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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures

What stories should we tell about climate change, and how should we tell them? What forms of communication will convince a broad public to accept scientific consensus, to overcome cynicism or apathy, and to take collective action, beyond simply raising awareness or changing individual behavior? We will examine and practice with the powers (and limits) of selected media and types of data, both textual and visual, qualitative and quantitative, such as: human-interest narratives, photographs, tables and graphs, journalistic and technical writing, social-media posts, public performances. Such strategies can engage our imagination as well as our reason, provoking not only fear or despair but also optimism and hope. Assignments may include syntheses of articles and analyses of media artifacts; public-facing documents or exhibits; and research presentations.

Full details for ENGL 1125 - FWS: Climate Change and Communications

Our human abilities to communicate about nature, the environment, and climate change are challenged by the scale and scope of the topics. This course enables students to read, write, and design forms of communication that engage with the environment, in order to inform, advocate, and to connect with our world. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1130 - FWS: Writing the Environment

How do we understand the reality of others? For that matter, how do we know and understand our own experience? One answer is writing: writing can crystalize lived experience for others. We can record our observations, our thoughts, our feelings and insights and hopes and failures, to communicate them, to understand them. In this course, we will read nonfiction narratives that explore and shape the self and reality, including the personal essay, memoir, autobiography, documentary film, and journalism. We will write essays that explore and explain these complex issues of presenting one's self and others.

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

What does it mean to be healthy? How do we describe our pain? Who becomes a physician? The practice of medicine isn't confined to scientific knowledge: it raises difficult questions about culture, identity, and bodies, and the stories we tell about all of these. This course will focus on works of literature and media to think about how medical care changes across time and place, and to explore images and narratives that shape our expectations about illness and health. Short writing assignments and longer essays will develop your critical thinking, strengthen your writing skills, and build your awareness of the complex cultural landscape of medical care.

Full details for ENGL 1140 - FWS: Writing Medicine: Stories of Illness and Healing

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

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

How does race inform the way we understand the world around us? How do writers explore their experiences of race and colonialism to challenge conventional notions of nation, citizenship, knowledge, and self? In this class, we engage materials that complicate our ideas of race in order to imagine new forms of identity, social life, and political possibility. We engage with creators who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, or from the Global South. The works we study may include podcasts, graphic novels, memoirs, poetry, plays, or films. Writing projects may be critical, creative, or research-based, as we develop our understanding of race and identity and by extension our capacities as writers.

Full details for ENGL 1160 - FWS: Intersections: Race, Writing, and Power

Reading is experiencing a new revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We still read paper books, but we also read by scrolling on screen, through search engines, and in images and memes. What kinds of texts are emerging in this new era, and how do we read them? How do writing-and our ways of reading-connect with the urgent topics before us now: technology and social control, truth and media, climate change and apocalypse, identity, equality, and human rights? This course will examine the past twenty years of writing in a variety of genres, printed and/or online, from fiction to memoir to poetry and beyond. As we read, we will explore and discover the forms that our own writing can take in response.

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Reading Now

From TV news to rock lyrics, from ads to political speeches to productions of Shakespeare, the forms of culture surround us at every moment. In addition to entertaining us or enticing us, they carry implied messages about who we are, what world we live in, and what we should value. Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all are built on the assumption that learning to decode these messages is a survival skill in today's media-saturated world and also excellent training for reading literature. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

What can a short story do that no other art form can do? We all consume and produce stories. To write about how narrative works, both within and against tradition, is to touch the core of identity, the quick of what makes us human. Storytelling informs all writing. Engaging diverse authors, we will practice not only reading sensitively and incisively but also making evidence-based arguments with power and grace, learning the habits of writing, revision, and documentation that allow us to join public or scholarly conversation. We will embrace shortness as a compression of meaning to unpack. Our own writing may include close analyses of texts, syntheses that place stories in critical dialogue, and both creative and research-based projects.

