Courses

Reading changes your life. Sometimes it's a specific book; sometimes it's a way of reading that's new and different. This course will introduce different ways we can read and write about books and media, and their life-changing potential. Designed as an introduction to literary studies, the class will sample different approaches, including (but not limited to) media studies, the novel ("classical" as well as "young adult," whatever that means), graphic novel, memoir, short stories, poetry, and drama. There will be guest speakers representing a range of different approaches. Emphasis will be on building skills and creating community. This is a course for bookworms and wannabe bookworms who want to know what to do next about how books move them.

Full details for ENGL 1100 - How Reading Changes Your Life

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1111 - FWS: Writing Across Cultures

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 to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1130 - FWS: Writing the Environment

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

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

What 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 to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

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

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Reading Now

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

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

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

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

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

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

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

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

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.

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

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 Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Zitkala-Ša, Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, and J.M. Coetzee.

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

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth.

Full details for ENGL 2080 - Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

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.

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

Why is popular culture so obsessed with the Middle Ages? Why are new fantasy worlds so often "medievalesque"? Why are we compelled to imitate, reinvent, and even relive aspects of the medieval past? What do these continuities and repetitions reveal about contemporary narratives of progress and identity formation (race, gender)? Examples of popular medieval forms we will examine include: premodern fandom (relics, saints' lives, heroic culture); fantasy series and movies (Game of Thrones; Harry Potter); "histories" of medieval epochs (e.g. The Saxon Stories; The Vikings); Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; gaming culture (Dungeons and Dragons to Assassin's Creed); medieval-inspired satire (Monty Python, The Knight's Tale); Arthuriana; and children's films (Shrek, Frozen). Assignments will include medieval texts and translations as well as theoretical, analytical, and creative writing. This course may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2130 - Popular Medievalisms

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).

Full details for ENGL 2350 - Literature and Medicine

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

Full details for ENGL 2580 - Imagining the Holocaust

The rap superstar Drake, comedian Ilana Glazer, and muscleman Zac Efron are just three of the millennial Jewish stars examined in this course. We will ask how millennial Jewish stars depict Jewishness in terms of race, gender, sexuality. For instance, why has the rapper Lil Dicky chosen such an emasculating stage name, and why does Ilana Glazer embrace the outdated racial term "Jewess?" How do these names use historical Jewish stereotypes to fuel present-day comedy? We will trace racial, gendered, and sexual tropes about Jews from 19th-century theater to the newest YouTube sketches. We'll cluster these media around themes like women's pleasure, Jewish identity, cultural appropriation, anti-Semitism, and millennial financial struggles. We'll laugh hard, learn a lot, and see today's media through new eyes.

Full details for ENGL 2585 - Millennial Jewish Stars: Race, Gender and Sexuality

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.

Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

This class aims to approach the literature and culture of the Cold War as the birth of the present "Age of Information," as well as the origin of modern notions of privacy that are now being superseded. We will begin with Hiroshima and the several forms of American anti-communism, and proceed from "containment culture" to the beginning of the counterculture, and from atomic weapons to the start of the environmental movement. Units of study will include intelligence (espionage), advertising (publicity), civil rights, and the public questioning of gender roles.  We will also view a few films and discuss music and painting of the period. Authors include James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Marshall McLuhan, John Okada, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith, and Rachel Carson.

Full details for ENGL 2675 - Cultures of the Cold War

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.

Full details for ENGL 2703 - Thinking Media

What does it mean to put a life story on the page? How does memory shape the present, and vice versa? What stories resonate in memoir, and why is it such a popular genre? This course will address these questions through reading memoir, a genre that became widely popular in the late Twentieth Century but that has deep historical roots. We will explore the questions it raises primarily through reading contemporary memoirs by writers such as Primo Levi, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Ondaatje, Alison Bechdel, and others.

Full details for ENGL 2715 - Memoir

What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for? The three fundamental questions Kant says philosophy aims to answer have also been traditionally asked by literature: What kinds of truths and knowledge of ourselves, others, and the world can literature offer us? Does literature help us act morally or foster faith that history bends towards justice? This course introduces students to how literature and philosophy work with and sometimes against each other in addressing these concerns through problems such as the construction of identity, passions and human community, body-mind interrelations, the nature of aesthetic experience. We will also examine the role of metaphors, narrative, and dialogue in philosophy. Authors include Plato, Sophocles, Hume, Sterne, Kant, Shelley, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Woolf, Adorno, Beckett.

