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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures

From literature to literacy, comics to archival work, writing can build bridges between campus and communities. Sections vary in topic, and issues may include healthcare, social justice, environmental studies, and others, but all will enable students to work with community partners. Students will learn skills in critical thinking and reflection, writing for specialized and non-specialized audiences, community engagement, and cultural awareness. Consult the John. S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage for current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

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

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Great New Books

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

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

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

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

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

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

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

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

This course will prepare students in the humanities to analyze, interpret, and visualize cultural data with computational methods. After a basic introduction to the programming language Python, we will cover topics such as data collection and curation through web scraping and data retrieval, text mining, image analysis, network analysis, and data visualization. We will survey and discuss how these computational tools are applied in humanistic research. We will also reflect on the specific problems, challenges, and ethical dilemmas posed by the computational study of culture.

Catalog Distribution: (MQR-AS)

Full details for ENGL 1350 - Introduction to Cultural Analytics: Data, Computation, and Culture

This service-learning course examines issues in Ithaca and surrounding areas and explores innovative approaches being used to bring about social equity and justice in relation to food access, immigration rights, financial inequality, animal activism, and education, among many others. We will hear from and work with community stakeholders to see exactly what it is they do and how we can get involved. In fact, we will be conducting community service trips in and around the Ithaca area. All students encouraged to enroll; preference given to students living in the West Campus House System.

Full details for ENGL 1606 - Leadership and Service in Tompkins County (LWYL)

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 Phillis Wheatley, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Zitkala-Ša, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, and Samuel Beckett.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

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 2020: Titus Andronicus, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest, with films or filmed productions directed by Julie Taymor, Grigori Kozintsev, Akira Kurosawa, Trevor Nunn, and Fred Wilcox. For updates, see courses.cit.cornell.edu/sad4449/2080/. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

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. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

How does one write the history of the present? How does the present absorb the futures of the past? We will approach the present 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 2545 - Literature of the Present

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

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

This course will introduce students to the African American literary tradition. Through aesthetic and contextual approaches, we will consider how African American life and culture has defined and constituted the United States of America. From slave narratives to Hip-Hop music, we will trace the range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We will ask: How do authors create and define a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors will include: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and Chimamanda Adichie.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

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

Do we have a duty to make strangers feel at home? Should we give others welcome even when they seem alien and threatening? And how does it feel to be homeless, cast out—refused hospitality? These questions have a long history, from ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible to debates about immigration in our own time. The first half of the course, which can be taken as a separate 2-credit course, will track this idea from ancient times to the modern period, bringing together literary and religious texts and visual art; the second half, also offered as a 2-credit unit, will focus on treatments of hospitality in fiction, film, and other media in our own time, including Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Stephen Frear's film, Dirty Pretty Things.

Full details for ENGL 2705 - The Idea of Hospitality I: From Ancient Times to the Present

What does it mean to welcome strangers today? How does it feel to be the outsider or the exile? How should we imagine hospitality for the refugee, the business traveler, the homeless person, the guest worker, the asylum seeker, the tourist? As border controls tighten and questions of belonging become increasingly vexed, writers and artists are exploring the hardest questions about hospitality. This half of the course, offered as a 2 credit unit, will focus on treatments of hospitality in fiction, film, and other media in our own time, including Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Stephen Frear's film, Dirty Pretty Things.  

Full details for ENGL 2706 - The Idea of Hospitality II: Fiction, Film, and Media in Our Time

"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

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2761 - American Cinema

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

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

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

A "utopia" is an imaginary world, a fantastical "no-place" that conveys important truths about the real world. This course surveys the literary genre of utopia from the Renaissance to today, focusing on writers who invent new worlds through fiction. In Thomas More's Utopia, we explore utopia's emergence in the sixteenth century in response to European political upheaval and New World exploration, then turn to how British and American writers transform utopian visions in the following centuries. Finally, we consider how utopia is re-worked in science fiction's paradoxical emphasis on both fantasy and realism. Topics include the politics of gender and the purpose of technology in a perfect society, and the wildly inventive forms of utopian fiction by Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Jonathan Swift, Aldous Huxley, Ursula LeGuin, and Philip K. Dick.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2901 - Utopia: From Thomas More to Science Fiction

Full details for ENGL 2983 - American Shakespeare

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

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, transgender 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