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

What happens when we adapt books into movies, write fan-fiction about video games, or create poetry about paintings? What happens when we write about one genre as though it were another? We have been writing about images and making images about writing for a long time. In addition to conventional types of art and literature like paintings, novels, or poetry, other forms such as film, video games, exhibitions, and virtual reality offer lively areas for analysis. In this class, we will engage with widely varied cultural forms-including, perhaps, experimental poetry, medieval manuscripts, graphic novels, memoirs, plays, films, podcasts, and more-to develop multiple media literacies as we sharpen our own writing about culture, literature, and art.

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

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. (ENGL-PRE)

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. (ENGL-PRE)

Full details for ENGL 2270 - Shakespeare

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 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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

The Cold War is often framed as a historical conflict between two competing geopolitical blocs, but it impacted the lives of many people throughout the world. This class explores how literature and culture shaped and was shaped by the Cold War, in American and some non-American contexts. How did Cold War cultures interact with state funding, the development of new sciences and technologies, and weaponized ideology? How did writers, intellectuals, artists, and activists -- state-sponsored and/or dissident -- navigate Cold War pressures and divides? We will begin with Hiroshima and the several forms of American anticommunism, and proceed from containment culture to countercultures, decolonization movements, and the environmental movement. Topics of study may include intelligence (espionage), advertising (publicity), civil rights, and the public questioning of gender roles. We will also engage with films, music, and painting, and possibly more recent works and new media. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 2675 - Cultures of the Cold War

Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

Full details for ENGL 2760 - Desire

From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies - and in particular Hollywood - have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino). (PMA-HTC)

Full details for ENGL 2761 - American Cinema

This course will tarry with questions of genre, representation, narrative, form, affect, adaptation, and so-called ?medium specificity? in and across poetry, fiction, drama, film, and television to explore the ways in which these forms of cultural expression trouble aesthetic, sociocultural, and historical boundaries. Our focus will be on world building within these works and how we might think with them to imagine the world anew. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 2765 - Watching Literature and Reading Film

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

On this course, students will explore creativity within essayistic form, considering its origins with Montaigne, exploring essays with expository roots, including texts by Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau and James Baldwin alongside lyric essay and poetics forms from writers such as Jorge Borges, Ishion Hutchinson and Bhanu Kapil. Student writers will produce a portfolio of essays and a brief poetics of their developing essayistic style. Taken with the instructor’s permission, and with the letter grade option, this course satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If counted toward the First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward ALC-AS.

Full details for ENGL 2860 - Creative, Lyric, and Expository Writing

This course offers guidance and an audience for students who wish to gain skill in expository writing-a common term for critical, reflective, investigative, and creative nonfiction. Each section provides a context for writing defined by a form of exposition, a disciplinary area, a practice, or a topic intimately related to the written medium. Course members will read in relevant published material and write and revise their own work regularly, while reviewing and responding to one another's. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term. Topics differ for each section. Please see the Class Roster for more details. This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. Taken with the instructor’s permission, and with the letter grade option, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If counted toward the First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward ALC-AS.

Full details for ENGL 2880 - Expository Writing

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, Mallarmé, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Parra, and Bolaño, the course will arc toward impactful recent interventions by such contemporaries as Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, Ilya Kaminsky, Jenny Xie, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and A.I.-generated poetry.

Full details for ENGL 2951 - Poetry's Image

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. (ENGL-PRE)

Full details for ENGL 3110 - Old English

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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST, PMA-HTC)

Full details for ENGL 3360 - American Theatre Stage and Screen I

The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary expansion of poetry in both Great Britain and the United States. Traditional forms like the ballad, the ode, and the elegy were given fresh life, as poets increasingly turned to the natural world for inspiration. At the same time the inner realms of mind, memory, and imagination were being explored by poets with unprecedented depth and precision. Nineteenth century poets also grappled with major social and political upheavals, from revolution and war to the struggle to abolish slavery throughout the English-speaking world. We will survey this rich and diverse body of work, focusing on prominent figures like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, Poe, and Dickinson, along with lesser-known poets who made significant contributions to its abundance. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 3460 - Nineteenth Century British and American Poetry: Wordsworth to Dickinson

