Some of the best novels of the last 75 years were written by people who were students or professors at Cornell. Reading a selection of these great Cornell novels, we will also be tracing the history and development of post-WWII American fiction. Readings will include classic works by V. Nabokov, K. Vonnegut, J. Russ, T. Morrison, T. Pynchon, and W. Gass, as well as several more recent (some very recent) works by your fellow Cornellians. Perhaps in a few years your work will be on the list.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 1102 - The Great American Cornell Novel

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

Full details for ENGL 2150 - The American Musical

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 2160 - Television

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

Dragons? Spaceships? Bodies that change gendered characteristics at will? Vampire archivists? Speculative fiction (sci fi, fantasy) imagines the world not as it is but as it should be. It can imagine worlds where trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people thrive without danger or difficulty (and has done so for a long time). What do such worlds look like? How does it feel to read narratives where the gender binary does not work the way it does in our present day? This course surveys very recent trans- and non-binary-authored narratives. Readings may include (Cornell alumna) Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars, Isaac Fellman's Dead Collections (the trans vampire archivists), and short stories by authors like Torrey Peters and Daniel Lavery. Visits from authors being planned.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2535 - Issues in Contemporary Fiction: Trans Utopias and Genderqueer Science Fiction

How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences—Wiesel's Night , Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank—before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's "The Shawl." We shall also read the Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books as well as W.G, Sebald's Austerlitz. We shall conclude with several episodes of the acclaimed 2009-2017 French TV series A French Village.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

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

What do recent calls to "decolonize the university" mean? This course considers this imperative from a historical perspective by tracing the economic, psychological, and cultural significance of "decolonization" in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and theory. We will begin by examining resistance to colonialism and imperialism in the early twentieth century, before turning to mid-century independence movements. We will then ask how the failures of these movements precipitated what we now call postcolonial studies, the academic analysis of empires and their aftermaths, with an array of related historical topics addressing nation, class, and gender. We will follow these lines of inquiry into our so-called age of globalization to see how they have prompted a further set of questions about race, diaspora, indigeneity, and the environment.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2604 - What is Decolonization?

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

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

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: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG)

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. Please see the Class Roster for more details. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (WRT-AG)

Full details for ENGL 2880 - Expository Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

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

This course provides an introduction to the theory of trauma, along with literary, artistic and clinical works that engage with traumatic experience. We will explore the enigmatic notion of an experience of catastrophe that is both deferred and repeated, that escapes immediate comprehension but insists on testimonial recognition. How does trauma require us to rethink our notions of history, memory, subjectivity, and language? Who speaks from the site of trauma, and how can we learn to listen its new forms of address? We begin with Freud's foundational studies and their reception across the 20th and 21st centuries, then examine a range of global responses reformulating individual and collective trauma in its social, historical and political contexts. Materials include theoretical, artistic, testimonial expression in various media.

Full details for ENGL 3051 - Introduction to Trauma Studies

English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into "early Middle English," when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3110 - Old English

Was Milton a revolutionary poet? During the English civil war, he wrote radical political pamphlets defending regicide, divorce, unlicensed printing, and religious dissent. Yet he also saw himself as the epic poet of English Protestantism. Modern readers tend to separate these two aspects of his writing but, for Milton, poetry was crucial to proper governance. In this course, we'll focus on how Milton reconciled the dual imperatives to resist illegitimate rule and to obey true authority. We'll learn about the poetic and rhetorical techniques that Milton used to distinguish paradox from contradiction, action from activity, and dissent from rebellion.  And we'll consider the importance of this kind of thinking to political action and public life.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3290 - Milton: Political Revolution and Paradise Lost

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3360 - American Drama and Theatre

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3490 - Curiosity: The Literature and Science of Knowing Too Much

