Courses

Course ID	Title	Offered
ENGL 1105	FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will in some way address the subject of sexual politics. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm. Full details for ENGL 1105 - FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1111	FWS: Writing Across Cultures Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of culture or subculture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm. Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1134	FWS: True Stories When students write personal essays for college applications, they often discover how challenging it can be to write about themselves. In this course, we'll examine how well-known authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Alison Bechdel, Tim O'Brien, and others construct their public, written selves. We'll also consider how the style of writing affects how readers understand an author's personality and motives. Readings will include short essays, possible some poems, and a few longer works. Through the writing frequent essays, we'll explore why and how people write about themselves—for self-exploration, political or social change, purely to practice a form of art, or for other reasons—and we'll investigate how writing shapes lived experience. Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1147	FWS: Mystery in the Story What makes a story, and what makes it a mystery story? In this course, we'll study and write about the nature of narratives, taking the classic mystery tale written by such writers as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler as typical of intricately plotted stories of suspense and disclosure that have been written and filmed in many genres: Greek tragedy, horror tales by Poe and Shirley Jackson, psychological thrillers by Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith, neo-noir films such as Memento and Fight Club, and postmodern mystery parodies such as those of Paul Auster and Jorge Luis Borges. We'll look at the way they hold together, the desire and fear that drive them, and the secrets they tell—or try to keep hidden. Full details for ENGL 1147 - FWS: Mystery in the Story	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1158	FWS: American Voices Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of American culture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm. Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1167	FWS: Great New Books Would you be able to identify the Shakespeare or Austen of your time? What are the best books being written today and how do we know they are great? What role do critics, prizes, book clubs and movie adaptations play in establishing the appeal and prestige of new literature? Are there some books that are great in their moment and others that will be considered great for generations to come? These are some of the questions we'll explore as we read, discuss, and write critical essays about several of the most acclaimed books published in the last twenty years. Our readings will include works in a range of genres, from novels and memoirs to poetry and graphic novels. Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Great New Books	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1168	FWS: Cultural Studies From TV news to rock lyrics, from ads to political speeches to productions of Shakespeare, the forms of culture surround us at every moment. In addition to entertaining us or enticing us, they carry implied messages about who we are, what world we live in, and what we should value. Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all are built on the assumption that learning to decode these messages is a survival skill in today's media-saturated world and also excellent training for reading literature. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm. Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1170	FWS: Short Stories What is the difference between an anecdote and a short story or a memoir and a short story? How does the short story separate itself from the prose poem, the myth, or the parable? What can a short story do that no other art form can do, including cinematic narrative? This course will focus on the reading and analysis of short stories derived from a range of cultures and time periods, with some emphasis on English-language stories, particularly those from the North American continent. Writers may include but not be limited to: Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Eudora Welty, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates and Anton Chekhov. Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1183	FWS: Word and Image Writers and artists from Homer to Raymond Pettibon have been fascinated by the relationship between words and images, a relationship that is sometimes imagined as a competition, sometimes as a collaboration. What are the differences between literary and visual media? What can the juxtaposition of word and image teach us about the nature of representation? What other kinds of ends (satiric, esoteric, etc.) do artists and writers hope to achieve by coupling words with images? To explore these questions, we will consult works drawn from a range of periods and genres (for example, graphic novels, medieval manuscripts, contemporary art and new media, emblem books, film, literary gaming, fiction and poetry). The course is structured around a progressive set of writing assignments and will include both informal exercises as well as formal essays. Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 1191	FWS: British Literature Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with the subject of British literature. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm. Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 2020	Literature in English II: 1750 to the Present What is a self? An integrated whole or a mass of fragments? Is each of us connected to others, and if so, which others? Are we mired in the past, or can we break from old habits and beliefs to create new selves and new worlds? How affected are we by status: as servant or slave, explorer or settler, indigenous or immigrant? These are some of the most vital questions in literatures from Britain, the U.S, the Caribbean, and Africa. We will consider some of the texts that engage these questions including those by authors such as William Wordsworth, Frederick Douglass, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, T S Eliot, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and Chinua Achebe. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2020 - Literature in English II: 1750 to the Present	Spring.
ENGL 2080	Shakespeare and the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries What can we learn about Shakespeare's plays from their reception by late modernity? What can we learn about modern cultures from the way they appropriate these texts and the Shakespeare mystique? We will study five plays and their adaptations in film and theater and explore the uses made of Shakespeare in education, advertising, and public culture and by the Shakespeare industry itself. For spring 2019: Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, with films or filmed productions directed by Richard Loncraine, Trevor Nunn, Janet Suzman, George Sidney, and Julie Taymor. For updates, see http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/sad4449/2080/. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2080 - Shakespeare and the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries	Spring.
ENGL 2100	Medieval Romance: Voyage to the Otherworld Romances were, essentially, medieval science fiction and fantasy writing. They were how authors in the Middle Ages imagined things beyond rational understanding that, at the same time, greatly extended the possibilities of the world around them. The course will survey some medieval narratives concerned with representative voyages to the otherworld or with the impinging of the otherworld upon ordinary experience. The syllabus will normally include some representative Old Irish otherworld literature: selections from The Mabinogion; selections from the Lays of Marie de France; Chretian de Troye's Erec, Yvain, and Lancelot; and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish by looking at a few contemporary otherworld romances, such as selections from J.R.R. Tolkein. All readings will be in modern English. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2100 - Medieval Romance: Voyage to the Otherworld	Spring.
ENGL 2350	Literature and Medicine How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag). Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2350 - Literature and Medicine	Spring.
ENGL 2512	Caribbean Worlds This introductory course to the study of the Caribbean will begin with examinations of what constitutes the Caribbean and an understanding of Caribbean space. We will then study its peoples, contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, African enslavement and resistance, Indian indentureship and other forced migrations. By mid semester we will identify a cross-section of leading thinkers and ideas. We will also pay attention to issues of identity, migration and the creation of the Caribbean diaspora. Constructions of tourist paradise and other stereotypes and the development of critical Caribbean institutions and national development will be discussed as we read and listen to some representative oral and written literature of the Caribbean and view some relevant film on the Caribbean. This inter-disciplinary survey provides students with a foundation for more specialized coursework on the Caribbean offered in our department. Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2512 - Caribbean Worlds	Spring.
ENGL 2540	The Twenty-First Century How does one write the history of the present? How does the present absorb the futures of the past? We will approach the twenty-first century as a literary period. We will explore how contemporary fiction has come to look the way that it does, and the old, new, and experimental forms it is taking in the present. We will consider the role that literature plays in limning our sense of a historical moment. We will read and discuss literature that represents, responds to, and reimagines major themes of the century thus far such as terrorism, financial crises, globalization, ecological disaster, technological development, surveillance, and migration. We will explore ascendant forms and modes, and attend to the ways contemporary fiction reimagines its literary precursors. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2540 - The Twenty-First Century	Spring.
ENGL 2580	Imagining the Holocaust How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences—Wiesel's Night, Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank—before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's "The Shawl." We shall also read the 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. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2580 - Imagining the Holocaust	Spring.
ENGL 2620	Introduction to Asian American Literature 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. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature	Spring.
ENGL 2703	Thinking Media From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, English, German Studies, Information Science, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data. Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2703 - Thinking Media	Spring.