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 surveys the myriad genres in which each writer worked (short stories, poetry, novels, drama, critical essays, folklore and anthropology). And it will also consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which their work was first read, as well as how that work was received, forgotten, recovered, contested, and emulated. The class concludes by examining reading subsequent major authors (Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen) who drew directly upon Hughes' and Hurston's legacies. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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

African Mythology examines how contemporary African and diasporic writers use historical and speculative fiction to reconstruct and revitalize precolonial African cosmologies. Through novels, epics, and myth-based speculative texts, students will explore myth as a living archive and as a literary method for confronting colonial erasure. The course foregrounds African worldbuilding traditions and intellectual histories often excluded from Eurocentric literary periodization, offering students a non-European entry point into premodern and early modern global thought. Emphasis is placed on myth as philosophy, narrative strategy, and cultural memory across the African continent and the Black diaspora. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 3610 - African Mythology: Historical and Speculative Worlds

Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) and France Harper's (1825-1911) careers as activists, orators, writers, and suffragists spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the age of enslavement through Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. We might say that the narrative of the life of Douglass is the narrative of the life of democracy and citizenship in the United States, as told by a man who often found himself characterized as an intruder, a fugitive, and an outlaw. Harper was a poet, lecturer, novelist, orator, and suffragist who challenged her white sisters to face their racism and her black brothers to face their misogyny. How do these two writers expand and challenge our understandings of citizenship and democracy? (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 3625 - Frederick Douglass and Frances E.W. Harper

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. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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

Do you yearn for the chance to write in different genres and media or for audiences beyond the university? Perhaps you’d like to try writing magazine articles or a newspaper op-ed. Or maybe you’d like to explore writing in different media so you can produce compelling online content. Through reading and discussing case studies as well as writing workshops, this course prepares students to tackle a variety of writing projects and think creatively about the connection between audience, genre, and media. And it will teach students how to produce a writing portfolio to present their work for professional purposes. These portfolios will be considered for the new Projects in Writing award, details of which can be found on the Department of Literatures in English website.

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.

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 3890 - The Personal Voice: Nonfiction 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, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States. All works will be in English. (HIST-HEU)

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

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. (PMA-HTC)

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

What do love, torture, and ecstasy all have in common? How could they all be considered spiritual experiences? The thirteenth century brought a new and intense focus on the body of Christ, bloodied, wounded, and tortured. Female and male mystics began to describe Jesus as a lord, lover, and even mother in most intimate?and even sexual?terms. Guides for meditation, memory work, and holy living focused on bodily practices for approaching the divine and replicating the suffering of Christ. In this course we will explore a range of literary texts and artistic representations that illuminate this religious and aesthetic ethos. Readings will be in modern and medieval English, and will also include contemporary theoretical texts (ENGL-PRE)

Full details for ENGL 4140 - Love and Ecstasy: Forms of Devotion in Medieval English Literature

Examines how collaboration among stage directors, designers, and actors leads to differing interpretations of plays. The course focuses on how the texts themselves are blueprints for productions with particular emphasis on the choices available to the actor inherent in the text. This is a special seminar sponsored by the John S. Knight Institute?s Sophomore Seminars Program. Seminars offer discipline-intensive study within an interdisciplinary context. While not restricted to sophomores, the seminars aim at initiating students into the discipline?s outlook, discourse community, modes of knowledge, and ways of articulating that knowledge. Limited to 15 students. Special emphasis is given to strong thinking and writing and to personalized instruction with tip university professors. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for ENGL 4210 - Shakespeare in (Con)text

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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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

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. 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 understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This class examines the centrality of audiotape to the aesthetic and political cultures of the late Cold War period. After writing On the Road in the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac spent twenty years writing a novel that tried, in part, to emulate in literary writing the properties and capacities of tape recording. By the time Visions of Cody was finally published in 1972, audiotape had become an aesthetic medium in its own right, its capacity for editing inspiring revolutions in music, art, and writing. From its very inception, however, it was also an instrument of political communication and surveillance. With an eye to the state and another to the field of music, this class will focus on the way literary writing responded to and incorporated the new technology. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 4619 - Writing on Tape in the 60s, 70s, 80s: Art and Politics of the Overdub