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

Beowulf is about monsters, dragons and heroes and is the longest and most interesting Old English heroic poem. In this course we will read the poem in the original and discuss the critical and scholarly problems which the poem presents. Some knowledge of Old English is appropriate, but the class is open to beginners in Old English who will be provided with tutorial help in preparing and reading assigned passages. Among the topics we will discuss are the relationship of Beowulf to "pagan" practice and belief, the related question of  "Christianity and Paganism " in the poem, "Beowulf and the tradition of  Germanic heroic poetry", " Orality and Christian Latin learning "and "Beowulf, Tolkien, and the modern age". The course will be open to student initiatives, if students wish to explore such topics as Beowulf and archeology or the historical context of the poem. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf

Chaucer became known as the "father of English poetry" before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not just because he is the granddaddy of this language and its literature; it's because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical and, oh yes, notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's brilliant early work, and then dig into his two greatest achievements: the epic Troilus and Crisyede, and The Canterbury Tales, his oft-censored panorama of medieval English life. Chaucer will be read in Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and pleasant. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3190 - Chaucer

Edmund Spenser is the major Elizabethan writer other than Shakespeare who most influenced English poetry. But students often don't know him, even though, in a way, they have already encountered him: Spenser's grand epic poem, The Faerie Queene, is often seen as a major source of contemporary fantasy literature and even of the plotting of video games. As we will see in this course, it is more, much more, than that. Knights (both male and female) are tested in perilous quests and some very strange figures are encountered in this complex and intellectually challenging work, a beautifully weird, many-stranded narrative and a fascinating mind-trip through wayward desires and monstrous fears. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3260 - Spenser and the Faerie Queene

A knowledge of the Bible's images, stories and themes is crucial to understanding not only the art and literature of many cultures, but also ancient and contemporary world politics. It is the world's most widely read book and a sacred text of three great religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This course will offer students an introduction to the Bible's major historical, anthropological and literary contexts. Students will learn about the Bible's literary divisions and its main stories and characters as well as its ideas about faith, salvation, history and the end of time. We will use the New Oxford Annotated Bible for all course work. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3280 - The Bible as Literature

Ideas change the world. Sometimes the same ideas can do tremendous good and also cause great suffering. In this course we will consider violence and revolutionary changes through the prism of British 17th and 18th century Enlightenment thought. Thinking through the writings of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft and others, we will explore the ways in which the brilliance and blind spots of Enlightenment thinking influenced contemporary notions of race, class, gender and changed the world. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3340 - Race, Class, Gender and Violence

A modern country and an ancient civilization, India has been imagined through the ages in many different ways. This introductory course focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, drawing on films (Bollywood and Hollywood), TV shows, music, novels, and political thought. Readings from Gandhi, Ambedkar, Tagore, Kipling, Forster, Premchand, Senapati, Manto, Ananthamurthy and Roy as well as such diasporic writers as Rushdie, Lahiri, and Naipaul.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3530 - Imagining India, Home and Diaspora

"My existence is a scandal," Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of "art for art's sake" and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or obscene, the Decadent writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, A. C. Swinburne, and especially Oscar Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, and design.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3550 - Decadence

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

How is the figure of the child constructed in popular culture? When and to what degree do children participate in the construction of these representations? This course surveys a variety of contemporary media texts (television, film, and the internet) aimed at children ranging in age from pre-kindergarten to young adults. We explore how these texts seek to construct children as empowered consumers, contesting adult conformity. Our theoretical approach complicates definitions of childhood as a time of innocence and potential victimhood and challenges normative constructions of childhood as a time for establishing "proper" sexual and gender identities. Taking a cultural studies approach, the class will consider the connections between the cultural texts and the realms of advertising, toys, and gaming.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

"One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one" wrote Simone de Beauvoir. How does such an odd becoming happen? What can literature teach us about it? Does anyone ever achieve "being a woman" and how do we ("we"??) survive always falling short of the implicit ideal? We will think about the power afforded by receptivity, passivity, bottoming, emotionality and openness, whether or not these are enacted by people born, designated or living as female.  What are some of the dimensions of femininity's diversity, even in the United States, today? This course is intimately informed by intersectional queer, women of color and trans* perspectives, which will be at the center of our inquiry. It will cover film, literature, personal essays and gender theory.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3725 - Femininity as Masquerade

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 - Design Thinking, Media, and Community

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

The Spring 2020 topic is: How to Get Away With a Literary Crime: Translation as Creative Writing. 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

