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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 1100 - How Reading Changes Your Life

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 for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1105 - FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics

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 for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures

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 for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

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

When students write personal essays for college applications, they often discover how challenging it can be to write about themselves. In this course, we'll examine how well-known authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Alison Bechdel, Tim O'Brien, and others construct their public, written selves. We'll also consider how the style of writing affects how readers understand an author's personality and motives. Readings will include short essays, possible some poems, and a few longer works. Through the writing frequent essays, we'll explore why and how people write about themselves—for self-exploration, political or social change, purely to practice a form of art, or for other reasons—and we'll investigate how writing shapes lived experience.

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

What makes a story, and what makes it a mystery story? In this course, we'll study and write about the nature of narratives, taking the classic mystery tale written by such writers as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler as typical of intricately plotted stories of suspense and disclosure that have been written and filmed in many genres: Greek tragedy, horror tales by Poe and Shirley Jackson, psychological thrillers by Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith, neo-noir films such as Memento and Fight Club, and postmodern mystery parodies such as those of Paul Auster and Jorge Luis Borges. We'll look at the way they hold together, the desire and fear that drive them, and the secrets they tell—or try to keep hidden.

Full details for ENGL 1147 - FWS: Mystery in the Story

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 for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

Would you be able to identify the Shakespeare or Austen of your time? What are the best books being written today and how do we know they are great? What role do critics, prizes, book clubs and movie adaptations play in establishing the appeal and prestige of new literature? Are there some books that are great in their moment and others that will be considered great for generations to come? These are some of the questions we'll explore as we read, discuss, and write critical essays about several of the most acclaimed books published in the last twenty years. Our readings will include works in a range of genres, from novels and memoirs to poetry and graphic novels.

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Great New Books

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 for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

What is the difference between an anecdote and a short story or a memoir and a short story? How does the short story separate itself from the prose poem, the myth, or the parable? What can a short story do that no other art form can do, including cinematic narrative? This course will focus on the reading and analysis of short stories derived from a range of cultures and time periods, with some emphasis on English-language stories, particularly those from the North American continent. Writers may include but not be limited to: Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Eudora Welty, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates and Anton Chekhov.

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

Writers and artists from Homer to Raymond Pettibon have been fascinated by the relationship between words and images, a relationship that is sometimes imagined as a competition, sometimes as a collaboration. What are the differences between literary and visual media? What can the juxtaposition of word and image teach us about the nature of representation? What other kinds of ends (satiric, esoteric, etc.) do artists and writers hope to achieve by coupling words with images? To explore these questions, we will consult works drawn from a range of periods and genres (for example, graphic novels, medieval manuscripts, contemporary art and new media, emblem books, film, literary gaming, fiction and poetry). The course is structured around a progressive set of writing assignments and will include both informal exercises as well as formal essays.

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British 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 for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

An introductory survey of literary and cultural criticism and theory, with a more general focus on developing critical thinking skills. The course draws on literature and film and gives students a solid foundation in the issues and vocabularies of the critical analysis of literature and culture. It is designed to be accessible and useful not only for English and literature majors (and prospective majors) but also for anyone interested in gaining a foundation in critical approaches to culture and society. The contemporary humanistic disciplines largely share many common concerns and this class provides undergraduates from various disciplines a firm grounding in the key concepts and issues of what has come to be called "theory." Readings from such schools as New Criticism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial studies.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2000 - Introduction to Criticism and Theory

Though it is now the global language of communication, English was once considered the vulgar tongue of a backwater. In this course, we will go to the sources of what we have come to call English literature to understand how texts and literary cultures played a role in shaping society and fashioning subjects, and how they also gave voice to dissent and difference — from the oral epic tradition of Beowulf to the public playhouses of Shakespeare's England, and from the intimate lyrics of the metaphysical poets to the indigenous and colonial voices of North America. We'll also take time to dwell on signal texts that can teach us the craft of literary invention. As we range from the boggiest depths of folk legend to the "light fantastic" of lyrical meter, we'll be building a toolkit of the literary terms and techniques that are necessary for the interpretation and creation of literary works. And through a series of exercises, students will gain hands-on experience with literary experimentation. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2035 - Science Fiction

