Courses

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

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 2270 - Shakespeare

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 2580 - Imagining the Holocaust

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

Full details for ENGL 2603 - The Novels of Toni Morrison

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

Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

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

Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

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

Full details for ENGL 2761 - American Cinema

In Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, Africa is a place of nobility, where even lions are at peace with lambs. In contrast, Leonardo DeCaprio's Blood Diamond is a violent look at the role the demand for diamonds has played in destabilizing mineral-rich African countries. But if Hollywood has long been concerned with depicting Africa in particular ways, African filmmakers are at the same time creating their own stories. Popular and scholarly film critics are also contributing to the battle over who speaks for Africa. In this course we will explore these competing images of Africa, questions of imagination versus reality, and the extent to which artists should, if at all, be responsible to the subject of their art.

Full details for ENGL 2771 - Africa in Hollywood

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

Full details for ENGL 2800 - Creative Writing

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

Full details for ENGL 2880 - Expository Writing

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 2935 - New Visions in African Cinema

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

Full details for ENGL 2951 - Poetry's Image

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.

Full details for ENGL 3110 - Old English

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

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

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 3360 - American Drama and Theatre

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.

Full details for ENGL 3390 - Jane Austen

Full details for ENGL 3500 - The High Modernist Tradition

This course offers an opportunity to read in depth two major writers of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Friends and one-time collaborators in the New York City of the 1920s, each had important careers that extended long after the Harlem Renaissance period in which they achieved early renown. This class will survey the myriad genres in which each writer worked (short stories, poetry, novels, drama, critical writing, folklore and anthropology). And it will also consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which both writers achieved early renown and which their work critically contested. The class concludes by examining the reading works of later major authors (Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen) who drew directly with Hughes' and Hurston's legacy.

Full details for ENGL 3505 - Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

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

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 3591 - Kids Rule! Children's Popular Culture

Full details for ENGL 3678 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

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.

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 3760 - World Poetry of the Pluriverse: Regional Forms and Global Readers

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

Full details for ENGL 3795 - Communicating Climate Change

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

Full details for ENGL 3820 - Narrative Writing

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

Full details for ENGL 3840 - Poetry Writing

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 3941 - Political Journalism

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, Marx, and Nietzsche, and use these works to help us understand the nature of moral inquiry in novels like Eliot's Middlemarch, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Other writers we will most probably read include Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Full details for ENGL 4020 - Literature as Moral Inquiry

Like all of us, poets change over time. In this course we'll track the shifting visions and styles of three major American poets. Rather than reading each poet separately, we'll move back and forth among them, comparing the phases of their careers, charting their formal and stylistic innovations, and exploring the lines of influence that connect them. For 2023-2024, the class will focus on three Cornellians: A.R. Ammons, Alice Fulton, and Ishion Hutchinson. Ammons taught at Cornell from 1964 to 1998, Fulton received her MFA from Cornell in 1982 and later joined the faculty (retiring in 2020), and Hutchinson joined the faculty in 2012.

Full details for ENGL 4030 - Poetry in Process

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?

Full details for ENGL 4240 - Metamorphoses in Renaissance Literature and Culture

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 or 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.

Full details for ENGL 4382 - Paul de Man

How does formal and informal education shape selves and communities in contemporary Africa? What does it mean for writers to be forced to learn the language and literature of conquerors and colonizers? What happens to local traditions and knowledge in the face of colonialism and globalization? Does migrating across borders teach you something about home? We will have time to consider just a small sample of brilliant works, but we will range as broadly across the continent as we can, including novels, short stories, music, and a few films from Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Mozambique. You will be expected to delve deeply into one local context in your semester-long research project.

Full details for ENGL 4502 - African Novels: The Bildungsroman and Other Stories of Education and Development

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

Full details for ENGL 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

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.

Full details for ENGL 4675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature

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?

Full details for ENGL 4696 - Political Violence in Contemporary Fiction: Silence as Compassion or Complicity

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

Full details for ENGL 4705 - Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media

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

Full details for ENGL 4800 - Advanced Poetry Writing

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

Full details for ENGL 4801 - Advanced Narrative Writing

The 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.

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. Please see the class roster for a description.

Full details for ENGL 4850 - Reading for Writers

Full details for ENGL 4912 - Black Women's Autobiography in the 21st Century WritingHerStory

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

Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

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

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

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

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

This course juxtaposes some of the core strains of current post-humanist 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 the other-than-human on literary theory and on formal critique. Texts include Newton, Opticks; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature; Burney, Evelina; Nabokov, Lolita; Cowper, The Task; Voltaire, Candide; Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain; Kendall, Keeper's Travels; The Dog of Knowledge; The Biography of a Spaniel; Auster, Timbuktu. 

Full details for ENGL 6330 - Animals, Affect, and Climate: The Counterhuman Imaginary

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 or 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.

Full details for ENGL 6382 - Paul de Man

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

Full details for ENGL 6554 - Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style

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

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

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?

Full details for ENGL 6694 - Political Violence in Contemporary Fiction: Silence as Compassion or Complicity

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.

Full details for ENGL 6791 - Acoustic Horizons

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. For descriptions, please consult the class roster.

Full details for ENGL 7850 - Reading for Writers

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

Full details for ENGL 7880 - Literary Small Publishing

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

Full details for ENGL 7940 - Directed Study

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

Full details for ENGL 7950 - Group Study

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