |
| ENGL 7940 |
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. |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 7950 |
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. |
Fall, Spring. |
| ENGL 7960 |
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. |
Fall. |