One way to think of African American literature is to recognize that certain themes and motifs recur and tell a story that one can study across time from slavery to freedom.  Solid literacies in this field not only provide valuable interpretive contexts for analyzing various aspects of African American and diasporan life and culture, but can reinforce work in a range of other fields, from Africana studies to American literature.  Additionally, they reinforce skills in reading and analysis of literature, as well as writing, that will pay off now and as time goes on.  We will examine selections from authors in African American literary history from the 18th century into the 1930s.  Authors who will be examined include Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T.  Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes.  The production of early African American literature was grounded in genres such as poetry, the novel, the short story, the slave narrative, the spiritual narrative, and autobiography, all of which will be explored.  It will be especially important for us to recognize the foundational contributions of African Americans to such fiction genres as the short story and the novel by the 1850s, forming a renaissance of sorts.  Additionally, we will consider the impact of oral forms on African American writing such as spirituals and folk tales.  We will consider the development of African American literature across a range of historical contexts, including the Revolutionary/Enlightenment period, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Harlem Renaissance/Jazz Age.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3507 - African American Literature Through the 1930's

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

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG, LA-AG)

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

This is a course on Irish writing of the modern period. In our readings over the semester (which will include some of the twentieth century's greatest literary texts), we will cover the development of Irish writing from the Yeats-led Irish Revival of the century's early years through Joyce's high modernist virtuosity to Bowen's Bloomsbury-inflected fiction to the proto-postmodernisms of O'Brien and Beckett. Along the way we will also examine how Irish modernism raises fundamental questions about such things as: the relation between language and national identity; the nature of modernism's "newness"; colonial, postcolonial, and "semicolonial" culture; the political uses of literature; and the contending forces of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the modern period.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3571 - The Modern Irish Writers

The term "AAPI" is often used as a U.S. demographic category for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but what brings these disparate groups together? This course explores the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and ideological imaginaries shaped by power struggles and empire. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking peoples across the Pacific, Asia and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? How does thinking about and critiquing imperialism inform what we mean when we say "AAPI"? Drawing on visual media, fiction, poetry, historical documents, speeches, and more, this course will track the relationship between the personal and political and ask what subjects emerge from competing imperial modernities.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3674 - AAPI and Empire

"Foreign in a domestic sense" is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called "Insular Cases" of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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

This course explores the creative cross-pollination between mass culture and avant-garde art, addressing key concepts in 20th century aesthetics (the middlebrow, the spectacle, pastiche, kitsch) and the evolution of the category of art itself. The mediating conditions of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be central to our examination of these conceptual histories, as will changes in the means of artistic production and distribution. Interdisciplinary and intermedial in its focus, the course will include texts by Theodor Adorno, Amiri Baraka, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burger, Guy Debord, Clement Greenberg, Cathy Park Hong, Griselda Pollock, Rosalind Krauss, Dwight MacDonald, Fred Moten, Sianne Ngai, Marjorie Perloff, Susan Sontag, and Hito Steyerl.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3753 - Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3795 - Communicating Climate Change

Full details for ENGL 3801 - Advanced Writing: Audiences, Genres, Media

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG)

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: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3840 - Poetry Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (WRT-AG)

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

Full details for ENGL 3920 - Introduction to Critical Theory

This seminar explores the relation between book history and literary history during the span from medieval English "manuscript" culture through Renaissance "print culture," with invitations to apply these concerns to any period and language. Skills taught are both theoretical and practical, focusing on manuscripts, old handwriting, literacy, printers, and issues linking material and social book-making to literary topics and forms. As a class, we will focus on the pivotal period of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but individual final editorial projects can take up any period or language. All students will learn to exploit chance archival discoveries, to write biographies of an early printer, and to use and create an edition.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4170 - The Archaeology of the Text from Chaucer through the Renaissance

This seminar explores one of the most consequential movements in African American cultural history, a movement of transnational impact. It was empowered in part by new social and institutional developments, including the Great Migration of African Americans, immigration from the Caribbean, and Pan-African contacts in Paris. It also benefited from new pluralistic theories of American culture and developments in the publishing industry centered in Manhattan. African American cultural vitality surged in the context of modern mobility and the rise of new publishing enterprises and technologies of sound reproduction. While chiefly centered on literature, the seminar will also touch on visual art, music, and performance.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4505 - The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1937