Readings from the work of nine poets chosen to help us think about the nature and possibilities of poetry and different ways of engaging with it: Shakespeare (the sonnets), Alexander Pope, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and A. R. Ammons. One assumption of the course is that there are other things to do with poems besides interpret them: reading aloud, writing imitations or parodies, memorizing, identifying poetic techniques, and creating anthologies of favorite poems. No previous study of poetry is presumed.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2045 - Major Poets

This course examines contemporary world literature from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Our readings will range across genres (fiction, poetry, drama, and film) and include writers from multiple geographies—in addition to America and Britain, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. As we define the category "world literature," we will explore innovations in aesthetics as well as historical developments that have influenced recent literary production. In particular, our readings will compel us to investigate how nationalism, religion, gender, race and socioeconomic status have impacted the formation of world literature and its bearings on social justice.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2050 - Contemporary World Literature

This class aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central place in Renaissance culture. We read ten plays covering the length of Shakespeare's career: comedies, history plays, tragedies, and romances, including The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Othello, King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV Part One, and Henry V. Our study will include attention to dramatic forms, Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts, including early modern English theater history. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions focused on performance, close reading, and questions raised by the plays. We will also view some film adaptations of Shakespeare. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2270 - Shakespeare

From the radical manifestos of revolutionaries to the satirical plays of union organizers, from new, experimental novels to poetry, visual art, and music, this course examines Latino/a literature published in the United States beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing to the present. We will pay particular attention to the historical, theoretical, and literary context for this literature. We will study memoir, poetry, essays, and cultural production. Authors include José Martí, Luisa Capetillo, Israel 'Cachao' López, Josefina López, Cherríe Moraga, Esmerelda Santiago, Gloria Anzaldúa, José Montoya, Carmen Tafolla, and Pedro Pietri.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2400 - Introduction to Latino/a Literature

This course will ask us to turn a critical eye toward the weird bodies at the center of Gothic fiction: monsters, vampires, ghosts, and…the human self. We'll read gothic fiction from its beginnings to some recent YA incarnations, pairing many of our literary readings with examples of the gothic in contemporary American pop culture. The novels, films, and critical texts we read will provide us with a conceptual foundation for recognizing how and why specific cultural moments have adapted Gothic aesthetics. By attending to the strangely constituted bodies at the gothic's core, we will think critically about why the genre's dark fascination with gender and racial uncertainty, political power, and the limits of literary and scientific authority continue to haunt us into the twenty-first century.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2410 - The Gothic Imagination

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2600 - Introduction to Native American Literature

What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for? The three fundamental questions Kant says philosophy aims to answer have also been traditionally asked by literature: What kinds of truths and knowledge of ourselves, others, and the world can literature offer us? Does literature help us act morally or foster faith that history bends towards justice? This course introduces students to how literature and philosophy work with and sometimes against each other in addressing these concerns through problems such as the construction of identity, passions and human community, body-mind interrelations, the nature of aesthetic experience. We will also examine the role of metaphors, narrative, and dialogue in philosophy. Authors include Plato, Sophocles, Hume, Sterne, Kant, Shelley, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Woolf, Adorno, Beckett.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2725 - Philosophy and Literature

We experience our bodies as so much a part of who we are that we take them for granted. Yet the way we think about the body has a history of its own. This class looks at how the idea of "the body" gets constructed over time. How has the body come to have attributes called "gender," "sexuality," and "race"? Why have some bodies been seen as monstrous, perverted, and unholy, others as gorgeous, normal, and divine? What makes bodies pleasurable and dangerous? We'll find out by examining a broad range of evidence from the ancient era to the present day, including literature (Ovid, Kafka, Octavia Butler), philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Judith Butler), film, and the history of science.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2780 - Body as Text: Pleasure and Danger

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2785 - Comic Books and Graphic Novels

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2800 - Creative Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2880 - Expository Writing

In her memoir Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston identified a conundrum familiar to many US-born children of Chinese immigrants when she asked: "What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" What is "Chinese tradition"? Does it mean the same thing to people in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, or to Chinese diasporic communities in North America?  Does "Chineseness" change across time and space? While there will be occasion to discuss what "Chineseness" means in different Asian contexts, this course will focus primarily on how ideas of "China" and "Chineseness" have been historically constructed by, for, and in the West—particularly in the US. Course materials include readings on the concept of "Chineseness," Chinese American literature and film, and historical studies of East/West relations.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2910 - It's All Chinese to Me