ENGL 2751	Literature, Sport, and Ideology There is a sentence that is 65 pages long in Don DeLillo's novel "Underworld." Nothing but an unending series of elliptical thoughts, phrases, incomplete thoughts, fragments. Only a novel about the "shot heard around the world," we might argue, could produce such a sentence. We will read DeLillo's novel, and not only to see if this sentence actually exists. There is nothing more ideological than sport -there is a good reason why some critics prefer to call it "war by other means" - in this course we will explore the connection amongst sport, ideology and literature. We will read novels, historical memoirs, short stories and works that defy categorization. We will wander the globe, from cricket in the Caribbean (CLR James) to football in Latin America (Eduardo Galeano, "Soccer in Sun and Shadow"), books about baseball ("The Boys of Summer") and a story about Roger Federer. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2751 - Literature, Sport, and Ideology	Spring.
ENGL 2760	Desire "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. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2760 - Desire	Spring.
ENGL 2810	Creative Writing An introductory course in the theory, practice, and reading of fiction, poetry, and allied forms. Both narrative and verse readings are assigned. Students will learn to savor and practice the craft of poetry and narrative writing, developing techniques that inform both. Some class meetings may feature peer review of student work, and instructors may assign writing exercises or prompts. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2810 - Creative Writing	Spring, Summer.
ENGL 2870	Freedom Writes: Literature of Global Justice Struggles This course examines some major justice movements of the modern era, introducing students to a submerged history that should neither be idealized nor forgotten. One goal will be to connect the ongoing struggles for social justice of minoritized populations in the US with the history of struggles for justice by workers, women, and disempowered social groups across the world. We'll begin with the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Gandhi, and conclude with a look at contemporary activist movements. Along the way, we'll look at such cultural forms as AIDS quilts, urban murals, the music of Bob Marley, and theatrical productions from prisons, as well as Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight L.A. and Helena Viramontes' novel Under the Feet of Jesus. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2870 - Freedom Writes: Literature of Global Justice Struggles	Spring.
ENGL 2890	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. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 2890 - Expository Writing	Spring.
ENGL 2999	The First American University Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university. Full details for ENGL 2999 - The First American University	Spring.
ENGL 3021	Literary Theory on the Edge Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, trangender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art. Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge	Spring.
ENGL 3115	Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3115 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics	Spring.
ENGL 3120	Beowulf In recent years, Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of two recent Beowulf movies and riveting new translations (eg. Seamus Heaney). The poem's appeal lies in the complex depictions of its monsters, accounts of heroic bravery, and lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "dark side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention to the poem's literary heritage (in Latin and Norse) and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives reveals an amalgamated Christian heroic ethos. [Readings in Old or Modern English] Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf	Spring.
ENGL 3270	Shakespeare: The Late Plays The course focuses on Shakespeare's middle to late plays, from the "problem comedies," through the great tragedies and romances. While we will pay particular attention to questions of dramatic form (genre) and historical context (including ways in which the plays themselves call context into question), the primary concentration will be on careful close readings of the language of the play-texts, in relation to critical questions of subjectivity, power, and art. On the way, we will encounter problems of sexuality, identity, emotion, the body, family, violence, politics, God, the nation, nature and money (not necessarily in that order). Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3270 - Shakespeare: The Late Plays	Spring.
ENGL 3330	Fictions of Self-Invention: The Eighteenth Century Novel If the Satanic fantasy is to believe ourselves "Self-begot, self-raised by our own quick'ning power," as Milton says, then the early novel is diabolical. Foundlings and orphans, abandoned wives, abducted daughters, incestuous marriages, exiled or restlessly traveling sons: early fiction imagines the possibility of socially inventing ourselves by challenging and leaving behind both the family defined by birth and a place called home. We will examine the ideology of self-invention—its promotion of individual autonomy through education, culture, sex, and economics—in such novels as Defoe's Moll Flanders, Haywood's Love in Excess, Fielding's Tom Jones, Austen's Emma. We will also examine how fiction tries to invent itself by turning to forms of realism and forgetting the history of literature. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3330 - Fictions of Self-Invention: The Eighteenth Century Novel	Spring.
ENGL 3370	Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond? What role has politics played in recent theatrical experimentation? How has performance been used as a platform for constructing and deconstructing concepts of identity, community, and nationality? And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present. We will focus on theatre that responds directly to or intervenes in moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3370 - Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen	Spring.
ENGL 3717	Trauma and Invention This course will examine modes of invention that emerge from and engage with trauma. We will focus on inventive explorations of different cultural and intersectional experiences. Students will offer critical and creative responses to film (including Get Out by Jordan Peele, Mother of George by Andrew Dosunmu, Moonlight by Barry Jenkins), poetry collections (including Book of Light by Lucille Clifton, Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, Zong! By NourbeSe Philip, Explanation of America by Robert Pinsky and The Real Horse by Farid Matuk) and a variety of critical and theoretical essays. We will trace the inventive processes and articulations that arise at the site of trauma and ask what it means to listen and to write at the limits of experience. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3717 - Trauma and Invention	Spring.
ENGL 3741	Media, Design, and Community Engagement This course introduces students to media- and design-based approaches to community engagement. From sustainability to social justice, researchers increasingly conduct and share work using media designed for specific communities and stakeholders. At the same time, community organizations share experiences with wider audiences using poetry, murals, videos, and public events as civic discourse. In this course, students study forms of transmedia knowledge and participatory research through such cases as the Healthy Aboriginal Network's public health comics and videos, as well as Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, a collaborative study by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design. Drawing lessons from design thinking, UX design, and tactical media, students apply their learning through collaborations with community partners. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3741 - Media, Design, and Community Engagement	Spring.
ENGL 3752	Thirteen Plays A survey of the dramatic tradition in England and America through close reading of thirteen plays, as well as videos of their performance, ranging from Marlowe to the present. We'll examine texts both as literary works, constructed of words, and as blueprints for performance, constructed of suggestions for creating a social interactive experience. We'll consider: How does each play represent the distinction between a private person, and personality as a social construct? How does the play represent the idea of a social system or milieu? Plays may include Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II (which follows from it), and Jonson's Barthololomew Fair; comedies from the Restoration and eighteenth century; twentieth-century British and Anglo-Irish plays by Beckett, Pinter, and Friel; and American plays by Arthur Miller, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner. Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns will represent our own century. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3752 - Thirteen Plays	Spring.
ENGL 3762	Law and Literature What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3762 - Law and Literature	Spring.
ENGL 3778	Free Speech, Censorship, and the Age of Global Media This course will help us understand how our ideas about free speech are shifting in an age of global information by surveying the history of censorship from the late 16th-century to the present day. In democratic societies, freedom of expression is both a cultural value and protected right, and yet governments also routinely regulate speech through a variety of mechanisms: from direct censorship, to licensing and copyright laws, to high court decisions about what qualifies as "speech." We will consider how the categories of dangerous speech—blasphemy, pornography, treason, libel—and thresholds of toleration, have changed over time. And we will also consider forms of censorship that have sought to protect freedoms and ensure civil discourse, such as restrictions on hate speech, genocide denial, and "fake news." Authors and subjects may include Milton, Defoe, Freud, Foucault, Joyce, MacKinnon, Butler, Wiki-Leaks, campus speech debates, Anonymous, social media, net neutrality and the economic determinants of free speech. Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3778 - Free Speech, Censorship, and the Age of Global Media	Spring.
ENGL 3805	Literary Translation The Spring 2019 topic is: The Words of Others. This workshop is designed to enrich your literary imagination and exercise your craft through the art of translation. Introduction to translation theory will guide you through the intriguing relationship between author, reader and text. Reading like a translator will challenge your understanding of the nuances of voice, tone and style. The act of translation—close reading accompanied by the mastery of language that measures up to the great writers—will engage with all of your creative resources. Knowledge of other languages is a plus, but not a requirement. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3805 - Literary Translation	Spring.
ENGL 3830	Narrative Writing This course focuses upon the writing of fiction or related narrative forms. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. Many students will choose to write short stories, but excerpts from longer works will also be accepted. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3830 - Narrative Writing	Spring.