Full details for ENGL 2725 - Philosophy and Literature

Stories are the most popular way we make sense of our lives and the world around us, and this introductory, discussion-based course focuses on stories told in different media – especially literary and cinematic -- to explore ethical issues. We see how, in everyday life, people have experienced moral quandaries and sought to understand and resolve them. We examine short texts and videos about our duties not only to others but also to ourselves – as well as to non-human creatures and our planet. We view films that focus on: acts of conscience and dissent (Official Secrets; Spotlight); organized political resistance (Gandhi; Amazing Grace); gendered self-deception ( TV's Mad Men); and go on to compare representations of major socio-political events (Central Park Five; When They See Us).

Full details for ENGL 2735 - Movies, Stories, Ethics

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

Full details for ENGL 2760 - Desire

Full details for ENGL 2762 - Desire and Modern Drama

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

Full details for ENGL 2810 - Creative Writing

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

Full details for ENGL 2890 - Expository Writing

What is distinctive about American Shakespeare? Is it merely a less confident cousin of its more prestigious UK relative; or does it have a character of its own? What is currently happening with 'American Shakespeare' that is not happening anywhere else? This course is designed explicitly to exploit the wide variety of human and material resources of the DC and surrounding area, such as the Folger Shakespeare Library and Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre and the Blackfriars Playhouse at Staunton. While encountering a number of plays, students will have the opportunity to see at least three live performances and numerous movies, consider the history of Shakespeare in America and learn from actors, directors, scholars and designers.

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.

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.

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.

Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that students who have read Jane Austen must be in want of an opportunity to continue that delicious experience, and that those who have not read her novels should. This course explores Austen's characters, culture, and narrative art against the backdrop of films, novels, and poems which resonate with her fiction. We will investigate Austen's importance in literary history as well as her continuing attraction in the twenty-first century. By immersing ourselves in her fictional world we will enrich our experience of her novels and sharpen our awareness of the pleasures of reading.

Full details for ENGL 3390 - Jane Austen

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

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

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.

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

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

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

After Rome's collapse, drama was gradually re-created from many sources: school-room debates, popular festivals, and, especially, religious liturgy. By the 17th century it was one of the most polished literary arts (and one of the sleaziest). This long span allows us to consider what happened in the middle. This course traces the residues of Roman drama and some "rebeginnings" of European drama, 10th to 13th centuries, then focuses mainly on late medieval drama in English in the 15th century, following that into the drama of the early Renaissance. We'll consider what became "modern"-and what was utterly unlike anything later. Discussion, lecture, regular writing, some experiments with production. English texts will be read in Middle English with lots of help; no previous knowledge required. This class counts as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3720 - Playing God: Medieval and Early Renaissance Drama

This course collaborates with a Civic Storytelling project supporting media ​local projects around issues such as health and wellbeing, the environment, economics, and social identity. Cornell students will role-play as critical design firms working with real stakeholders. Students will learn human-centered design skills through design thinking, media-making, and multivalent performance assessment while helping develop transmedia lesson kits for schools and community organizations. Our goal is to support youth-based civic discourse through transmedia knowledge-making: real stories about real issues for real audiences. Students will also document and reflect on their work by building a class website.

Full details for ENGL 3741 - Design Thinking, Media, and Community

When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result. In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature. What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet? We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers such as W.E.B DuBois, Maya Angelou, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Teju Cole, and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 3778 - Free Speech, Censorship, and the Age of Global Media

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

Full details for ENGL 3795 - Communicating Climate Change

This 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Full details for ENGL 3910 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

Talking chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos or gorillas are certainly widespread in myths, novels or movies (from Franz Kafka to The Planet of the Apes, from Tristan Garcia to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). But centuries of philosophical speculation and of scientific research have also endowed some great apes with the ability to communicate verbally with humans, either through sign language or with arbitrary symbols on computer keyboards. This class will explore the scientific, theoretical, imaginary, and legal underpinnings and consequences of such endeavors and narratives, thereby also serving as an introduction to the "post-humanistic" field of "animal studies." Our course will take advantage of unique video resources, the Cornell archive documenting the life of Kanzi and other bonobos as well as the "Ape Testimony Project."