What does the representation of sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights ('Alf layla-wa layla) have to do with a politics of race and gender? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic text across literature, film, and popular culture, in the Middle East and in Europe. We will pay attention to the transmission of phobic tropes about female sexuality and miscegenation, or "interracial" sex as they manifest in various versions of 1001 Nights across time and space.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2917 - Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights

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.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2935 - New Visions in African Cinema

This seminar offers an introduction to the humanities by exploring the historical, cultural, social and political stakes of the Society for the Humanities annual focal theme. Students will consider novels, films, short stories and historical texts as they explore the theme in dialogue with literature, cinema, art, media, and philosophy. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to local sites relevant to the theme, and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in this seminar will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the Society's theme and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research. For more information visit the Society for the Humanities webpage.

Full details for ENGL 2950 - Introduction to Humanities

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, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Parra, Bolaño, and Dylan, the course will arc toward impactful recent interventions by such contemporary intermedial artists as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar.

Catalog Distribution: (HA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2951 - Poetry's Image

An introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and the Icelandic family saga-the "native" heroic literary genre of Icelandic tradition. Texts will vary but will normally include the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Hrafnkels Saga, Njals Saga, Laxdaela Saga, and Grettirs Saga. All readings will be in translation. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3080 - Icelandic Family Sagas

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3110 - Old English

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that students who have read Jane Austen must be in want of an opportunity to continue that delicious experience, and that those who have not read her novels should. This course explores Austen's characters, culture, and narrative art against the backdrop of films, novels, and poems which resonate with her fiction. We will investigate Austen's importance in literary history as well as her continuing attraction in the twenty-first century. By immersing ourselves in her fictional world we will enrich our experience of her novels and sharpen our awareness of the pleasures of reading.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3390 - Jane Austen

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

This course studies the life experiences and political struggles of black women who have attained political leadership. It will study their rise to political power through an examination of the autobiographies of women from the Caribbean, the U.S., Africa and Brazil. Political figures such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Shirley Chisholm, Benedita da Silva will serve as some of the primary sources of analysis and discussion. Students will have the opportunity to select and follow a political leader and her challenges closely. The first half of the course will examine some of the general literature on the subject; the second half will study the women in their own words. We will attempt to have some available local political leaders visit the class.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3606 - Black Women and Political Leadership

This class examines current aural technologies of writing:  podcasts, audiobooks, site-specific headphone theater. We will focus on the challenges and opportunities of the present—making our own recordings along the way—from the point of view of the technologies' long history. Authors have always written for the ear, but after 1877, when Thomas Alva Edison read "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a gramophone horn, a new set of possibilities were born. What new kinds of writing were made possible by the gramophone disc, the microphone, long-range broadcasting, high fidelity, audiotape, multitrack recording, stereo, binaural, and quadraphonic mixing, headphones, the Walkman, digitality, streaming on-demand? What new audiences and forms of listening accompanied these new technologies? We will consider the meaning of each technology when it was avant-garde, from Edison to Gertrude Stein, from William S. Burroughs to the Last Poets, to the Radiolab, Serial, and Homecoming podcasts. This unique class will feature collaborations with Ithaca's Cherry Artspace and visiting artists-in-residence from The World According to Sound.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3615 - Gramophone, Radio, Podcast: Sound Recording as a Medium for Writing

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 such as W.E.B DuBois, Maya Angelou, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Teju Cole, and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3742 - Africans and African Americans in Literature

Where would crime fiction be without its constitutive trouble—the body on the floor, the predatory femme fatale, the sin-steeped city that only an honest sleuth can purge? And where would literary culture be without crime fiction to make trouble for—to attack, parody, reinvent, complicate, and rejoice in? This course will review classic mystery story design in Poe, Doyle, and Hammett and will read later fictions by such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Michael Chabon, China Miéville, Tana French, and Mukoma Wa Ngugi, viewing films by John Huston, Roman Polanski, Christopher Nolan, and Denis Villeneuve—and promising never to let the trouble go away.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3747 - The Trouble with Crime Fiction

This course offers an exciting trip to the intricate world of Nabokov's fiction. After establishing himself in Europe as a distinguished Russian writer, Nabokov, at the outbreak of World War II, came to the United States where he reestablished himself, this time as an American writer of world renown. In our analysis of Nabokov's fictional universe, we shall focus on his Russian corpus of works, from Mary (1926) to The Enchanter (writ. 1939), all in English translation, and then shall examine the two widely read novels which he wrote in English in Ithaca while teaching literature at Cornell: Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957).