ENGL 3850	Poetry Writing This course focuses upon the writing of poetry. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3850 - Poetry Writing	Spring.
ENGL 3890	The Personal Voice: Nonfiction 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 relish their view of the world and learn from it. This course is for the maturely self-motivated 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 enabling models of literary nonfiction, including one another's, and work to develop a portfolio of diverse and polished writing. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3890 - The Personal Voice: Nonfiction Writing	Spring.
ENGL 3910	Poetry and Poetics of the Americas As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3910 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas	Spring.
ENGL 3980	Latinx Popular Culture Matters This course analyzes several areas of Latinx popular culture that deeply impacted U.S. politics and history, artistic productions, and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as popular and civic cultures. Mapping a historical trajectory of Chicanidad and Latinidad in art, music, film, and popular media in the twentieth century, the course also engages contemporary practices in art that are rooted in 1960s and 1970s civil rights and community art movements. Topics include Latinx people in film and TV, muralism and street art, music, spoken word as well as close examinations of representations of Latinx people in American mainstream culture. Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 3980 - Latinx Popular Culture Matters	Spring.
ENGL 4030	Poetry in Process A close study of three major 20th century poets (Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks) who attended scrupulously to the diversity of life, both social and biological, while expanding the form and language of poetry. As women poets writing in a period dominated by males, they established a space for poetry that seems disarmingly modest in its emphasis on nature and domesticity yet harbors enormous moral power and sharp social critique. As an African American, Brooks made racial inequity a central focus of her work, but all three poets forcefully address issues of identity and injustice. We will read each poet's work in its entirety, tracking their careers from early to middle to late periods while putting them in ongoing dialogue with one another. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4030 - Poetry in Process	Spring.
ENGL 4090	Theories of Popular Culture Why study popular culture? Although it is often equated with mass culture and perceived to be unworthy of academic study, this course argues that popular culture is an important site for the production of both pleasure and politics. We consider a range of theoretical approaches and read a spectrum of cultural critics and theorists, from those who equate the popular with the "folk" and the marginalized to those who explore the highly mediated and commercialized aspects of the popular. We look across media and its sites—television, film, the porn industry, baseball, popular music, and Starbucks coffee shops. Studies of texts will be located in economic, political, and social contexts. Also, we ask what feelings of desire, pleasure, fear, and disgust does popular culture generate? Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4090 - Theories of Popular Culture	Spring.
ENGL 4145	Race and Gender in the Middle Ages If "the past is a foreign country," is it a country full of oppressed women? We can, with some smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman or sexual minority in the Middle Ages, but it's nowhere near that simple. Also un-simple are medieval notions of race. Scholars long assumed that the European Middle Ages were entirely white and/or that since "race" as a concept hadn't been invented yet, it wasn't an issue. But both racial and gender difference matter tremendously, then as now. Together, we will think about race and gender as imagined at a time before the world we now know came into being, asking what the pre-history of difference might have to do with us and our future. Catalog Distribution: (HA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4145 - Race and Gender in the Middle Ages	Spring.
ENGL 4260	The Animal In recent years literary representations and philosophical discussions of the status of the animal vis-à-vis the human have abounded. In this course, we will track the literary phenomenology of animality. In addition we will read philosophical texts that deal with the questions of animal rights and of the metaphysical implications of the "animal." Readings may include, among others, Agamben, Aristotle, Berger, the Bible, Calvino, Coetzee, Darwin, Derrida, Descartes, Donhauser, Gorey, Haraway, Hegel, Heidegger, Herzog, Kafka, Kant, La Mettrie, de Mandeville, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ozeki, Rilke, Schopenhauer, Singer, Sorabji, Sterchi, Stevens, de Waal, Wittgenstein, Wolfe. A reading knowledge of German and French would be helpful. Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4260 - The Animal	Spring.
ENGL 4291	American Shakespeare Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4291 - American Shakespeare	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 4671	How the Civil War Haunts America The Civil War haunts the United States. Its legacy still drives protests over confederate monuments. Nineteenth-century writers and artists confronted war in their own backyards. Taking advantage of our location in Washington, we will consider how present day memorials and re-enactments keep the war alive, as well as reading 19th century poetry and novels. Looking at photographs and political cartoons gives a visual resonance to the iconography of national violence. We will visit archives at the Library of Congress, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of African American History. And we will read newspaper coverage from the 2018-2019 debates over monuments. This class satisfies the pre-1900 requirement in American Studies as well as the capstone seminar requirement. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4671 - How the Civil War Haunts America	Spring.
ENGL 4700	Reading Joyce's Ulysses A thorough episode-by-episode study of the art and meaning of the most influential book of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. The emphasis is 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—including painting and sculpture—and show how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic, hero, and reader. We shall examine Ulysses as a political novel, including Joyce's response to Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance; Joyce's role in the debate about the direction of Irish politics after Parnell; and Joyce's response to British colonial occupation of Ireland. We shall also consider Ulysses as an urban novel in which Bloom, the marginalized Jew and outsider, is symptomatic of the kind of alienation created by nativist xenophobia. No previous experience with Joyce is required. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4700 - Reading Joyce's Ulysses	Spring.
ENGL 4775	The Family in Literature: From the House of Atreas to the Ipes This course will investigate conceptualizations of the family as a human and social unit of exploration in Western drama and fiction from select instances from classical writers to the moderns, including Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Arundathi Roy. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4775 - The Family in Literature: From the House of Atreas to the Ipes	Spring.
ENGL 4810	Advanced Poetry Writing This course is intended for creative writers who have completed ENGL 3840 or ENGL 3850 and wish to refine their poetry writing. It may include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. In addition to the instructor's assigned writing requirements, students may work on longer-form verse writing projects. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4810 - Advanced Poetry Writing	Spring.
ENGL 4811	Advanced Narrative Writing This course is intended for narrative writing students who have completed ENGL 3820 or ENGL 3830 and wish to refine their writing. It may include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. In addition to the instructor's assigned writing requirements, students may work on longer-form narrative writing projects. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4811 - Advanced Narrative Writing	Spring.
ENGL 4850	Reading for Writers Reading for Writers examines literary works through the eyes of a writer, focusing on the craft of literature. Topics vary with each section and semester and may focus on fiction, poetry, or both. Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4850 - Reading for Writers	Spring.
ENGL 4920	Honors Seminar II The purpose of the Honors Seminar is to acquaint students with methods of study and research to help them write their senior Honors Essay. However, all interested students are welcome to enroll. The seminar will require a substantial essay that incorporates literary evidence and critical material effectively, and develops an argument. Topics and instructors vary each semester. Full details for ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II	Spring.
ENGL 4930	Honors Essay Tutorial I Students should secure a thesis advisor by the end of the junior year and should enroll in that faculty member's section of ENGL 4930. Students enrolling in the fall will automatically be enrolled in a discussion section, which will meet a few times throughout the semester and will give students a chance to get together with other honors students to discuss issues pertinent to writing a thesis. Topics will include compiling a critical bibliography and writing a prospectus. Professor Lorenz, the Honors Director in English, will contact students to set up the first meeting time. Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 4940	Honors Essay Tutorial II This course is the second of a two-part series of courses required for students pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English. The first course in the series is ENGL 4930 Honors Essay Tutorial I. Full details for ENGL 4940 - Honors Essay Tutorial II	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 4950	Independent Study Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work. Full details for ENGL 4950 - Independent Study	Fall, Spring, Summer.
ENGL 4961	Race and the University What is a university, what does it do, and how does it do it? Moving out from these more general questions, this seminar will focus on a more specific set of questions concerning the place of race within the university. What kinds of knowledge are produced in the 20th- century U.S. university? Why is it, and how is it, that certain knowledge formations and disciplines come to be naturalized or privileged within the academy? How has the emergence of fields of inquiry such as Ethnic Studies (with an epistemological platform built on the articulations of race, class and gender) brought to the fore (if not brought to crisis) some of the more vexing questions that strike at the core of the idea of the university as the pre-eminent site of disinterested knowledge? This seminar will give students the opportunity to examine American higher education's (particularly its major research institutions) historical instantiation of the relations amongst knowledge, power, equality and democracy. Catalog Distribution: (SBA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4961 - Race and the University	Spring.