Full details for ENGL 3921 - Apes and Language

Religious beliefs, practices, and conflicts shape our world and influence global politics.  Yet mediatized depictions of religion can be reductive and polarizing.  Moreover, these depictions may be different from what people experience in their everyday lives.  In the contemporary theatre, we have the opportunity to consider representations of individuals' lived religion, the complex questions of belief, and challenges to faith from within and outside religious communities.  Through close readings of plays and related materials engaging with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and other faith traditions, we will explore and discuss together the religious motivations, tensions, and dilemmas facing us today.  Our texts include, among others, Jesus Christ Superstar, Indecent, Angels in America, and Heroes of the Fourth Turning.

Full details for ENGL 3947 - Staging Faith: Contemporary Theatre and Lived Religions

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

Full details for ENGL 3977 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

This course examines several areas of Latinx popular culture that influence U.S. politics and society, 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 art practices 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.

Full details for ENGL 3980 - Latinx Popular Culture Matters

Like all of us, poets change over time. In this course we'll track the shifting visions and styles of three major American poets whose work spans two centuries. Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons differ in many ways, but they share an expansive perspective that celebrates mind, body, and creativity while acknowledging violence, loss, and death. Rather than reading each poet separately, we'll move back and forth among them, comparing the phases of their careers, charting their formal and stylistic innovations, and exploring the lines of influence that connect them. Ammons taught at Cornell from 1964 to 1998, and we'll consider how his work synthesizes Whitman's rugged physicality and Stevens's meditative subtlety to produce a poetry that draws equally on scientific thought and religious feeling. 

Full details for ENGL 4030 - Poetry in Process

Why are prequels and sequels snapped up so eagerly by today's audiences? Extending the story-line backwards or forwards allows us to gain new insights into characters we thought we knew. The same can happen with the fictional worlds that surround the characters. Some Victorian novels gain this sort of richness by themselves, without extending their stories backward or forward. We will read two such novels, Dickens's Little Dorrit and Eliot's Middlemarch. Both are quite long, but our course syllabus will give you time to enjoy them. Wuthering Heights joins them, reminding us that memorable fictional worlds can come in smaller packages. These three novels allow us to experience life in a city and a town, as well as in isolated dwellings on the English moors. They are among the greatest novels written in the Victorian era, or in any other.

Full details for ENGL 4470 - Fictional Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities?  In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Félix, González-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

Full details for ENGL 4505 - Queer Proximities

Anna Julia Cooper's pioneering publication of A Voice from the South (1892) underscores the centrality of black women in determining the possibilities for black racial uplift in the nation. Areas from local color and regionalism, to contemporary fields such as cultural geography, have underscored the impact of geography on identity. Such insights have increasingly underscored that region matters in shaping black women's identities in the U.S., along with their various cultural productions. Black women writers in the U.S. South played a salient role in shaping the black women's literature renaissance of the 1970s in both writing and theorizing literature, and thus, in expanding the conventional canons in African American and American literature more broadly. This course considers the new generation of writers of black women that has emerged in the U.S. South in more recent years in the twenty first century, whose writings have increasingly impacted the development of contemporary African American literature. This course is designed to meet this body of material with serious reading, study and critical analysis. Genres that we will explore include the novel, poetry, the essay and the memoir, along with visual art. We will consider a range of newer authors, including Edwidge Danticat, Honorée Jeffers, Tayari Jones, Valdez Perkins, Natasha Tretheway, Jesmyn Ward, and Shay Youngblood. Concomitantly, we will explore the visual art of Kara Walker. We will consider ways in which these writers build upon established themes and conventions in African American and black women's writing and the implications of their work for black feminist theory. Furthermore, we will examine the impact of their work within the emergent field of twenty first century African American literature and criticism.

Full details for ENGL 4603 - New Black Southern Women Writers

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

Full details for ENGL 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

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.