A thorough episode-by-episode study of one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. The emphasis will be on the joy and fun of reading this wonderful and often playful masterwork. We shall place Ulysses in the context of Joyce's writing career, Irish culture, and literary modernism. We shall explore the relationship between Ulysses and other experiments in modernism and show how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic, hero, and reader. We shall also examine Ulysses as a political novel, including Joyce's response to Yeats and the Irish Revival; Joyce's role in the debate about the direction of Irish politics after Parnell; and Joyce's response to British colonial occupation of Ireland. No previous experience with Joyce is required. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 4700 - Reading Joyce's Ulysses

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. (ENGL-PST)

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

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.

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.

Full details for ENGL 4801 - Advanced Narrative Writing

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

What do love, torture, and ecstasy all have in common? How could they all be considered spiritual experiences? The thirteenth century brought a new and intense focus on the body of Christ, bloodied, wounded, and tortured. Female and male mystics began to describe Jesus as a lord, lover, and even mother in most intimate—and even sexual—terms. Guides for meditation, memory work, and holy living focused on bodily practices for approaching the divine and replicating the suffering of Christ. In this course we will explore a range of literary texts and artistic representations that illuminate this religious and aesthetic ethos. Readings will be in modern and medieval English, and will also include contemporary theoretical texts.

Full details for ENGL 6140 - Love and Ecstasy: Forms of Devotion in the Middle Ages

The seminar focuses on one of the most complex and pressing problems of our time: political theology. Historically defined in different ways, political theology is a discourse that links sacred and secular sources of authority - faith, and reason - in order to ground community in a language of legitimacy. Variously articulated in antiquity by Marcus Varro and others and crucially reformulated by Augustine in City of God, political theology identifies the sources of authority, describes their relation to each other, and explores their worldly administration and organization. Its analysis leads directly to political institutions, cultural practices, behaviors, beliefs and economic structures. Related topics include sovereignty, sacrifice, exception, enmity, secularization, translation, biopolitics, conversion, embodiment and metaphor.

Full details for ENGL 6273 - Sovereignty II: Literature and the Problem of Political Theology

This course juxtaposes core strains of current posthumanist theory-new materialism or thing theory, the affective turn, ecocriticism or environmental humanities, and literary animal studies. Using eighteenth-century literature, culture, and intellectual discourse as a starting point and then sampling related materials in the Anglo-American tradition from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will define these theoretical scenarios, and evaluate the broader impact of approaches to the other-than-human in literary theory and in formal critique. Texts (and selections): Newton, Opticks; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature; Voltaire, Candide; Auster, Timbuktu; Heise, Imagining Extinction; Kohn, How Forests Think; Braidotti, The Posthuman.

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

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for ENGL 6400 - Thinking Media Studies

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.

Full details for ENGL 6515 - The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1937

This class examines the centrality of audiotape to the aesthetic and political cultures of the late Cold War period. After writing On the Road in the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac spent twenty years writing a novel that tried, in part, to emulate in literary writing the properties and capacities of tape recording. By the time Visions of Cody was finally published in 1972, audiotape had become an aesthetic medium in its own right, its capacity for editing inspiring revolutions in music, art, and writing. From its very inception, however, it was also an instrument of political communication and surveillance. With an eye to the state and another to the field of music, this class will focus on the way literary writing responded to and incorporated the new technology.

Full details for ENGL 6619 - Writing on Tape in the 60s, 70s, 80s: Art and Politics of the Overdub

A thorough episode-by-episode study of one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. The emphasis will be on the joy and fun of reading this wonderful and often playful masterwork. We shall place Ulysses in the context of Joyce's writing career, Irish culture, and literary modernism. We shall explore the relationship between Ulysses and other experiments in modernism and show how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic, hero, and reader. We shall also examine Ulysses as a political novel, including Joyce's response to Yeats and the Irish Revival; Joyce's role in the debate about the direction of Irish politics after Parnell; and Joyce's response to British colonial occupation of Ireland. No previous experience with Joyce is required.

Full details for ENGL 6700 - Reading Joyce's Ulysses

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