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

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

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

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

What can literary works, especially novels, tell us about moral issues? Should they be seen as suggesting a form of moral inquiry similar to the kind of philosophical discussion we get in, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics? Can reading philosophical works in ethics together with novels that deal with similar themes help us understand these themes better? This course is an attempt to answer these questions. We will read selections from Aristotle, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche, and use these works to help us understand the nature of moral inquiry in novels like Eliot's Middlemarch, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Other writers we will most probably read include Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Catalog Distribution: (KCM-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4020 - Literature as Moral Inquiry

Wisdom literature is the literary expression of the received ideas that define the religious, cultural, and political ideals of a community. It is rich, interesting, and sometimes very strange. It is also one of the best attested genres preserved in Old English.We will read some poems that are explicitly sapiential, such as the Exeter Maxims which gather gnomic statements, proverbs and "sentential statements." Others, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer, are poems of lament and reflection, but include extensive wisdom passages.In addition to wisdom poetry as such, there is an extensive corpus of vernacular riddles in Old English and riddling poetry is closely related to wisdom poetry. In Proverbs 1:6 wisdom texts are described as the riddles of the wise. And finally, the corpus of Old  English law. which is the only surviving corpus of early Germanic law in the vernacular, preserves a great deal of wisdom literature as well as more explicitly "legal" texts. Previous knowledge of Old English is not required. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4100 - Advanced Old English

Examines how collaboration among stage directors, designers, and actors leads to differing interpretations of plays. The course focuses on how the texts themselves are blueprints for productions with particular emphasis on the choices available to the actor inherent in the text.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

Henry V, Richard III, Macbeth…. Shakespeare created riveting, lively, provocative drama when he laid creative hands on the chronicle histories. How does this dramatized history speak to us? What does it say about human agency, material circumstances? These plays debate political philosophy, political theology; they ask compelling questions about rulers and subjects, authority and subversion, dissent and rebellion, women and power. Dramatizing events of the past, with an eye toward contemporary concerns, Shakespeare gives us solemn reflections, violent actions, and witty and entertaining episodes. He invites us to ponder the stakes of history itself, the meaning of historical events, the shaping roles of rhetoric and emotional expressiveness. We will read the plays with chronicle selections, secondary material, and consider the place of cinematic adaptations. This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4270 - Advanced Seminar in Shakespeare

In the nineteenth century, evolution was a "dangerous" yet seductive concept. How did competing ideas of evolution impact the literary imagination? This course examines the influence of evolutionary thinking on nineteenth-century literature. Examining Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, we will consider how a galvanizing scientific theory took narrative shape before turning to the work of major Victorian novelists and poets. We will analyze how evolutionary ideas affected how the Victorians understood relations with animals, the status of religion, and the concept of race. In turn, these ideas affected how literary forms and genres themselves (realism, nonsense, elegy, science fiction) "adapted" to evolution's new horizons on the human. Authors will include Tennyson, Eliot, Carroll, Hardy, Hopkins, Schreiner, and Wells.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4425 - Victorian Evolutions

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being in the early and mid-twentieth century, as well as twenty-first century applications. Artists and authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Nao Bustamante, Luis Alfaro, Emma Pérez, José Saldívar, Rupert García, Tommy Pico, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Regina José Galindo, James Luna, Adál Maldonado, Coco Fusco, Nelson Maldonado Torres, and many other decolonial producers who are concerned with existence and resistance in the western hemisphere.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Art of/as Resistance in the Americas

This course examines the way audiotape both corrupted and enabled the aesthetic and political culture of the 1970s. The possibilities of editing (via the cut, the loop, the overdub, the mixtape) on one hand, and the seeming capacity for indiscriminate recording of sound on the other, revealed tape to be a medium with claims both for authentic documentation (and also surveillance), and wide aesthetic reference (but also mass deception). With one ear to the state and another to the music industry, this class will focus on the way politics and the arts responded to and incorporated the new technology. Artists include Andy Warhol, Steve Reich, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, The Firesign Theatre, Dr. Dre, Marley Marl.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4619 - Writing on Tape in the 1970s

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

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 4930 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

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

Full details for ENGL 4940 - Honors Essay Tutorial II

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

Full details for ENGL 4950 - Independent Study

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

The modern world relies on a vast array of natural resources to drive its activities, but for most of human history, animals have provided energy to people. Animals were, and often still are, the energy fueling human transportation, agriculture, nutrition, and even entertainment. This course examines Classical and modern representations of animals as workpower, food and fuel, and raw materials for manufacture. We will read a wide array of sources that depict the work of animals in Classical antiquity and the modern world; we will also look at texts that attempt to describe how the animal body creates energy. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ENGL 4964 - Animal Power