ENGL 4991	Antagonism In contemporary scholarship on race, temporality mediates the relationship between historicity and human difference by way of alignments and affiliations between time and interiority; immediacy and transparency; and complementarily, exteriority and opacity. In contrast to its popular denotations, race scholarship thus recognizes "mediation" as antagonistic, rather than conciliatory. We map the discursive lines shaping contemporary scholarship which grasps for the philosophical grounds of race and racialization at the infrastructural levels of time, space, and ontology. In tandem, we consider media that reflect and engage questions raised by the antagonistic mediation of racial difference. Readings may include works by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Fred Moten, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Llloyd, Michelle Wright, Calvin Warren, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida. Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS) Full details for ENGL 4991 - Antagonism	Spring.
ENGL 6021	Literary Theory on the Edge Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, trangender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art. Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required. Full details for ENGL 6021 - Literary Theory on the Edge	Spring.
ENGL 6050	Archives and Artifacts Taught by curators and archivists in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, this seminar provides an introduction to the analysis of books and unique archival documents as physical objects. Students will work hands-on with rare materials in the Carl A. Kroch Library to learn the skills necessary to pursue original research dependent upon locating and studying primary sources such as rare books, archival collections, photographs, and other unique artifacts. Topics covered will include descriptive bibliography and the analysis of books (their manufacture, distribution, and audiences), an introduction to archival arrangement and description, and how to navigate institutional repositories of rare materials. Students will also have the opportunity to discuss strategies and methods for locating materials related to their own projects or areas of study. Full details for ENGL 6050 - Archives and Artifacts	Spring.
ENGL 6120	Beowulf Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "darker side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English. Full details for ENGL 6120 - Beowulf	Spring.
ENGL 6145	Race and Gender in the Middle Ages If "the past is a foreign country," is it a country full of oppressed women? We can, with some smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman or sexual minority in the Middle Ages, but it's nowhere near that simple. Also un-simple are medieval notions of race. Scholars long assumed that the European Middle Ages were entirely white and/or that since "race" as a concept hadn't been invented yet, it wasn't an issue. But both racial and gender difference matter tremendously, then as now. Together, we will think about race and gender as imagined at a time before the world we now know came into being, asking what the pre-history of difference might have to do with us and our future. Full details for ENGL 6145 - Race and Gender in the Middle Ages	Spring.
ENGL 6207	Black Feminist Theories: Sexuality, Creativity, and Power This course examines black feminist theories as they are articulated in the cross-cultural experiences of women across the African Diaspora. We will explore a variety of theories, texts and creative encounters within their socio-political and geographical frames and locations, analyzing these against, or in relation to, a range of feminist activisms and movements. Some key categories of discussion will include Black Left Feminism, Feminist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and African feminisms. Texts like the Combahee River Collective statement and a variety of US Black feminist positions and the related literature as well as earlier black feminist articulations such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice will also be engaged. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own research projects from a range of possibilities. Full details for ENGL 6207 - Black Feminist Theories: Sexuality, Creativity, and Power	Spring.
ENGL 6255	Theorizing Fiction in the Early Modern World What kind of thing is a fiction? How do imaginary creations exist in relation to the "real" world? What are the points of contact between actual and imaginary experiences? Is fiction immaterial (an idea) or material (words on a page)? What kinds of knowledge can a fiction produce? Are fictions nothing but lies? This seminar investigates such philosophical problems in the context of pre-modern theories of fiction: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. We will survey drama, poetry, romance, utopia, travel narrative, philosophical prose, and the familiar essay. We will also explore how various technical discourses define "fiction," including poetics, natural philosophy, natural history, faculty psychology, ethnography, mechanical philosophy, and legal theory. Full details for ENGL 6255 - Theorizing Fiction in the Early Modern World	Spring.
ENGL 6554	Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style "I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me," the critic Roland Barthes once wrote. How do we take pleasure in a text, even when it appears to betray us? How do we speak of the erotics of style beyond the mere thematic interpretation of sexual representation? Has such an erotics even been written yet? To explore a methodology for contemplating this elusive embrace between the aesthetic and the erotic, we will consider influential works of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer theory alongside a survey of great modernist novelists whose innovative experiments in prose style have proved most sensual and most challenging, among them Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes. Full details for ENGL 6554 - Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style	Spring.
ENGL 6660	Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Ecocriticism and the Environmental Imagination What, today, is the state of eco-critical theory and the environmental humanities? This course will explore recent work at the edge of literary criticism shading into ecological thought and questions of social justice alongside particularly suggestive twentieth century literary texts. We will also read earlier iterations of eco-criticism from the 1940s, a birth time of the modern environmental movement in the United States. A crucial question will be what relevance, if any, the "humanities" might have for global sustainability. Authors will include Richard Wright, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, Leslie Marmon Silko, A. R. Ammons, Rob Nixon, Stephanie LeMenager, Lawrence Buell, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula LeGuin, Ramachandra Guha, Timothy Morton, and others. Full details for ENGL 6660 - Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Ecocriticism and the Environmental Imagination	Spring.
ENGL 6710	Law and Literature What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy. Full details for ENGL 6710 - Law and Literature	Spring.
ENGL 6715	The Idea of Black Culture This course examines the major theoretical and conceptual currents of Black thought as it unfolds in the political and historical context of the post-slavery, post-colonial world; we will read texts by C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Nahum Chandler, Fred Moten, R.A. Judy, and other contemporary thinkers on the question of black culture and the African Diaspora. Full details for ENGL 6715 - The Idea of Black Culture	Spring.
ENGL 6741	Sustainable Forms This course explores questions of politics and literary studies in an unusual way. We will experiment with turning away from moments of disruption, innovation, and exception to take up the problem of sustainability—how to keep social worlds going over time. This will involve thinking about literary and social forms that have not been traditionally valued in our field, such as routine, shelter, and infrastructure. We will focus on nineteenth-century and contemporary realism to ask how some traditional realist techniques give us ways of thinking about the sustaining of collective life over time. We will ask about how we might create a canon of sustainability, and we will read a range of theorists, including Susan Fraiman, everyday life studies, Birmingham cultural studies, recent work in queer antinormativity, and ecocriticism. Full details for ENGL 6741 - Sustainable Forms	Spring.
ENGL 6912	Michel Foucault: Sovereignty to BioPolitics This course will explore the ways in which Michel Foucault's oeuvre transitions from a concern with sovereignty to a preoccupation with biopolitics. Foucault's early work (one understands that there is no absolute Foucaultian division into "sovereignty" and "biopolitics"), such as "Madness and Civilization," attends to the structure, the construction and the force of the institution -- the birth of asylum, the prison, while his later career takes up the question of, for want of a better term, "political efficiency." That is, Foucault offers a critique of sovereignty insofar as sovereignty is inefficient (neither the sovereign nor sovereign power can be everywhere; certainly not everywhere it needs or wants to be; ubiquity is impossible, even/especially for a project such as sovereignty) while biopower is not. Biopower marks this recognition; in place of sovereignty biopower "devolves" to the individual subject the right, always an intensely political phenomenon, to make decisions about everyday decisions -- decisions about health, sexuality, "lifestyle." In tracing the foucaultian trajectory from sovereignty to biopower we will read the major foucaultian texts -- "Madness and Civilization," "Birth of the Prison," "History of Sexuality" as well as the various seminars where Foucault works out important issues. Full details for ENGL 6912 - Michel Foucault: Sovereignty to BioPolitics	Spring.
ENGL 7810	MFA Seminar: Poetry The MFA poetry seminar is a required course for MFA poetry students. Full details for ENGL 7810 - MFA Seminar: Poetry	Spring.
ENGL 7811	MFA Seminar: Fiction The MFA fiction seminar is a required course for all MFA fiction students. Full details for ENGL 7811 - MFA Seminar: Fiction	Spring.
ENGL 7890	Pedagogical and Thesis Development This is a required course for students pursuing an MFA degree in Creative Writing. The course will focus on the pedagogical methodology and philosophical approaches to teaching creative writing. The workshop format will include readings, guest speakers, lesson plan development, and the vetting of syllabi. Graduate students in both poetry and fiction will share ideas on teaching and thesis development. Full details for ENGL 7890 - Pedagogical and Thesis Development	Spring.
ENGL 7940	Directed Study This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes. Full details for ENGL 7940 - Directed Study	Fall, Spring.
ENGL 7950	Group Study This course should be used for an independent study in which a small group of students works with one member of the graduate faculty. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes. Full details for ENGL 7950 - Group Study	Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1105