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3790 - Reading Nabokov

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: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3820 - Narrative Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3840 - Poetry Writing

This course offers students a chance to write and reflect intensively on their engagement inside Auburn, Cayuga, Elmira or Five Points Correctional Facilities. We will read essays by incarcerated writers and advocates for change to the criminal legal system, and fiction about prison experience. These readings will provoke our thinking about crime and punishment, confinement and "rehabilitation" and the project of higher education in correctional setting, and inspire our own writing about our motivations and discoveries as in-prison volunteers -- personal, social, educational, political, moral and spiritual.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3895 - Reflecting on the Prison Classroom

Shortly after the last election, The New Yorker published an article entitled "The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming." This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, beginning with its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, and Marx) and then focusing on its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse), particularly in its engagement with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht, Kafka, and Beckett).  Established in 1920s at the Institute for Social Research, the assorted circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to commentaries on the entertainment industry, high art, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today's world ("what they knew") as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3920 - Introduction to Critical Theory

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3954 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of the Performance

In this course we will trace how the wider participation of women in the public sphere affected media, gender roles, and sexuality in early nineteenth-century England. Women, as well as men, responded vigorously to the French Revolution and to the British reaction against it. Women were able, during the Romantic period, to accomplish widely contrasting achievements, such as these: follow up A Vindication of the Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of Women; win fame and earn a living by writing Italian sonnets, or by writing closet dramas; win a separation payment after an affair with the Prince of Wales and then thrive as a writer and intellectual; and, of course—as Mary Shelley did, at age 19—write and publish Frankenstein. This seminar aims to understand, interpret, and even participate in the history of women's writing and achievements in the public sphere—as well as—also important—more private imaginative experiences. No previous knowledge of pre-twentieth century literature is necessary.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4330 - Women, Real and Imagined: British Romanticism

A study of the impact of imaginative innovation in literary history—what triggers the creation of new literary genres; how is creativity shaped to convey new meanings; how does novelty enter into the literary tradition, to become convention? We will apply these questions to a varied selection of works, each of which plays a distinctive role in "making it new" in English literature. As we consider works from slave narrative to Gothic fiction, travel literature, the erotic novel, and manners fiction, we will define the distinctive incentives for innovation and consider common forms of novelty across a range of imaginative experiences. Texts include: Behn, Oroonoko; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Richardson, Pamela; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; and Burney, Evelina. This course counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4350 - Make it New: Literary Uncertainty

Why are prequels and sequels snapped up so eagerly by today's audiences? Extending the story-line backwards or forwards allows us to gain new insights into characters we thought we knew. The same can happen with the fictional worlds that surround the characters. Some Victorian novels gain this sort of richness by themselves, without extending their stories backward or forward. We will read two such novels, Dickens's Little Dorrit and Eliot's Middlemarch. Both are quite long, but our course syllabus will give you time to enjoy them. Wuthering Heights joins them, reminding us that memorable fictional worlds can come in smaller packages. These three novels allow us to experience life in a city and a town, as well as in isolated houses on the English moors. They are among the greatest novels written in the Victorian era, or in any other.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4470 - Fictional Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison received her M.A. in English at Cornell University in 1955.  To study her, in a way, is to gain a deeper understanding of how she journeyed on from her days as a student here to become one of the world's greatest writers, how she has helped to transform world literature, and  how she has  shaped  Cornell's great legacy.  In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels.  Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language.  Furthermore, from novel to novel, she is even known for developing features such as the very first sentence with great contemplation, an approach that also demonstrates her commitment to form.  As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years.  The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study.  By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced critical understanding of it.  The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and help them to become more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.  Morrison's novels have placed her at the vanguard of the globalization of the novel itself, and she is, undisputedly, one the most famous and innovative writers in the world.  She emerged as one of the greatest and most prolific writers of the twentieth century, and her audiences have continued to be captivated by her literary genius in this millennial age.  She is one of the most revered writers within the American literary establishment and has helped to reshape it both as a critic and novelist.  Her work can help one to develop more mastery in reading the novel as a genre.  Indeed, her thinking about this area is so original and pivotal that her fiction and critical works are absolutely indispensable for all serious students and scholars in fields such as American literature.  Its impact on African American literature is equally vital.  We will focus on reading the repertoire of novels by Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003),  A Mercy (2008) Home (2012), and God Bless the Child (2014).  We will screen the 1998 film adaptation of her novel Beloved, along with documentaries related to Morrison such as Gail Pellet and Bill Moyers's Toni Morrison:  A Writer's Work and Gary Deans, Alan Hall and Jana Wendt's Toni Morrison: Uncensored.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This course will explore a concern shared by contemporary women writers and artists. In their works, bodily visibility raises questions about sexuality, race, and mother-daughter relations. They also use fiction and visual culture to show ingestion and forced incorporation. For example, many works emphasize scenes of eating and, contrarily, refusing to eat. Texts may include novels by Dorothy Allison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edwidge Danticat, Oonya Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Artists examined may include Renee Cox, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, Jolene Rickard, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Bernie Searle, and Kara Walker.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4525 - Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Artists