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

What are the limits and possibilities for Asian American longing and belonging? Asian Americans have been variously understood as immigrants, refugees, "forever foreigners," and "model minorities." These ideas emerge from and shape US understandings of nation, empire, rights, and citizenship. Native and Indigenous studies scholars have asked how and whether immigrants—including exploited workers—are complicit with settlement and occupation. In this course we will read Asian American literary texts from the Americas through Asian American and Indigenous cultural critique to consider the overlapping dimensions of militarism, carcerality, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and dispossession in order to learn what comparative and relational approaches can teach us.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4630 - Rethinking Asian American Literature: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Settler Colonialism

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for ENGL 4706 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4800 - Advanced Poetry Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4801 - Advanced Narrative Writing

Full details for ENGL 4815 - Reading (with) Judith Butler

Reading for Writers examines literary works through the eyes of a writer, focusing on the craft of literature. Topics vary with each section and semester and may focus on fiction, poetry, or both. Please see the class roster for a description.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4850 - Reading for Writers

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

Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

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

English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into "early Middle English," when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed.

Full details for ENGL 6110 - Old English

This seminar explores the relation between book history and literary history during the span from medieval English "manuscript" culture through Renaissance "print culture," with invitations to apply these concerns to any period and language. Skills taught are both theoretical and practical, focusing on manuscripts, old handwriting, literacy, printers, and issues linking material and social book-making to literary topics and forms. As a class, we will focus on the pivotal period of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but individual final editorial projects can take up any period or language. All students will learn to exploit chance archival discoveries, to write biographies of an early printer, and to use and create an edition.

Full details for ENGL 6171 - The Archaeology of the Text from Chaucer through the Renaissance

"All decolonization," wrote Frantz Fanon, "is successful at the level of description."  With a focus on the difference between description and critique and on the uneven relation between the academic project underlying the subfield of postcolonial studies and histories of colonialism and aspirations to decolonization across the twentieth century,  this seminar will offer a retrospective survey on the assemblage of texts that has come under the name "Postcolonial Theory" and inquire into its purchase on this present with particular emphasis on questions of indigeneity and environmental crisis.  Authors may include: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, David Scott, Leela Gandhi, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jason Moore, Glenn Coulthard, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon.

Full details for ENGL 6221 - Postcolonial Theory: Then and Now

Full details for ENGL 6261 - Forms-of-Life: Power and Thought in Early Modern Drama

This seminar will explore the both the intellectual grounding of and the nuts and bolts of feminist pedagogy. In what context did feminist pedagogy emerge and why? How have its practitioners variously defined it? What goals in teaching have they pursued? How might this work be useful to you as a teacher beginning or honing your teaching? Both theoretical and practical questions like these will be our subject.

Full details for ENGL 6440 - Feminist Pedagogy: What, Why, and How

Full details for ENGL 6491 - Radical Global Blackness Looking Back at our Present Times through Literature

The first half of the 20th century saw an unprecedented wave of poetic innovation, much of it produced by American poets living both in the United States and abroad.  This course will explore crucial texts and movements that range widely in their aesthetic and formal orientations, but that share in the expansive and experimental spirit of modernism.  We'll consider key volumes by Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes, as well as major poetic sequences produced in the shadow of World War II.  We'll also attend to varying modes of poetic circulation, including periodicals, small presses, and radio.  Our primary focus will be on individual poems and their powers to illuminate our lives.

Full details for ENGL 6632 - Modern American Poetry, 1910-1950

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for ENGL 6705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

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

Full details for ENGL 6707 - Theory and Method

Full details for ENGL 6816 - Reading (with) Judith Butler

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. The descriptions can be found at 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 students through the process of writing and revising an academic article. We will begin by introducing the genre of the article and its key components (central claims, methodological approach, scholarly intervention, readings). The seminar will address the foundations of writing and the academic publishing landscape alongside a variety of landmark articles across subdisciplines and journals. It will, however, primarily function as a workshop, providing in-depth feedback and allowing students to leave the course with a polished article draft and the resources for its submission.

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