FWS: Writing and Sexual Politics

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will in some way address the subject of sexual politics. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm.

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

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1111

FWS: Writing Across Cultures

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of culture or subculture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm.

Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1134

FWS: True Stories

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

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1147

FWS: Mystery in the Story

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

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

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1158

FWS: American Voices

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of American culture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm.

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1167

FWS: Great New Books

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

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Great New Books

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1168

FWS: Cultural Studies

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

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1170

FWS: Short Stories

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

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1183

FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 1191

FWS: British Literature

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with the subject of British literature. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John. S. Knight Writing Seminar Program brochure for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/fws/fws.htm.

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 2020

Literature in English II: 1750 to the Present

What is a self? An integrated whole or a mass of fragments? Is each of us connected to others, and if so, which others? Are we mired in the past, or can we break from old habits and beliefs to create new selves and new worlds? How affected are we by status: as servant or slave, explorer or settler, indigenous or immigrant? These are some of the most vital questions in literatures from Britain, the U.S, the Caribbean, and Africa. We will consider some of the texts that engage these questions including those by authors such as William Wordsworth, Frederick Douglass, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, T S Eliot, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and Chinua Achebe.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2020 - Literature in English II: 1750 to the Present

Spring.

ENGL 2080

Shakespeare and the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

What can we learn about Shakespeare's plays from their reception by late modernity? What can we learn about modern cultures from the way they appropriate these texts and the Shakespeare mystique? We will study five plays and their adaptations in film and theater and explore the uses made of Shakespeare in education, advertising, and public culture and by the Shakespeare industry itself. For spring 2019: Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, with films or filmed productions directed by Richard Loncraine, Trevor Nunn, Janet Suzman, George Sidney, and Julie Taymor. For updates, see http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/sad4449/2080/.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2080 - Shakespeare and the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Spring.

ENGL 2100

Medieval Romance: Voyage to the Otherworld

Romances were, essentially, medieval science fiction and fantasy writing. They were how authors in the Middle Ages imagined things beyond rational understanding that, at the same time, greatly extended the possibilities of the world around them. The course will survey some medieval narratives concerned with representative voyages to the otherworld or with the impinging of the otherworld upon ordinary experience. The syllabus will normally include some representative Old Irish otherworld literature: selections from The Mabinogion; selections from the Lays of Marie de France; Chretian de Troye's Erec, Yvain, and Lancelot; and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish by looking at a few contemporary otherworld romances, such as selections from J.R.R. Tolkein. All readings will be in modern English.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2100 - Medieval Romance: Voyage to the Otherworld

Spring.

ENGL 2350

Literature and Medicine

How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2350 - Literature and Medicine

Spring.

ENGL 2512

Caribbean Worlds

This introductory course to the study of the Caribbean will begin with examinations of what constitutes the Caribbean and an understanding of Caribbean space. We will then study its peoples, contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, African enslavement and resistance, Indian indentureship and other forced migrations. By mid semester we will identify a cross-section of leading thinkers and ideas. We will also pay attention to issues of identity, migration and the creation of the Caribbean diaspora. Constructions of tourist paradise and other stereotypes and the development of critical Caribbean institutions and national development will be discussed as we read and listen to some representative oral and written literature of the Caribbean and view some relevant film on the Caribbean. This inter-disciplinary survey provides students with a foundation for more specialized coursework on the Caribbean offered in our department.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2512 - Caribbean Worlds

Spring.