Why might a novelist choose to focus on food (or a chef) in order to tell a particular tale?  How do writers use the language of food to explore issues such as gender, sexuality, race and nation? What can a study of food tell us about the dynamic of power and its circulation in US culture? This class interrogates the ways food functions as a symbol in literary texts; we will also consider how writers deploy narrative form and language to capture the sensual pleasures of food. Our entrees will consist of novels and short stories, but sides may include memoir, food essays, and cookbooks.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4645 - Culinary Literature, Literary Food

How should anti-racist people respond to the new racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States? What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available? How can we form cross-racial progressive coalitions? How should we understand the nature of our social identities and what they make possible? This course is a wide-ranging introduction to these questions with readings drawn from social and cultural theory, as well as literature and film. Films include Get Out and I Am Not Your Negro, as well as such Hollywood classics as Imitation of Life. Texts by such writers as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Danzy Senna and Dorothy Allison, as well as relevant anthropological and social-theoretical work (Strangers in Their Own Land, Whiteness of a Different Color) and memoirs of anti-racist activists. A central text will be the recent book The Future of Whiteness by the Latina feminist scholar Linda Martin Alcoff.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4733 - The Future of Whiteness

How does literature count? Language and numbers seem to be radically divergent—if not mutually exclusive—ways of representing the human world. And yet throughout history examples abound of literary works that attempt to incorporate, approximate, or travesty (and often all at once!) quantitative methods of counting, permutation, and computation in the linguistic medium of fiction. Is literature always expressive? Is quantification always cold? What does it feel like to be a number? When we analyze literature quantitatively, what can we see with fresh eyes and what do we miss? This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of literary critical analysis, including the emergent quantitative and computational tools of the digital humanities. We will read diverse works of literature to ground our investigation.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4795 - Quantification: Literature that Counts

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4800 - Advanced Poetry Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4801 - Advanced Narrative Writing

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: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4820 - Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Seminar

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. For Fall 2019, the topic will be: Pleasure and Complexity. Please see the class roster for a description.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4850 - Reading for Writers

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.

Full details for ENGL 4910 - Honors Seminar 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 Cohn, the Honors Director in English, will contact students to set up the first meeting time.

Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

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

Full details for ENGL 4940 - Honors Essay Tutorial II

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

Full details for ENGL 4950 - Independent Study

This course addresses psychoanalytic understandings of psychic energy, its sources and functions, and its manifestations as mania or psychosis. Students will be introduced to foundational psychoanalysts: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Frantz Fanon, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, Hortense Spillers, Christopher Bollas. We will also study literary portraits of madness, considering how these portraits correspond or diverge from psychoanalytic frameworks. We will discuss how to apply psychoanalytic theory to literature, but also how to challenge the theory with a literary lens. Through collective dialogue and private reading, we will think about the energy of own minds, our constitutions and possibilities and breaking points. These investigations will be both intellectual and intimate, both troubling and reparative. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ENGL 4962 - Energetic Expression, Manic Defense, Psychotic Foreclosure: Psychoanalytic and Literary Portraits