What kinds of poetry might be usefully characterized as "postcolonial" and what are the stakes of such a designation? How common, variable, translatable are values deemed "postcolonial" for particular poetics across cultures? Is there such a thing as a transnational, transcultural, "Postcolonial Poetics?" What relation(s) do specific textual/poetic features or strategies have to geopolitical, cultural, historical, economic circumstances, and to the condition(s) of what has come to be called the "postcolonial" in particular? With special reference to Edouard Glissant's influential concept of a "poetics of relation," attending as well to our own situatedness as readers - perhaps also, though not necessarily, as writers - of poetry within U.S. (and) academic context(s), this seminar will focus on Caribbean poetry as an especially fruitful site for exploring a diversity of approaches to these and related questions concerning postcoloniality, poetry, community, language, culture, and identity.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4981 - Postcolonial Poetry and the Poetics of Relation

The course examines how postcolonial African writers and filmmakers engage with and revise controversial images of bodies and sexuality--genital cursing, same-sex desire, HIV/AIDS, genital surgeries, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' troubling of problematic tropes and practices such as the conception in 19th-century racist writings of the colonized as embodiment, the pathologization and hypersexualization of colonized bodies, and the precarious and yet empowering nature of the body and sexuality in the postcolonial African experience. As we focus on African artists and theorists, we also read American and European theorists, including but not certainly limited to Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Joseph Slaughter, detecting the ways in which discourses around bodies in the African context may shape contemporary theories and vice versa.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4995 - Body Politics in African Literature and Cinema

Full details for ENGL 5800 - Graduate Creative Writing Special Seminar

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

Beowulf is about monsters, dragons and heroes and is the longest and most interesting Old English heroic poem. In this course we will read the poem in the original and discuss the critical and scholarly problems which the poem presents. Some knowledge of Old English is appropriate, but the class is open to beginners in Old English who will be provided with tutorial help in preparing and reading assigned passages. Among the topics we will discuss are the relationship of Beowulf to "pagan" practice and belief, the related question of  "Christianity and Paganism " in the poem, "Beowulf and the tradition of  Germanic heroic poetry", " Orality and Christian Latin learning "and "Beowulf, Tolkien, and the modern age". The course will be open to student initiatives, if students wish to explore such topics as Beowulf and archeology or the historical context of the poem.

Full details for ENGL 6120 - Beowulf

Henry V, Richard III, Macbeth…. Shakespeare created riveting, lively, provocative drama when he laid creative hands on the chronicle histories. How does this dramatized history speak to us? What does it say about human agency, material circumstances? These plays debate political philosophy, political theology; they ask compelling questions about rulers and subjects, authority and subversion, dissent and rebellion, women and power. Dramatizing events of the past, with an eye toward contemporary concerns, Shakespeare gives us solemn reflections, violent actions, and witty and entertaining episodes. He invites us to ponder the stakes of history itself, the meaning of historical events, the shaping roles of rhetoric and emotional expressiveness. We will read the plays with chronicle selections, secondary material, and consider the place of cinematic adaptations.

Full details for ENGL 6270 - Advanced Seminar in Shakespeare

This course takes up current thinking on the force, agency, and "vibrancy" of matter in the literary imagination, through the juxtaposition of a set of readings that engage with objects, animals, climate, and geological phenomena. It offers a practical testing ground for explication and analysis, as well as a review of key theoretical statements and a perspective on new materialism's relevance to the tradition of ideology critique or the "cultural imaginary." Readings will move from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Anna Sewell, Emily Brontë, Paul Auster, Amitav Ghosh, and Jane Bennett.

Full details for ENGL 6325 - New Materialism: Ecology, Vitalism, Thing-Power

What kinds of knowledge does Victorian literature make? Attending to representations of small scales of interiority as well as vast living systems, we will consider when and how novels and poems enfold the knowledge practices of ethics, biology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Raymond Williams writes of a naive nineteenth-century realism, "We thought we had only to open our eyes to see a common world," but we will examine how Victorian literature creates as well as distorts images of a common reality as it reimagines practices of knowing. We will also evaluate the consequences of recent accounts of the novel as information, and of critical efforts to forge methods for interdisciplinary scholarship. Likely authors include Austen, Gaskell, Tennyson, Dickens, Eliot, Carroll, Hardy, and Stoker; theorists include Moretti, Gallagher, ​Poovey, Jameson, Foucault, Daston, Deleuze, and Thacker.