ENGL 2540

The Twenty-First Century

How does one write the history of the present? How does the present absorb the futures of the past? We will approach the twenty-first century as a literary period. We will explore how contemporary fiction has come to look the way that it does, and the old, new, and experimental forms it is taking in the present. We will consider the role that literature plays in limning our sense of a historical moment. We will read and discuss literature that represents, responds to, and reimagines major themes of the century thus far such as terrorism, financial crises, globalization, ecological disaster, technological development, surveillance, and migration. We will explore ascendant forms and modes, and attend to the ways contemporary fiction reimagines its literary precursors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2540 - The Twenty-First Century

Spring.

ENGL 2580

Imagining the Holocaust

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 2620

Introduction to Asian American Literature

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 2703

Thinking Media

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, English, German Studies, Information Science, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 2751

Literature, Sport, and Ideology

There is a sentence that is 65 pages long in Don DeLillo's novel "Underworld." Nothing but an unending series of elliptical thoughts, phrases, incomplete thoughts, fragments. Only a novel about the "shot heard around the world," we might argue, could produce such a sentence. We will read DeLillo's novel, and not only to see if this sentence actually exists. There is nothing more ideological than sport -there is a good reason why some critics prefer to call it "war by other means" - in this course we will explore the connection amongst sport, ideology and literature. We will read novels, historical memoirs, short stories and works that defy categorization. We will wander the globe, from cricket in the Caribbean (CLR James) to football in Latin America (Eduardo Galeano, "Soccer in Sun and Shadow"), books about baseball ("The Boys of Summer") and a story about Roger Federer.

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Spring.

ENGL 2760

Desire

"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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 2810

Creative Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring, Summer.

ENGL 2870

Freedom Writes: Literature of Global Justice Struggles

This course examines some major justice movements of the modern era, introducing students to a submerged history that should neither be idealized nor forgotten. One goal will be to connect the ongoing struggles for social justice of minoritized populations in the US with the history of struggles for justice by workers, women, and disempowered social groups across the world. We'll begin with the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Gandhi, and conclude with a look at contemporary activist movements. Along the way, we'll look at such cultural forms as AIDS quilts, urban murals, the music of Bob Marley, and theatrical productions from prisons, as well as Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight L.A. and Helena Viramontes' novel Under the Feet of Jesus.

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Spring.

ENGL 2890

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.

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Spring.

ENGL 2999

The First American University

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

Full details for ENGL 2999 - The First American University

Spring.

ENGL 3021

Literary Theory on the Edge

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, trangender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art. Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3115

Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics

The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3120

Beowulf

In recent years, Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of two recent Beowulf movies and riveting new translations (eg. Seamus Heaney). The poem's appeal lies in the complex depictions of its monsters, accounts of heroic bravery, and lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "dark side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention to the poem's literary heritage (in Latin and Norse) and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives reveals an amalgamated Christian heroic ethos. [Readings in Old or Modern English]

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3270

Shakespeare: The Late Plays

The course focuses on Shakespeare's middle to late plays, from the "problem comedies," through the great tragedies and romances. While we will pay particular attention to questions of dramatic form (genre) and historical context (including ways in which the plays themselves call context into question), the primary concentration will be on careful close readings of the language of the play-texts, in relation to critical questions of subjectivity, power, and art. On the way, we will encounter problems of sexuality, identity, emotion, the body, family, violence, politics, God, the nation, nature and money (not necessarily in that order).

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3330

Fictions of Self-Invention: The Eighteenth Century Novel

If the Satanic fantasy is to believe ourselves "Self-begot, self-raised by our own quick'ning power," as Milton says, then the early novel is diabolical. Foundlings and orphans, abandoned wives, abducted daughters, incestuous marriages, exiled or restlessly traveling sons: early fiction imagines the possibility of socially inventing ourselves by challenging and leaving behind both the family defined by birth and a place called home. We will examine the ideology of self-invention—its promotion of individual autonomy through education, culture, sex, and economics—in such novels as Defoe's Moll Flanders, Haywood's Love in Excess, Fielding's Tom Jones, Austen's Emma. We will also examine how fiction tries to invent itself by turning to forms of realism and forgetting the history of literature.

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Spring.

ENGL 3370

Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen

How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond? What role has politics played in recent theatrical experimentation? How has performance been used as a platform for constructing and deconstructing concepts of identity, community, and nationality? And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present. We will focus on theatre that responds directly to or intervenes in moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3717

Trauma and Invention

This course will examine modes of invention that emerge from and engage with trauma. We will focus on inventive explorations of different cultural and intersectional experiences. Students will offer critical and creative responses to film (including Get Out by Jordan Peele, Mother of George by Andrew Dosunmu, Moonlight by Barry Jenkins), poetry collections (including Book of Light by Lucille Clifton, Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, Zong! By NourbeSe Philip, Explanation of America by Robert Pinsky and The Real Horse by Farid Matuk) and a variety of critical and theoretical essays. We will trace the inventive processes and articulations that arise at the site of trauma and ask what it means to listen and to write at the limits of experience.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3741

Media, Design, and Community Engagement

This course introduces students to media- and design-based approaches to community engagement. From sustainability to social justice, researchers increasingly conduct and share work using media designed for specific communities and stakeholders. At the same time, community organizations share experiences with wider audiences using poetry, murals, videos, and public events as civic discourse. In this course, students study forms of transmedia knowledge and participatory research through such cases as the Healthy Aboriginal Network's public health comics and videos, as well as Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, a collaborative study by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design. Drawing lessons from design thinking, UX design, and tactical media, students apply their learning through collaborations with community partners.

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Spring.

ENGL 3752

Thirteen Plays

A survey of the dramatic tradition in England and America through close reading of thirteen plays, as well as videos of their performance, ranging from Marlowe to the present. We'll examine texts both as literary works, constructed of words, and as blueprints for performance, constructed of suggestions for creating a social interactive experience. We'll consider: How does each play represent the distinction between a private person, and personality as a social construct? How does the play represent the idea of a social system or milieu? Plays may include Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II (which follows from it), and Jonson's Barthololomew Fair; comedies from the Restoration and eighteenth century; twentieth-century British and Anglo-Irish plays by Beckett, Pinter, and Friel; and American plays by Arthur Miller, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner. Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns will represent our own century.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3762

Law and Literature

What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3778

Free Speech, Censorship, and the Age of Global Media

This course will help us understand how our ideas about free speech are shifting in an age of global information by surveying the history of censorship from the late 16th-century to the present day. In democratic societies, freedom of expression is both a cultural value and protected right, and yet governments also routinely regulate speech through a variety of mechanisms: from direct censorship, to licensing and copyright laws, to high court decisions about what qualifies as "speech." We will consider how the categories of dangerous speech—blasphemy, pornography, treason, libel—and thresholds of toleration, have changed over time. And we will also consider forms of censorship that have sought to protect freedoms and ensure civil discourse, such as restrictions on hate speech, genocide denial, and "fake news." Authors and subjects may include Milton, Defoe, Freud, Foucault, Joyce, MacKinnon, Butler, Wiki-Leaks, campus speech debates, Anonymous, social media, net neutrality and the economic determinants of free speech.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3805

Literary Translation

The Spring 2019 topic is: The Words of Others. This workshop is designed to enrich your literary imagination and exercise your craft through the art of translation. Introduction to translation theory will guide you through the intriguing relationship between author, reader and text. Reading like a translator will challenge your understanding of the nuances of voice, tone and style. The act of translation—close reading accompanied by the mastery of language that measures up to the great writers—will engage with all of your creative resources. Knowledge of other languages is a plus, but not a requirement.