From The Walking Dead to 28 Weeks Later, zombies are king. These monsters are more than pop culture fluff. This course considers how zombies serve as a symptom of and metaphor for anthropogenic climate change. Both phenomena challenge traditional humanistic assumptions about the division between the natural and unnatural world; the human and nonhuman; the spiritual and secular. As mass-scale climate disaster appears ever nearer, the zombie becomes less a fantasy, and more a heuristic for understanding our seemingly new and startlingly monstrous world. Drawing from novels, films, TV shows, comic books, anthropology, political theory, climate science, and governmental reports, this interdisciplinary course will ponder how zombies – and we, as planetary citizens - move, think, and feed. For longer description and instructor bio visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ENGL 4968 - Zombies of the Anthropocene: Climate Change in the Cultural Imagination

This course focuses on literature as a model and harbinger of posthumanism. The German tradition in particular is rich in literary texts that offer posthuman constellations and experiences avant la lettre. Other texts, which often show a significant German literary or philosophical influence, will also be included. In addition to analyzing specific historical contexts and developments that encouraged literary sorties beyond the limits of the human, we will closely examine literature as a privileged medium of such transgression.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4972 - Beyond the Limits of the Human: Explorations in German Literature

An introduction to practical and theoretical aspects of graduate English studies, conducted with the help of weekly visitors from the 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

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

Study of short stories and a novel that self-consciously foreground questions of narrative form and technique and the process of reading. Authors to be read include Balzac, Borges, Calvino, Coover, Cortazar, Kafka, Kincaid, and others selected by the students. We will also read theoretical essays on the analysis of narrative by Barthes, Bakhtin, Genette, Fludernik, Pratt, Altman, Lanser, and others, focusing on questions about relations between plot and narrative discourse, the discrimination of narrators, the role of gender, and interpretive frameworks for thinking about narrative. Short exercises, an oral report and a longer paper.

Full details for ENGL 6155 - Theory and Analysis of Narrative

A myriad of texts bear witness to the emancipatory power of writing: the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, to name just two. This course will explore how scholars and theorists (Juliet Fleming, Chris Johnson, Greg Ulmer, Walter Ong, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) have approached writing since Derrida first proposed the (impossible) science of grammatology and identified writing as a pharmakon. We will return to some of the texts that were key to post-structuralist theory, Plato's Phaedrus and Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages; and we will also consider how media theory has inflected our approaches to writing. To keep after the question of what writing is (even if we cannot ever know its ends), we will also look to literary works that have tried to address that question; here, authors may include Christine de Pizan, Philip Sidney, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ishmael Reed. 

Full details for ENGL 6225 - What is Writing

Translation is a cultural, conceptual, and political problem. It lies at the heart of the literary itself. Methodological discussions of "world" literature hinge on it, and Renaissance culture is unthinkable apart from it. The Renaissance—defined in terms of transmission and reception of ancient texts—is itself, in a way, translation. Tied to philosophical and theo-political problems of origin and copy, Truth and falsehood, fidelity, heresy and betrayal (as the Italian maxim traduttore, traditore attests), translation raises questions of sameness and identity, originality, authority, property, sacredness and evil. The seminar explores these questions in texts from Luther, Cervantes and Montaigne, through Benjamin, Derrida and Agamben. Particular focus is on the early modern as template and groundwork for the complexity and centrality of translation to life.

Full details for ENGL 6285 - Early Modern Translations

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison received her M.A. in English at Cornell University in 1955.  To study her, in a way, is to gain a deeper understanding of how she journeyed on from her days as a student here to become one of the world's greatest writers, how she has helped to transform world literature, and  how she has  shaped  Cornell's great legacy.  In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels.  Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language.  Furthermore, from novel to novel, she is even known for developing features such as the very first sentence with great contemplation, an approach that also demonstrates her commitment to form.  As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years.  The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study.  By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced critical understanding of it.  The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and help them to become more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.  Morrison's novels have placed her at the vanguard of the globalization of the novel itself, and she is, undisputedly, one the most famous and innovative writers in the world.  She emerged as one of the greatest and most prolific writers of the twentieth century, and her audiences have continued to be captivated by her literary genius in this millennial age.  She is one of the most revered writers within the American literary establishment and has helped to reshape it both as a critic and novelist.  Her work can help one to develop more mastery in reading the novel as a genre.  Indeed, her thinking about this area is so original and pivotal that her fiction and critical works are absolutely indispensable for all serious students and scholars in fields such as American literature.  Its impact on African American literature is equally vital.  We will focus on reading the repertoire of novels by Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003),  A Mercy (2008) Home (2012), and God Bless the Child (2014).  We will screen the 1998 film adaptation of her novel Beloved, along with documentaries related to Morrison such as Gail Pellet and Bill Moyers's Toni Morrison:  A Writer's Work and Gary Deans, Alan Hall and Jana Wendt's Toni Morrison: Uncensored.