Full details for ENGL 6480 - Forms of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century

This course will examine the development of a self-conscious black aesthetic and literary criticism in the long 19th century, beginning with Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1793) and ending with W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903).  We will give special attention to form (particularly seriality), black performance (through the Colored Conventions movement) and affect (through black religious traditions). How have print culture methodologies and changing understandings of the "archive" changed the way we construct African American literary histories? What is the relation between black artists and Western aesthetics, a tradition that remains hostile to black expressive culture? In that sense, we will simultaneously probe early black aesthetic discourse and situate it within and against aesthetic discourse(s) more broadly.

Full details for ENGL 6495 - Black Aesthetics in the Long Nineteenth Century

Full details for ENGL 6511 - The African Diaspora: Theories and Texts

This class will survey 20th century writers who simultaneously worked in the service of state information networks as spies and civil servants. How might participation in cultural-political institutions of the Cold War have conditioned late modernism both ideologically and formally? We will assess key genres of the period—spy novel, campus novel, structuralist code-work, memoir of state service—and see what writers did when modernist tropes of cross-cultural contact become the mediated province of state offices in the mid-century. This class will examine novels, poems, memoirs, as well as a range of theories of how literature interacts with the bureaucratic state.

Full details for ENGL 6535 - Literature and the State: Spies, Diplomats, Bureaucrats

This course takes as its starting point the thinking of address that emerges from the study of trauma, and explores how the notion of address (its failures, and its new possibilities) help us reconceptualize not only traumatic temporality and affect but the philosophical and theoretical frameworks bound up with them. We will open with a brief introduction on Sigmund Freud and move to three sections: on Jean-Francois Lyotard (selections from The Differend, "Emma," and "The Phrase Affect"), Emmanuel Levinas (selections from Otherwise than Being and "Philosophy and Awakening") and Paul de Man ("Autobiography as De-Facement," "Hypogram and Inscription," and "The Resistance to Theory"). Prominent Levinas, Lyotard, and trauma scholars will join the course for one class in each section.

Full details for ENGL 6559 - Theories of Address

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being in the early and mid-twentieth century, as well as twenty-first century applications. Artists and authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Nao Bustamante, Luis Alfaro, Emma Pérez, José Saldívar, Rupert García, Tommy Pico, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Regina José Galindo, James Luna, Adál Maldonado, Coco Fusco, Nelson Maldonado Torres, and many other decolonial producers who are concerned with existence and resistance in the western hemisphere.

Full details for ENGL 6565 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of/as Resistance in the Americas

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

What kinds of poetry might be usefully characterized as "postcolonial" and what are the stakes of such a designation? How common, variable, translatable are values deemed "postcolonial" for particular poetics across cultures? Is there such a thing as a transnational, transcultural, "Postcolonial Poetics?" What relation(s) do specific textual/poetic features or strategies have to geopolitical, cultural, historical, economic circumstances, and to the condition(s) of what has come to be called the "postcolonial" in particular? With special reference to Edouard Glissant's influential concept of a "poetics of relation," attending as well to our own situatedness as readers - perhaps also, though not necessarily, as writers - of poetry within U.S. (and) academic context(s), this seminar will focus on Caribbean poetry as an especially fruitful site for exploring a diversity of approaches to these and related questions concerning postcoloniality, poetry, community, language, culture, and identity.

Full details for ENGL 6850 - Postcolonial Poetry and the Poetics of Relation

Wisdom literature is the literary expression of the received ideas that define the religious, cultural, and political ideals of a community. It is rich, interesting, and sometimes very strange. It is also one of the best attested genres preserved in Old English.We will read some poems that are explicitly sapiential, such as the Exeter Maxims which gather gnomic statements, proverbs and "sentential statements." Others, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer, are poems of lament and reflection, but include extensive wisdom passages.In addition to wisdom poetry as such, there is an extensive corpus of vernacular riddles in Old English and riddling poetry is closely related to wisdom poetry. In Proverbs 1:6 wisdom texts are described as the riddles of the wise. And finally, the corpus of Old  English law. which is the only surviving corpus of early Germanic law in the vernacular, preserves a great deal of wisdom literature as well as more explicitly "legal" texts. Previous knowledge of Old English is not required.

Full details for ENGL 7100 - Advanced Old English

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

Full details for ENGL 7810 - MFA Seminar: Poetry

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

Full details for ENGL 7811 - MFA Seminar: Fiction

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

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

Full details for ENGL 7940 - Directed Study

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

Full details for ENGL 7950 - Group Study