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Spring.

ENGL 3830

Narrative Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3850

Poetry Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3890

The Personal Voice: Nonfiction 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 relish their view of the world and learn from it. This course is for the maturely self-motivated 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 enabling models of literary nonfiction, including one another's, and work to develop a portfolio of diverse and polished writing.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 3910

Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

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Spring.

ENGL 3980

Latinx Popular Culture Matters

This course analyzes several areas of Latinx popular culture that deeply impacted U.S. politics and history, artistic productions, and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as popular and civic cultures. Mapping a historical trajectory of Chicanidad and Latinidad in art, music, film, and popular media in the twentieth century, the course also engages contemporary practices in art that are rooted in 1960s and 1970s civil rights and community art movements. Topics include Latinx people in film and TV, muralism and street art, music, spoken word as well as close examinations of representations of Latinx people in American mainstream culture.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 4030

Poetry in Process

A close study of three major 20th century poets (Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks) who attended scrupulously to the diversity of life, both social and biological, while expanding the form and language of poetry. As women poets writing in a period dominated by males, they established a space for poetry that seems disarmingly modest in its emphasis on nature and domesticity yet harbors enormous moral power and sharp social critique. As an African American, Brooks made racial inequity a central focus of her work, but all three poets forcefully address issues of identity and injustice. We will read each poet's work in its entirety, tracking their careers from early to middle to late periods while putting them in ongoing dialogue with one another.

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Spring.

ENGL 4090

Theories of Popular Culture

Why study popular culture? Although it is often equated with mass culture and perceived to be unworthy of academic study, this course argues that popular culture is an important site for the production of both pleasure and politics. We consider a range of theoretical approaches and read a spectrum of cultural critics and theorists, from those who equate the popular with the "folk" and the marginalized to those who explore the highly mediated and commercialized aspects of the popular. We look across media and its sites—television, film, the porn industry, baseball, popular music, and Starbucks coffee shops. Studies of texts will be located in economic, political, and social contexts. Also, we ask what feelings of desire, pleasure, fear, and disgust does popular culture generate?

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Spring.

ENGL 4145

Race and Gender in the Middle Ages

If "the past is a foreign country," is it a country full of oppressed women? We can, with some smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman or sexual minority in the Middle Ages, but it's nowhere near that simple. Also un-simple are medieval notions of race. Scholars long assumed that the European Middle Ages were entirely white and/or that since "race" as a concept hadn't been invented yet, it wasn't an issue. But both racial and gender difference matter tremendously, then as now. Together, we will think about race and gender as imagined at a time before the world we now know came into being, asking what the pre-history of difference might have to do with us and our future.

Catalog Distribution: (HA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 4260

The Animal

In recent years literary representations and philosophical discussions of the status of the animal vis-à-vis the human have abounded. In this course, we will track the literary phenomenology of animality. In addition we will read philosophical texts that deal with the questions of animal rights and of the metaphysical implications of the "animal." Readings may include, among others, Agamben, Aristotle, Berger, the Bible, Calvino, Coetzee, Darwin, Derrida, Descartes, Donhauser, Gorey, Haraway, Hegel, Heidegger, Herzog, Kafka, Kant, La Mettrie, de Mandeville, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ozeki, Rilke, Schopenhauer, Singer, Sorabji, Sterchi, Stevens, de Waal, Wittgenstein, Wolfe. A reading knowledge of German and French would be helpful.

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Spring.

ENGL 4291

American Shakespeare

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Fall, Spring.

ENGL 4671

How the Civil War Haunts America

The Civil War haunts the United States. Its legacy still drives protests over confederate monuments. Nineteenth-century writers and artists confronted war in their own backyards. Taking advantage of our location in Washington, we will consider how present day memorials and re-enactments keep the war alive, as well as reading 19th century poetry and novels. Looking at photographs and political cartoons gives a visual resonance to the iconography of national violence. We will visit archives at the Library of Congress, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of African American History. And we will read newspaper coverage from the 2018-2019 debates over monuments. This class satisfies the pre-1900 requirement in American Studies as well as the capstone seminar requirement.

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Spring.

ENGL 4700

Reading Joyce's Ulysses

A thorough episode-by-episode study of the art and meaning of the most influential book of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. The emphasis is 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—including painting and sculpture—and show how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic, hero, and reader. We shall examine Ulysses as a political novel, including Joyce's response to Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance; Joyce's role in the debate about the direction of Irish politics after Parnell; and Joyce's response to British colonial occupation of Ireland. We shall also consider Ulysses as an urban novel in which Bloom, the marginalized Jew and outsider, is symptomatic of the kind of alienation created by nativist xenophobia. No previous experience with Joyce is required.

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Spring.

ENGL 4775

The Family in Literature: From the House of Atreas to the Ipes

This course will investigate conceptualizations of the family as a human and social unit of exploration in Western drama and fiction from select instances from classical writers to the moderns, including Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Arundathi Roy.

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Spring.

ENGL 4810

Advanced Poetry Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 4811

Advanced Narrative Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 4850

Reading for Writers

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 4920

Honors Seminar II

The purpose of the Honors Seminar is to acquaint students with methods of study and research to help them write their senior Honors Essay. However, all interested students are welcome to enroll. The seminar will require a substantial essay that incorporates literary evidence and critical material effectively, and develops an argument. Topics and instructors vary each semester.

Full details for ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II

Spring.

ENGL 4930

Honors Essay Tutorial I

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

Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 4940

Honors Essay Tutorial II

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

Full details for ENGL 4940 - Honors Essay Tutorial II

Fall, Spring.

ENGL 4950

Independent Study

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

Full details for ENGL 4950 - Independent Study

Fall, Spring, Summer.

ENGL 4961

Race and the University

What is a university, what does it do, and how does it do it? Moving out from these more general questions, this seminar will focus on a more specific set of questions concerning the place of race within the university. What kinds of knowledge are produced in the 20th- century U.S. university? Why is it, and how is it, that certain knowledge formations and disciplines come to be naturalized or privileged within the academy? How has the emergence of fields of inquiry such as Ethnic Studies (with an epistemological platform built on the articulations of race, class and gender) brought to the fore (if not brought to crisis) some of the more vexing questions that strike at the core of the idea of the university as the pre-eminent site of disinterested knowledge? This seminar will give students the opportunity to examine American higher education's (particularly its major research institutions) historical instantiation of the relations amongst knowledge, power, equality and democracy.

Catalog Distribution: (SBA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 4991

Antagonism

In contemporary scholarship on race, temporality mediates the relationship between historicity and human difference by way of alignments and affiliations between time and interiority; immediacy and transparency; and complementarily, exteriority and opacity. In contrast to its popular denotations, race scholarship thus recognizes "mediation" as antagonistic, rather than conciliatory. We map the discursive lines shaping contemporary scholarship which grasps for the philosophical grounds of race and racialization at the infrastructural levels of time, space, and ontology. In tandem, we consider media that reflect and engage questions raised by the antagonistic mediation of racial difference. Readings may include works by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Fred Moten, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Llloyd, Michelle Wright, Calvin Warren, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

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Spring.