Full details for ENGL 6513 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This course will explore postwar US poetry through the lens of what might be called micro-periodization. Taking the decade as a privileged frame of reference, we'll ask what recognizable shifts in style, institutional placement, and cultural value occur as we move from the 50s to the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. These temporal modulations will serve as an alternative to the spatial demarcations that have typically shaped accounts of postwar poetry—e.g., by region, school, movement, etc.  We'll consider, for example, how the loosely paratactic style that emerges in the 50s (Ginsberg, Lowell, Bishop) gives way in the 60s to a lyric mode that blends epiphany and epigram (Merwin, Wright, Creeley), yielding in turn to a more discursive style in the 70s (Ammons, Ashbery, Rich).

Full details for ENGL 6631 - American Poetry: 1950-2000

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

Things Fall Apart has been translated into over 50 languages but has not yet been translated into Igbo, the author's mother tongue. Heart of Darkness would be a close equivalent if it had never been translated into Polish. How can it be that Africa's most famous book does not yet exist in Igbo? By looking at the growth and standardization of English first in England and then its implementation through colonial education in Africa, you will get a good grasp of the relationship between language, identity, and decolonization as a contradiction within the English metaphysical empire. We will therefore be exploring philological debates in Romantic England and post-colonial Africa.

Full details for ENGL 6731 - Politics of English and African Literature

How should anti-racist people respond to the new racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States?  What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available? How can we form cross-racial progressive coalitions? How should we understand the nature of our social identities and what they make possible?  This course is a wide-ranging introduction to these questions with readings drawn from social and cultural theory, as well as literature and film. Films include Get Out and I Am Not Your Negro, as well as such Hollywood classics as Imitation of Life. Texts by such writers as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Danzy Senna and Dorothy Allison, as well as relevant anthropological and social-theoretical work (Strangers in Their Own Land, Whiteness of a Different Color) and memoirs of anti-racist activists.  A central text will be the recent book The Future of Whiteness by the Latina feminist scholar Linda Martin Alcoff.

Full details for ENGL 6733 - The Future of Whiteness

This course will examine Giorgio Agamben's recently completed nine-volume Homo Sacer project. Beginning with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and ending with The Use of Bodies (2015) we will follow Agamben's thought as it addresses such topics as biopolitics, the legal order, political theology, oikonomia, work and inoperativity, form-of-life, and others. We will also read Agamben in relation to a number of his influences and interlocutors, such as Arendt, Benjamin, Benveniste, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Kantorowicz, and Schmitt. 

Full details for ENGL 6739 - Agamben's Homo Sacer

This course will examine cosmopolitanism as a cultural, moral, and political concept both historically, with reference primarily to the eighteenth century, and theoretically, in contemporary debates. The aim will be to elaborate critically the universalist and egalitarian premises of the Enlightenment notion of cosmopolitical subjects and to evaluate what progressive or ideological functions this notion continues to play in discourses on sovereignty, human rights, religious tolerance, and cultural dissemination and aesthetic community. Works by Cicero, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx will be read with those by Arendt, Balibar, Derrida, Habermas, Honig, and other contemporary theorists.

Full details for ENGL 6970 - Cosmopolitanism and Post-Enlightenment

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

Full details for ENGL 7800 - MFA Seminar: Poetry

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

Full details for ENGL 7801 - MFA Seminar: Fiction

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.

Full details for ENGL 7850 - Reading for Writers

This workshop will take you through the process of writing and polishing an academic article. We will begin by introducing you to the genre of the article, including its length and standard sections (central claims, methodological approach, scholarly intervention, readings). The seminar will discuss the foundations of writing in conjunction with Eric Hayot's The Elements of Academic Style. But it will primarily function as a workshop, providing you with in-depth feedback on drafts of your article. At the end of the workshop you will have a polished draft of your article as well as a sense of where and how to circulate it.

Full details for ENGL 7910 - Article Writing Seminar

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

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 enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for ENGL 7940 - Directed Study

This course should be used for an independent study in which a small group of students works with one member of the graduate faculty. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the 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

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