Full details for ENGL 4700 - Reading Joyce's Ulysses

This course analyzes how cultural beliefs about masculinity intersect with race, sexuality, and citizenship. To emphasize how masculine norms vary across cultures, we will use the plural term "masculinities." Treating gender as a relational system of power, we will investigate how masculinities are defined against femininities, and how different masculinities are defined against each other (for example, the stereotypes of the Latino "bad hombre" vs. the white "all-American football player"). Combining sociological studies with media analysis, we will ask the following questions and more: Where do beliefs about masculinities come from, and how do they change over time? How do these beliefs naturalize certain kinds of violence? How do these beliefs interact with, and help to create, ideas about race and nation?

Full details for ENGL 4757 - Be a Man! Masculinity, Race, and Nation

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

Full details for ENGL 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.

Full details for ENGL 4811 - Advanced Narrative Writing

Full details for ENGL 4820 - Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Seminar

Recent years have seen a boom in ways to use technology in order to learn about and improve the self. This course examines contemporary cultural orientations toward technology by exploring how medieval thinkers turned to language, images, books, and other tools and means of making in order to develop a sense of themselves in ethical relationship to others and to the world around them. We will place medieval work (such as Chaucer and Kempe) in conversation with resonant modern and contemporary writing (including Haraway, hooks, and Foucault). Advertisements and marketing for apps like "Co-Star", and "Calm" will supplement our discussions. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ENGL 4909 - Medieval Technologies of the Self

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. For Spring 2021, the topic for section 101 will be The Jazz Age, and the topic for section 102 will be Race, Class, Gender, and Violence.

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 Elisha 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

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

This seminar treats allegorical poetry spanning the Middle Ages but aimed at later medieval England, interlarded with modern and medieval theory. The modes of medieval allegory, entailing religious, historical, moral, economic, and political interpretation, merge with ideas of signification and figural language in general, but also with the practice of distinctive medieval genres such as debate, visions, homily, and morality drama. Selections, in Latin and French followed by medieval English works, include Augustine, Macrobius, Boethius, Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille, the Owl and the Nightingale, Roman de la rose, Nicholas Bozon, the Ovide moralisé, and Piers Plowman, plus debates, lyrics, drama, and political allegories. Translations of Latin and French and some of the Middle English works will be available. Informal writings, two essays, take-home final.

Full details for ENGL 6115 - Medieval Allegorical Poetry

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

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

Not quite a survey, this course investigates several terms that its title might obscure. Drawing on theoretical constructions of gender, genre, race, and history, the course considers the historical conditions for women writers as they produce works under conditions of necessity, pleasure, politics, and polemical insistence. We will read poetry, short stories, letters, and novels. Authors will include Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as Emily Dickinson, Alice and Phoebe Cary, Sui Sin Far, Sarah Winnemucca, Maria Ruiz de Burton, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Full details for ENGL 6410 - Women Writers in North America, 1830-1930

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities?  In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Félix, González-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

Full details for ENGL 6505 - Queer Proximities

This course focuses on early African American print culture as archive, emerging field, and method. We will historicize and theorize modes of antebellum authorship, circulation, infrastructure, and readership as well as attend to particular genres and forms (slave narrative, serial fiction, sketches, poetry, etc.). We'll place special emphasis on periodicals (Freedom's Journal, Frederick Douglass's Paper, the Anglo-African Magazine, etc.), the colored conventions movement, and digital projects, such as the Colored Conventions Project. We will think about what the study of print culture brings to early African American studies, as well as how early African American studies challenges print culture methodologies.

Full details for ENGL 6585 - African American Print Culture

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.

Full details for ENGL 6700 - Joyce's Ulysses

After Rome's collapse, drama was gradually re-created from many sources: school-room debates, popular festivals, and, especially, religious liturgy. By the 17th century it was one of the most polished literary arts (and one of the sleaziest). This long span allows us to consider what happened in the middle. This course traces the residues of Roman drama and some "rebeginnings" of European drama, 10th to 13th centuries, then focuses mainly on late medieval drama in English in the 15th century, following that into the drama of the early Renaissance. We'll consider what became "modern"-and what was utterly unlike anything later. Discussion, lecture, regular writing, some experiments with production. English texts will be read in Middle English with lots of help; no previous knowledge required.

Full details for ENGL 6721 - Playing God: Medieval and Early Renaissance Drama

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