ENGL 6021

Literary Theory on the Edge

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, trangender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art. Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

Full details for ENGL 6021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

Spring.

ENGL 6050

Archives and Artifacts

Taught by curators and archivists in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, this seminar provides an introduction to the analysis of books and unique archival documents as physical objects. Students will work hands-on with rare materials in the Carl A. Kroch Library to learn the skills necessary to pursue original research dependent upon locating and studying primary sources such as rare books, archival collections, photographs, and other unique artifacts. Topics covered will include descriptive bibliography and the analysis of books (their manufacture, distribution, and audiences), an introduction to archival arrangement and description, and how to navigate institutional repositories of rare materials. Students will also have the opportunity to discuss strategies and methods for locating materials related to their own projects or areas of study.

Full details for ENGL 6050 - Archives and Artifacts

Spring.

ENGL 6120

Beowulf

Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "darker side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English.

Full details for ENGL 6120 - Beowulf

Spring.

ENGL 6145

Race and Gender in the Middle Ages

If "the past is a foreign country," is it a country full of oppressed women? We can, with some smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman or sexual minority in the Middle Ages, but it's nowhere near that simple. Also un-simple are medieval notions of race. Scholars long assumed that the European Middle Ages were entirely white and/or that since "race" as a concept hadn't been invented yet, it wasn't an issue. But both racial and gender difference matter tremendously, then as now. Together, we will think about race and gender as imagined at a time before the world we now know came into being, asking what the pre-history of difference might have to do with us and our future.

Full details for ENGL 6145 - Race and Gender in the Middle Ages

Spring.

ENGL 6207

Black Feminist Theories: Sexuality, Creativity, and Power

This course examines black feminist theories as they are articulated in the cross-cultural experiences of women across the African Diaspora. We will explore a variety of theories, texts and creative encounters within their socio-political and geographical frames and locations, analyzing these against, or in relation to, a range of feminist activisms and movements. Some key categories of discussion will include Black Left Feminism, Feminist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and African feminisms. Texts like the Combahee River Collective statement and a variety of US Black feminist positions and the related literature as well as earlier black feminist articulations such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice will also be engaged. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own research projects from a range of possibilities.

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Spring.

ENGL 6255

Theorizing Fiction in the Early Modern World

What kind of thing is a fiction? How do imaginary creations exist in relation to the "real" world? What are the points of contact between actual and imaginary experiences? Is fiction immaterial (an idea) or material (words on a page)? What kinds of knowledge can a fiction produce? Are fictions nothing but lies? This seminar investigates such philosophical problems in the context of pre-modern theories of fiction: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. We will survey drama, poetry, romance, utopia, travel narrative, philosophical prose, and the familiar essay. We will also explore how various technical discourses define "fiction," including poetics, natural philosophy, natural history, faculty psychology, ethnography, mechanical philosophy, and legal theory.

Full details for ENGL 6255 - Theorizing Fiction in the Early Modern World

Spring.

ENGL 6554

Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style

"I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me," the critic Roland Barthes once wrote. How do we take pleasure in a text, even when it appears to betray us? How do we speak of the erotics of style beyond the mere thematic interpretation of sexual representation? Has such an erotics even been written yet? To explore a methodology for contemplating this elusive embrace between the aesthetic and the erotic, we will consider influential works of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer theory alongside a survey of great modernist novelists whose innovative experiments in prose style have proved most sensual and most challenging, among them Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes.

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Spring.

ENGL 6660

Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Ecocriticism and the Environmental Imagination

What, today, is the state of eco-critical theory and the environmental humanities? This course will explore recent work at the edge of literary criticism shading into ecological thought and questions of social justice alongside particularly suggestive twentieth century literary texts. We will also read earlier iterations of eco-criticism from the 1940s, a birth time of the modern environmental movement in the United States. A crucial question will be what relevance, if any, the "humanities" might have for global sustainability. Authors will include Richard Wright, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, Leslie Marmon Silko, A. R. Ammons, Rob Nixon, Stephanie LeMenager, Lawrence Buell, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula LeGuin, Ramachandra Guha, Timothy Morton, and others.

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Spring.

ENGL 6710

Law and Literature

What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy.

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Spring.

ENGL 6715

The Idea of Black Culture

This course examines the major theoretical and conceptual currents of Black thought as it unfolds in the political and historical context of the post-slavery, post-colonial world; we will read texts by C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Nahum Chandler, Fred Moten, R.A. Judy, and other contemporary thinkers on the question of black culture and the African Diaspora.

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Spring.

ENGL 6741

Sustainable Forms

This course explores questions of politics and literary studies in an unusual way. We will experiment with turning away from moments of disruption, innovation, and exception to take up the problem of sustainability—how to keep social worlds going over time. This will involve thinking about literary and social forms that have not been traditionally valued in our field, such as routine, shelter, and infrastructure. We will focus on nineteenth-century and contemporary realism to ask how some traditional realist techniques give us ways of thinking about the sustaining of collective life over time. We will ask about how we might create a canon of sustainability, and we will read a range of theorists, including Susan Fraiman, everyday life studies, Birmingham cultural studies, recent work in queer antinormativity, and ecocriticism.

Full details for ENGL 6741 - Sustainable Forms

Spring.

ENGL 6912

Michel Foucault: Sovereignty to BioPolitics

This course will explore the ways in which Michel Foucault's oeuvre transitions from a concern with sovereignty to a preoccupation with biopolitics. Foucault's early work (one understands that there is no absolute Foucaultian division into "sovereignty" and "biopolitics"), such as "Madness and Civilization," attends to the structure, the construction and the force of the institution -- the birth of asylum, the prison, while his later career takes up the question of, for want of a better term, "political efficiency." That is, Foucault offers a critique of sovereignty insofar as sovereignty is inefficient (neither the sovereign nor sovereign power can be everywhere; certainly not everywhere it needs or wants to be; ubiquity is impossible, even/especially for a project such as sovereignty) while biopower is not. Biopower marks this recognition; in place of sovereignty biopower "devolves" to the individual subject the right, always an intensely political phenomenon, to make decisions about everyday decisions -- decisions about health, sexuality, "lifestyle." In tracing the foucaultian trajectory from sovereignty to biopower we will read the major foucaultian texts -- "Madness and Civilization," "Birth of the Prison," "History of Sexuality" as well as the various seminars where Foucault works out important issues.

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Spring.

ENGL 7810

MFA Seminar: Poetry

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

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Spring.

ENGL 7811

MFA Seminar: Fiction

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

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Spring.

ENGL 7890

Pedagogical and Thesis Development

This is a required course for students pursuing an MFA degree in Creative Writing. The course will focus on the pedagogical methodology and philosophical approaches to teaching creative writing. The workshop format will include readings, guest speakers, lesson plan development, and the vetting of syllabi. Graduate students in both poetry and fiction will share ideas on teaching and thesis development.

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Spring.

ENGL 7940

Directed Study

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

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Fall, Spring.

ENGL 7950

Group Study

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

Full details for ENGL 7950 - Group Study

Fall, Spring.

Courses by semester

Courses for Spring 19